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Croissants and Horses and Paris, oh my!
June 30th, 2009
Aha! Finally some Wi-Fi (pronounced like wee-fee over here) in the Office of Tourism. I have so much to report!
To backtrack a little, as I was flying over France this past Thursday morning, I noticed that the entire country looked like patches of different colored grass. Well, if you add some cows, horses, hay bales, and teensy little cottages, that’s EXACTLY what France is, until you hit a major city. The 5-6 hour drive to Paris was like driving through the most gorgeous farm I’d ever seen. There were huge fields of vegetables, vineyards, and empty fields with big rolls of hay. My favorite part, though, was how the animals were just chilling out by the highway (which was small, by the way, with no traffic or huge cars) and eating grass. I tried to get a picture of the cows (we must’ve passed ten thousand cows in total) but alas, my camera failed to capture anything worth posting. If you are ever in France and find that you have to go for a long drive, not only will you enjoy the sights, but it’s a good opportunity to sleep off some jet lag and write some postcards.
We arrived at Paris late at night, and we were fortunate enough to get to stay in a small apartment in Montmartre.
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For the third morning in a row, I had my favorite breakfast: pain au chocolat and café au lait. Some other options, though, are regular bread (croissants, baguettes, etc.), fresh fruit, eggs, fruit juice, or club soda with syrup. Flavored syrup is incredibly popular here, and it’s on nearly every supermarket or Tabac (convenience store) shelf. You can add some to regular water, club soda, or (if you want to get creative) soda, which I really want to try, even though apparently nobody here adds it to soda. My favorite flavors so far are framboises (raspberry) and grenadine (cherry).
The first thing we did was walk through Montmartre, which is sort of an artists’ quarter. It was full of beautiful old buildings covered with ivy. There was even a little vineyard on someone’s property. According to my uncle, that section actually used to be where artists lived, and it wasn’t so affluent and touristy. Now, there are many street vendors and performers, but it’s very pretty all the same. From there we walked to the Sacré-Cœur Basilica, a beautiful basilica that overlooked the city and la tour Montparnasse, one of the only structures in Paris that is higher than Notre Dame.
Alas, internet time is costly, so you shall have to be patient for the next installment!
COMING UP: L’Arc de Triomphe, cross-dressers, Michael Jackson zealots, la Tour Eiffel, le Louvre, German jazz band, and MORE!
**Disclaimer: I have no time to edit, so apologies in advance for spelling/grammatical errors!
