Bon jour, gay Paris!

We've just returned from a short stay in Paris... and I'm happy to tell you that the Eiffel Tower is still standing.

If you've never been to Paris you might not be able to grasp how that city is completely lousy with historic monuments and gilded statues and huge buildings. I don't want to hear one more comment about "American excess." Seriously, we'd be walking down a Rue de Something or other and there would be some 40 foot tall golden woman waving a sword and holding an infant and standing on a lion's neck and I'd ask Susan... "what's that?" and she'd have no idea. The fact that I had no idea what it was is no shock to anyone who's reading this... but that Susan would have no idea indicates that this particular piece of statuary didn't make the Top 300 Things to See in Paris.

We had just a few days so there's no possible way could see any more than a tiny fraction of all that Paris holds. We saw the Eiffel Tower, of course. If you are like me (heaven forbid) you thought the Eiffel Tower was black. Wrong. It's a medium brown. Something near the color of a Starbucks Mocha Latte. Not the creamy part but the coffee part. Right now it's got a series of small, white strobe lights covering it and after dark they... well, they sparkle. (I intended to never use the word "sparkle" in this blog but there's clearly no way around it.) Anyway, it was beautiful and the good Dr. gave me a little kiss right there on the Parisian street while the lights twinkled (another word I didn't want to use) above us.

We also saw Notre Dame. The church has stood for years and has an incredible set of carvings of Jesus and saints and popes. The weather was scheduled to be rainy but the rain never came so the sky was beautiful and the old church was amazing. The gargoyles were interesting but so high off the ground that it was difficult to see them. The boys fed the pigeons and sparrows and I wandered off to look at a statue of Charlemagne that was sort of forgotten and almost hidden by some trees. From now on, when someone says "French military" I'm not going to think of Napoleon. I'm going to think of Charlemagne. That guy looked like a warrior. Beard, battleaxe, heavy sword, light armor. That's a former leader the French ought to bring up a little more often... and imitate, once in a while.

Of course we saw the Arc de Triomphe. We went at night and I personally considered it a Triomphe when we got across the busy roundabout without getting killed. The Arc is, like so much in Paris, huge. After the last couple of weeks in England, where everything looks like a scale model, the grandiosity of Paris is astonishing. The Arc looks about five stories tall and is very majestic. Napoleon must have been, not only short, but lacking in other substantial ways.

We also saw the Catacombs. Long ago, Parisians in a certain district were getting sick because they lived near a large cemetary. The groundwater was being contaminated by the decomposing bodies so the Parisians dug up all the bodies and dumped them in the empty limestone quarry underneath their fair city. These tunnels run below the subway, below the water and sewer systems. Sometime later, the P.T. Barnum of France went down into the catacombs and organized the millions of bones into some very rudimentary designs and began charging admission. Now, tourists pay good money to climb 30 meters down into these old quarries and walk among the bones of the departed. The signs ask you to be respectful of the dead buried here... but it's hard to take them seriously when they charged admission to the grotesque sight. If you've ever had the desire to see what must be the largest mass grave anywhere in the world, come to gay Paris!

I have to admit to a little bias here. I came to Paris expecting to see dirty streets, arrogant locals and a tremendous language barrier. I was wrong. In my experience, the Parisians were more friendly (not even counting the guys who hit on my lovely wife) than the British. Most of them worked harder to speak English and frankly, spoke better English than the British. The streets were dirty and grungy but not littered. Like everywhere else I've been in Europe they don't necessarily consider bathing a daily event but it wasn't much of an issue until we were crammed into the subway cars. Overall, Paris was a very interesting city and worth the trip. Just keep an eye out for pick pockets and wife-stealers.