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

We are actually back from Paris already. I pre-scheduled the past 8 or so blog entries so that I wouldn’t have to spend any time blogging in Paris. Now that our European adventures are over I can turn to Paris for the next little while. I’ll have some more entries on Denmark in a few weeks. 

On our journey from Copenhagen to Paris we learned three things. First, never trust that your pre-arranged taxi will actually show up. Two, always have a backup plan. And, three, leave yourself more time than you will really need to get to the airport.

We had someone else call in Danish to reserve an early morning taxi for us. They said we were all set, but no taxi was there when scheduled. We waited 15 minutes and then I headed for a pay phone. When I finally got through the person on the other end either couldn’t hear me or they were the only person in Denmark who doesn’t speak English. (I take that back; neither of our Copenhagen taxi drivers spoke English.) We were now sweating it, but we had left plenty of cushion time. We walked to the Forum Metro station with the intent of taking the train to the airport, but along the way we hailed a cab and made it in plenty of time.

We couldn’t leave Copenhagen without some more cloud displays so Mother Nature cooperated by given us multi-layers at take off.

You can see from the above image (after enlarging it by clicking on it) that we flew on Air Berlin. Everything was great on Air Berlin but the food. The sandwiches were horrible.

South of Copenhagen the clouds broke for some nice views of the countryside. We didn’t fly direct to Paris. Hence, the plane never got that high in the sky.

These islands off of the main Denmark masses all seemed to be populated. I’m not sure which islands these are, but they may have been part of the Rago Sund near Southern Zealand.

The plane wasn’t full so Ellie’s stuffed animal, Maja, even got a seat.

This is Dusseldorf, Germany where we made our connection to Paris.

Posted on August 11th, 2008 under Denmark. Tags: clouds, copenhagen, pictures, Travel. Comments: 1

Today’s clouds are from the Botanisk Have again.

The above steeple is part of the International Church of Copenhagen. We didn’t go inside, but a fellow faculty member went to church there once. I think it is the only place in Denmark with services in English. I asked him how it was since religion is mostly dead in Scandinavia. He said there were only about 20 people at the service. The place holds hundreds.

When we were in the Vor Frue Kirke their service was about to start. The place seemed big enough to hold several hundred people–maybe even 500–but there were no more than about 30. They all looked pretty unhappy and pretty old. The average age was well over 50.

Of the tiny percentage of the population that attends church in Denmark, some are still atheists who attend for social reasons. Even a Danish priest, Thorkild Grosboll, came out as a non-believer and his congregation supported him.

Many, if not nearly all, of the churches in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark only continue to exist because of state support. Some have been converted into museums, restaurants, and other facilities. We saw one in Gothenburg, Sweden that had been turned into a fish market.

I wonder how long it will take the rest of the world to follow Scandinavia’s lead. In my own town, in the U.S.A. even, churches have shut their doors permanently because of a lack of interest.

Posted on August 5th, 2008 under Denmark. Tags: clouds, copenhagen, living in copenhagen, nature, pictures, sweden. Comments Off on More Copenhagen cloud photos (and some commentary on religion in Scandinavia)