We happened to be in Paris on the first Sunday of the month which also happens to be the only day of the month in which several museums are free. So we headed off early to get to the Louvre before it opened. It turned out that we weren’t the only ones to do so.

There are three entrances to the Louvre. Two of them are rather hidden and the lines are shorter than the ground level entrance at the pyramid. We opted for the Metro entrance below which, while having less people queued than above, still had over a thousand people in it. The other, less used, entrance is Porte des Lions, at the south wing of the Museum near the river. I don’t know how many people were lined up there, but it would have probably been less.

The good news is that with nobody having to purchase tickets the lines moved pretty quickly. The bad news is that once you got in, even though the museum had only been open for about 15 minutes, it was already packed.

Everyone was heading for the Mona Lisa so we went in another direction and took a look at some friezes that were originally on the Parthenon in Greece. We continued on to the Venus de Milo while nearly everyone else was at the Mona Lisa.

From the backside we noticed that we weren’t the only ones in the vicinity of this famous statue as a spider had taken up residence on her shoulder. Actually, there were loads of tourists at the Venus de Milo, but not as many as there would be later in the day.

We browsed our way to the Mona Lisa.

I thought it was really bizarre that people were beside themselves to get to the Mona Lisa while completely ignoring the other works along the way. There was a wall with several Leonardo da Vinci paintings on it that no one was even looking at while hundreds of people were packing in to take a picture of the Mona Lisa. It made no sense. Is this how people really want to take pleasure in art?

It was as if the tourists wanted to be able to say (or prove with a picture) that they had seen the Mona Lisa, but they really had no intention of enjoying their experience at the Louvre. We tried to avoid the crowds as much as possible, but it wasn’t easy.

The above is a statue of one of the first baseball players. 😉 It looks like he may have been on steroids.

To avoid the claustrophobia I felt in the Louvre, I looked out nearly every window I could find. In doing so, I found that much of the “art” of the Louvre is not housed on the inside, surrounded by pushy tourists elbowing their neighbors out of the way for a picture to show their friends back home, but through the windows. Some of the windows offer unique vantage points to interior places in the Louvre and others have dramatic exterior views.

The one above (and it looks much better once you enlarge it by clicking on it) includes the Eiffel Tower to the right.

Posted on August 15th, 2008 under Paris. Tags: eiffel tower, louvre, museums, Paris, pictures. Comments Off on The Louvre

Notre Dame Cathedral is on an island in the middle of the River Seine. As we were crossing the bridge from that island, Ile de la Cite, to the smaller island in the Seine, Ile St. Louis, we came across a couple of the many street performers in Paris.

Most street performers are a dime a dozen, but this one had an act I hadn’t seen before–headless accordion player. Actually, he did have a head, but you can’t see it well in the above picture. The red balloon was his head, and it had a big smiley face on it.

The next act was actually pretty good. This guy, pictured above, had tons of equipment set up. He blocked off the entire walking bridge (no cars allowed on this bridge) with chairs for his spectators. My kids are on the bottom of the picture sitting in two of his chairs.

The performance was very strange. It consisted of many bike tricks on several different bikes as well as other shenanigans. At one point a totally nude man (except for a tiny fig leaf on his front which didn’t cover much) ran out of the audience and joined the act before running off into the night. The naked guy seemed to be planned, and I don’t know what the significance was since the dialogue was all in French.

The views from the bridge in every direction were quite good. The kids finished off our first day in Paris with ice cream cones on Ile St. Louis. At 3 Euro a scoop (about US$5), I passed.

Posted on August 14th, 2008 under Paris. Tags: clouds, Paris, pictures. Comments: 1

La Préfecture de Police – Paris – 2008

We crossed the Seine for the first time as the clouds broke up. To our right was the police department above. To our left was the famous Cathedral of Notre Dame.

A huge line of people stood, ready to enter, before the imposing church. The line brought back memories of entering Saint Mark’s in Venice, Italy.

The interior was huge, yet still packed with people. Notre Dame is very creepy both inside and out. The gothic architecture is right out of the Medieval, Dark Ages. You could also say it is inspiring to any developer of modern haunted houses or Addams Family or Munsters’ sets.

At night Notre Dame looks great (and eerie) too.

Hundreds of gargoyles grace the exterior of Notre Dame. Some are mostly worn away making them even spookier looking.

The best view, in my opinion, is from the back. From there you can see the flying buttresses which were necessary to support the extremely high ceilings. When the clouds cooperate, as they did on the day we were there, the scene is amazing.

There is a park on the rear side of the cathedral that my kids enjoyed as I took pictures. They liked playing on the unique equipment that they had never seen in the U.S. or Scandinavia.

Posted on August 13th, 2008 under Paris. Tags: clouds, notre dame, Paris, pictures. Comments Off on Notre Dame de Paris Cathedral

We flew into Orly Airport (ORY) instead of the Paris usual of Charles de Gaulle (CDG). We thought about taking the Orlybus into Paris, but with our luggage, and since there were four of us, decided on a taxi instead. That turned out to be a good decision as we ended up in our apartment a mere 20 minutes after our plane was supposed to land. (Our plane landed a bit early, our luggage came right out, and there was no traffic.) The cab fare was “only” 29 Euros (almost US$50) which would have been about the same for four of us on the Orlybus with a transfer to the Metro.

Our apartment looked great on the inside, just like the pictures on vrbo.com. The outside needed a serious renovation, but we didn’t care about that. We didn’t plan on spending much time there anyway since we only had five nights.

We were staying in what is called the Marais area so we decided to take Rick Steves‘ “Marais Walk” to get a feel for our neighborhood. 

The walk took us through the Hotel de Sully which is a very nice, Renaissance residence dating back almost 400 years. Although the above picture makes it look as if no one was there the hotel was actually pretty crowded with tourists.

A park just a couple of blocks from our apartment was the above Place des Vosges. This place was also about 400 years old, the oldest square in the city. The kids enjoyed chasing pigeons while we dodged rain drops.

Across the street we saw some Smart Cars outside a cafe. I first saw the Smart Car in Italy several years ago. They are beginning to make their appearance in the U.S. They are all over Europe. The gas mileage isn’t that incredible, but you can park them just about anywhere which is very important in a city as crowded as Paris.

While the architecture in Paris is nice, what you don’t see are all of the people which I have cropped out of the above photograph. I was surprised by the masses. I suppose I was imagining Paris to be something like a large Quebec City in Canada, which I have visited, with an Eiffel Tower. It turned out to be very densely populated and much dirtier than Quebec. More on that in a future blog entry…

Paris is actually about as crowded as Tokyo, yet it felt worse. The density is more than twice that of Copenhagen, and about twice that of New York City. People don’t tell you that when they say Paris is so wonderful. Paris is crawling with tourists, like Rome, but the number of people per square kilometer in Paris is quite a bit higher.

Since it was Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, the Marais Walk through the Jewish Quarter wasn’t all that interesting. So we drifted towards the Seine River near the above Hotel de Ville (which is not a hotel). The rain had now ceased, and the clouds were getting pretty.

Posted on August 12th, 2008 under Paris. Tags: clouds, Paris, pictures, Travel. Comments Off on Marais Walk

Paris isn’t cheap. We knew that going in, but we were a bit surprised by just how expensive it is to stay in Paris at even the “less expensive” places. So we did lots of research for our Paris trip this coming August, and I will share our findings with you. Perhaps it will save you a few hours in finding a place for, or few hundred Euros on, your next trip to Paris.

There are two main factors that cause Paris to be expensive in our case. The first is that the U.S. dollar is very weak at the moment. If a dollar equaled a Euro (like it did eight years ago) then things wouldn’t be so bad. As I write this, however, a U.S. dollar equals just over .6 of a Euro which means that things are more than 56% expensive in U.S. dollars that they were eight years ago due to the weak dollar. This doesn’t even consider inflation. As recent as 2002, a U.S. dollar equaled 1.15 Euros which means things have actually become more than 70% expensive in just six years (not counting inflation)!

The second factor is that there are four of us. Very few hotels in Paris allow four people in a single room (what are called quad rooms in Paris) which means that we’d have to get two rooms at more than 90% of the Paris hotels. Given that average room rates are near 200 Euro a night, we are talking about more than $600 U.S. dollars a night for something that isn’t all that fancy. Ouch! But there is a better, less expensive way.

Look not for a hotel but an apartment when you want to go to Paris. There are many advantages in renting an apartment in Paris over a hotel room.

1. apartments are usually bigger, in many cases much bigger
2. apartments have a kitchen (not only is this a matter of convenience, but it also means you don’t have to eat out for every meal–saving yourself some more money)
3. apartments frequently include a free-to-use washing machine (and compared to hotels more have free cable TV, WiFi, and phone calls) 
4. apartment neighbors are usually real Parisians instead of noisy tourists
5. apartments can usually accommodate 4 or more people
6. apartments cost much less than a much smaller hotel room
7. apartments usually have a big price break if you stay for a week or more

About the only disadvantage is you won’t have daily maid service. With the above discovered, we narrowed down our search to three places.

http://www.vrbo.com/171594
http://www.vrbo.com/79965
http://www.vrbo.com/117217

We ended up going with the middle one because the first seemed a little cramped for four of us, and the last one was booked the week we needed it. I’ll provide reviews and recommendations (or not) after we stay there in August.

To look for your apartment in Paris these are the two best sites:
http://www.vrbo.com/vacation-rentals/europe/france/ile-de-france/paris
http://paris.en.craigslist.org/vac/

Posted on May 28th, 2008 under Paris. Tags: budget, cheap, compare reserve trip, france, hostel, Paris, rentals, vacation. Comments Off on Finding a place (hotel or apartment) to stay in Paris, France