The Rest of Paris

O man, 2 weeks since my last post...

Well here is some more of Paris, hopefully I haven't lost too many of you.

We made our way to Versailles, of course, which wasn't too far away from where we were staying.

The weather was great, which was perfect for touring the gardens, probably the best sky of our entire stay in France!

Versailles grows oranges that you can get squeezed into juice. After eating the small limes that turned out to be non-ripe oranges, we 'obtained' an orange. Hella tasty!

Here's mini Versailles, built for the Queen when she 'needed' to 'get away' from the 'hectic' life in the main palace... gimme a break. While it wasn't in as good of shape as some of Versailles, it was built with pink marble and granite, which was very cool. On that note, most of Versailles you can't access. The part that everyone walks through is maybe 30% max of the total palace, so it makes me wonder what kind of condition the rest of the palace is in....

While taking a break along the grand canal, we noticed the huge fish! They had to be about 3 feet long!

A feature of the gardens are the 100's of marble carvings of Roman gods, royalty, animals and huge vases. There is almost certainly dozens of lifetimes worth of work in these carvings as each one took between 3-5 years to carve. This one is of some dude and his three sons, all naked, wrestling about 6 snakes.

Now you probably want to see the gardens, so here they are:

Yup, about 80% of the 'gardens' are just giant hedges with a dirt path... really not impressive. Although they are laid out in geometric patterns, which I suppose is great... if your in a helicopter.

But now onto the gardens you hear about.

The part of the gardens that you expect to be great really are, they contain hundreds of rare and imported flowers and trees and shrubs from all over Europe, which I think is an impressive feat in itself.

The geometric patterns you can see are really cool, most of the potted trees are the orange trees, with gross not-ready oranges on them.

I suppose I'm not going to show you any of the Palace, I don't know why. But to sum it up, dozens of rooms completly covered in gold and gigantic murals. Tons of imported granite and marble, insane hardwood floors and furniture. My favorite in royal excess is entire rooms dedicated to 'the king dressing in the morning'.

Rachael took us to a spot on the river one evening where people gather to listen to music and dance. There are several distinct 'pits' right on the river where people were dancing to ballroom music and folk music. We found a little more upbeat brass band close by, awesome!

This bookstore was great. It felt like it belonged in Harry Potter's world. I think the only thing that wasn't covered in books was just enough of the floor so you could walk.

Notre dam is cool I guess, but was a little spoiled for me cause I couldn't get an up close look at the flying buttresses and the HUGE slow moving line/sea of people inside the cathedral.

But that didn't stop me from finding something to hang off of!

Next stop the Louvre

While the Louvre was just what you would expect, it is a museum, therefore not a carnival so I needed some bad coffee from Starbucks, where I proceeded to watch an American woman yell at the French girl who got her huge complicated order wrong.

Opinion, don't expect to be blown away if:

you've been to a museum before

you expect to be entertained

you don't dream about art which portrays people you don't know painted by people you don't know

And 2-3 hours is probably all you can take, cause really, its just a giant museum which lacks a general theme or feeling cause its got EVERYTHING in it!

Here is some of the oldest human writing in existence. My thoughts, too small.

Two statues from Easter Island, wait.... no, one of them is Chris.

I'm not showing you the Mona Lisa cause this is better and you know what it looks like, and it looks exactly what it looks like. Here's several hundred people with their cameras taking pictures from 20 feet away. THE best way to appreciate the most famous painting in the world, through a 2 inch lcd screen and then 20 blurry zoomed in photos! The best part were the people who pushed to the front to 'contemplate and appreciate' the painting.... ya ok.

I can't wait to photoshop that fat guy out of this picture! :)

So this pyramid shows the difference between architectural design and engineering. The architect promised that the pyramid would be see through and you wouldn't even notice it was there. His reasoning? It's made of glass, you can see through glass

The reality? Glass is heavy, and not 100% transparent, it's 'see through' but not transparent.

The result? Large amounts of opaque steel support structure obscuring the view and diminished visibility looking through several panes of really thick glass. Exactly what what designed!

And for Rachel's Question, yes, me and Chris made excellent use of the French train system. We took the metro around the city often. We wanted to try out the high speed train, which we did. As you would expect, it doesn't really feel like your going really fast, like an airplane. We also used the suburban train network as well to get from Rachael's place to the city, so I think we got them all covered almost. It really makes me hope that the Edmonton-Calgary commuter train line gets built(Ha! ya maybe in 50 years!), it would be a great addition to Alberta.

Anyways, hope you've enjoyed, the nest post will be either from or about Italy, cause I leave tomorrow!