Interesting view points...I think I like Boyd's comments the best. Especially his whole thing about politicizing this particular sin, and ignoring things like divorce.
I think Colson might be too naive, just because ppl don't bash gays doesn't mean they're not prejudiced towards them. Just because they're "welcomed" in the church doesn't mean we're welcoming towards them.
Almost there, this the second to last day. Probably my favorite day in Paris. The weather was night, we didn't have to walk too far, and we had good food.
Started off the day near the Hotel Des Invalides, we were just near by and trying to walk over to Rue Cler
We passed by a bakery, or rather a Boulangerie, and Christina got very excited by the prospect of macroons. I believe we bought one macroon here
Man it smelled so good. Good thing I was cheap (the exchange rate was so bad then! if only we had gotten married during an economic recession) or else I would have gone nuts.
At least, the one sight I wanted to go to in Paris that was not horribly touristy. It's basically like a famous market with good food stuffs.
Nasty cheese
*drool* *Homer Simpson food face*
Not only do Baguettes taste good, you can spear people with them. But in all honesty, bread is awesome
You see the size of that macaroon? it's like a freaking Big Mac, I think France secretly engineers it's berries
View of the street corner, it's hard to read but that street corner would be our favorite destination in France, Cafe Marche.
Saying good bye to our beloved Rue, worry not we'll see you again soon
Decided to check out the Hotel Des Invalides, basically France's equivalent of Walter Reed, but with an awesome war museum. We toured the museum, it was pretty cool. Lots of WWI and WWII history. We learned that Charles de Gaulle single handedly saved France and Europe while in exile, those crazy Frenchies. Didn't take any pictures inside the museum, but heres the front of the building.
We also checked out Napolean's tomb, his sarcophagous (wow I got that spelling right on the first try, no spelling error detection in Firefox, that is unreal) is huge, apparently his body is really inside.
Inside was really decked out, pretty awesome. I want to be buried there.
Nice panorama of the view from the tomb.
After that we walked to a nearby park, where we proceeded to devoure that baguette and like 10 macroons (ok maybe more like 3, but again remember, these are Big Mac sized) Afterwards we decided to walk back to Rue Cler to eat at Cafe Marche, and we were not disappointed.
After dinner we walked over to Parc du Champs de Mars, very pretty. We then camped out there for until it turned dark to see this:
Quite amazing in the dark, especially on the hour, where the tower sparkles with strobe lights going off.
Super Crazy Day - Basically walked from Notre Dame to Arc de Triumphe. We started off near the Notre Dame, went in and around the cathedral, then went got some awesome/cheap/ghetto turkish food, then walked towards the Louvre, then walked throught he building and saw the glass pyramid. We then under the mini Arc near the Louvre, and into the Jardin des Tuileries. Crossed the Concord and walked on the Champ-Elysees to the Arc de Triumphe. We had dinner at a nice cafe near the Arc, then heading back towards the banks of the Seine, where we saw the Notre Dame again, walked thru the Turkish district then went home exhausted.
"Sarah Palin has many virtues," Brooks wrote in a recent column. "If
you wanted someone to destroy a corrupt establishment, she'd be your
woman. But the constructive act of governance is another matter. She
has not been engaged in national issues, does not have a repertoire of
historic patterns and, like President Bush, she seems to compensate for
her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness."
Not sure if people are aware of what's going on in Wall St. but this is really unprecedented, really crazy times. Also means crazy times at work too. But things are a calmer today so I thought I'd continue the postings, so the honeymoon saga continues....
So we had left off with our arrival in Paris and our un-eventful day of driving and settling in. We woke up the next morning and I was starving, polished off most of the rest of the groceries that we found and by lunch time I really wanted some real food. We found a pizza place, and decided to try out luck. Turns out they spoke English, which was quite nice. Food was decent nothing to write home about, just personal pizzas, dough as a bit tough, everyone was eating w/ their fork and knives, I decided to just eat w/ my hands contemplating whether or not we should have gone somewhere else.
After putting some food in our stomachs we decided to go grocery shopping again, and down the street was a grocer. The bounty of our hunt, see the HUGE bottle of Pago Strawberry juice - see Day 1 entry for a reminder of where we first encountered this. I was in Pago heaven...*drool*. Note the Rotisserie Chicken flavored chips (very nasty) and Ketchup flavored chips (not too bad, Christina loves Ketchup)
Time came to drop off the BMW, that way we get it sooner in the US, and we don't have to pay for parking. The drop off location was at the airport, but didn't really say where very clearly, so we got to the airport and got lost for a good 20 minutes. I have no recollection about how we finally found it but we did (maybe Christina can comment on that) and then we dropped off the car, a final parting shot with my baby
We had to sign all this paper work, and then we were driven to the Airport terminal where we took a shuttle bus back to our hotel. We took a while trying to figure out if we should just call it a day and stay at the room, or do something. Our hotel room was pretty ghetto so it was motivation for us to head outside, and so we decided to do the Eiffel Tower tonight since the guidebook said we should go at night. So we head over there via the Metro, we decided to shorten our subway stop and walk to the tower instead of stopping right near there, since we had time.
View from pretty far away, I must pat myself on the back for my one armed portraits
We strolled along the middle of the Seine river there was this walk way embankment that was built, lots of nicely dressed ppl getting ready for river cruises, I stepped in dog poop...it was pretty nasty.
We ended up hitting this! Look familiar?
Yup, Lady Liberty in the land of her birth. Another shot that I thought was pretty cool that I should pat myself on the back for...
So we were talking towards the Eiffel Tower, and along the sidewalk there were these HUGE bumps, like as if the asphalt was bubbling after it got poured, I triped over them repeatedly...so I took a picture of my nemsis. They were like the size of bowling balls
We saw a crepe place along the way and had our first crepe. I got a ham crepe and Christina got a Chocolate crepe...as you can tell, she was pleased w/ her over-price tourist crepe. (We were hungry) This is the beginning of my love affair w/ the crepe. It kind of parallels my love of tubular meats in Germany.
Christina in her typical Ling family uber upright pose w/ a famous monument....seriously everyone in her family does this...it's quite hilarious
We're almost there at the base of the Tower
And we're underneath, it's pretty cool to see how intricate the steel lattices are.
What wasn't cool was the crazy line. I think we waited for about an
hour. There were Americans, Russians, Spaniards tourists. It was kinda
fun people watching...until it started drizziling...patience is not one
of my virtues. So there are three tiers, first, second and top. The way it works is that you go up to the highest level you want, and you stop on various floors as you head down. The top is very windy, and also limited in space so at the time we were at the very bottom they weren't selling tickets to go up to the top. So we went to the second floor first and took pretty pictures of night time Paris
Palais de Chaillot
Parc du Champs de Mars
Looking due east of the tower, along the River, at the very right is Notre Dame
This nice Spanish dad w/ two kids asked us to take some pictures for them, and then very nicely offered to take pictures of us. If you look carefully in picture, there's a little lighted monument to the right of us, that's the Arc de Triomphe.
So as we were on the second floor, the top floor opened up, and we bough tickets and headed up to the top.
Some views from the top, paralleling the views from the second tier
We saw the time and realized that we had to start heading home before the Metro closes. So we head down.
One last parting shot of the tower.
So afterwards we had to hull our butts to the subway station because it was about to close. Once we got there, they were closing up but they let us into the entrance tunnel but we had no way to buy tickets and we didn't speak any French. Since this station wasn't our station we walk through the tunnels to get to the connecting station. So once we got to entrance of the other station we couldn't buy tickets there either. So panicked about missing the last train, I jumped the turnstile. Christina kept trying to use an old ticket but obviously it wouldn't work so eventually she followed suit. When we got to our station I was kind of worried that they might come after us or something. There were lots of people at the station, so I told Christina to take off her jacket and I took off mine and stuffed it into my back pack and hid the pack. I learned this from Bourne Identity!
