I'm in Paris still

Paris is a beautiful city and we have seen a lot of it now. If we keep going like this I think we will need new shoes in a month. It’s fair to say we have done a lot of walking. We have done most of the really touristy things like Versailles, Notre Dame (Quasimodo says hello), Champs Ellysees, Eiffel tower and the Louvre. When we arrived at the airport we bought the Museum Pass which gets you into all of these plus many more, but the big thing is it gets you past the huge lines. There are special lines for people with the Museum Pass and seriously it is worth buying just for that. At Versailles the line was at least 100m long, at the Louvre there was a separate entrance with only about 50 people waiting. Museum Pass = gold. We arrived at the Louvre just on opening time and as it turns out, that’s the thing to do, there was hardly anyone there. We went straight for the Mona Lisa, or La Jaconde as they call it in France, because we heard that there are big lines to see it. Apparently not at this time in the morning because we just strolled right up to the front. In fact we walked all over the Louvre in about 3 and a half hours and saw the important parts. Now obviously you can’t see all of the Louvre in that time but they say if you look at every piece of art for 3 seconds each, it will take over a year to see all of them. It is a huge place with so much to see, so if you are there I would say choose which bits you REALLY want to see and then just wander through the others. For us it was the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, some Egyptian exhibits and Hammurabi’s code of laws.



As big as the Louvre is, it is small compared to Versailles. That place is rather large. The building itself is impressive but it is the gardens that really make you say wow. It’s quite amazing to think that this was someone’s house. It is decadence at its best. There is a train that takes you to the furthest parts of the gardens, where Marie Antoinette had her little hideaway and if you don’t take it you can look forward to 30 minutes walk there, and 30 minutes back (uphill both ways).

Now we are spending a few days with some friends at their house and we are enjoying French hospitality. The food they are giving us is superb and every meal is an event. We needed a couple of days to chill and recover from hitting the pavement so hard in both Paris and Singapore. Tomorrow we get our car and we are off to Germany which is our gateway to Eastern Europe. At the moment it is time for another ridiculously good French meal so I will leave it there. Sometimes life is good.