Paris, avec the Mama: Part Trois

Location: Paris, France
Marie Antoinette: Still Dead

April 22

Our final day in Paris dawns with chirping birds and the vigorous denial of surrendering without a blasted fight. There's not really a whole lot of huge things left to see in this city, unless one counts the anti-matter Eiffel Tower recently imported from dimension X, but we decide to forgo that as a means of protest.

Our first stop, as good hungry Americans everywhere will support, involved a Mexican restaurant, highly recommended by my handy-dandy Lonely Planet guide. Lured by the promise of beef-filled tortillas and frozen tequila-based concoctions, I was powerless to resist, and Mom in her endless supportive optimism decided to humor me. The food was excellent, the service was passable (by the way, I love the fact that we are Americans in France eating Mexican food served by a British waitress... that's 4 national leaps, not far shy of the record, and more than one normally finds on a Sunday afternoon), but the booze left something to be desired. I'm not sure if you would ever have guessed this, but northern France is not the best place to go if you want full-on, screaming margaritas. Who knew?

Perhaps called to mind by giggly images of Mexican laborers rotting in jail for stealing jobs from honest, hardworking Frenchmen, we decide to make our next stop the famous revolutionary jail: The Conciergie. After experiencing the great disappointment that is Place de la Bastille last time I was in Paris, this has a factor of personal redemption as much as anything else.

The Conciergie began as all great European prisons do: as a French palace. Then the king moved out, and the woe-begotten servants decided that the only way to heal their broken hearts was to find replacement residents with character similar to that of the departed royals; namely, convicts. Its most famous prisony time period was during the French Revolution, when it was the primary prison for the condemned sods of the Reign of Terror. You know all those people who got guillotined for fun? This is where they ate their last savory meal before traveling to that big cheese-tasting in the sky. Cool, I know. Even better is that among their number was Marie Antoinette, fabled Queen of Angry Cake Remarks. Oh, hooray! Let's go see where she spent her last despairing months being watched by Peeping Tom revolutionary soldiers for whom auto-erotic sportsmanship etiquette involved unwritten rules such as 'no peeing on the condemned regent.'

The prison is much as you would expect, awesome barrel-vaulted stone and tiny little cells filled with scarecrows meant to resemble despondent French peasants, which they do in aspect and manner with great mannequined fervor. There's a lot of information, presented in machine-gunned museum style, talking about the French Revolution, which I'm proud to say made even less sense than most capitalized Revolutions. There's a great list, much resembling, say, the Vietnam War Memorial, that contains the names and professions of all 2,780 people sentenced to death by the Revolutionary Court, ranging from generals and statesmen to - I am not making this up - hairdressers and cripples. How bad does your life suck that even the monuments built to commemorate your wrongful execution refer to you only as a cripple? There is serious post-mortem therapy needed here.

After the prison, we're in the mood for something slightly lighter, so we head down to the oddly-named Luxembourg Gardens. It's pretty, full of trees and pretty birdies and small children sailing miniature ships upon a giant fountain. Absolutely no flesh-eating ogres. There is, at one point, a statue of some frolicking satyr-like creature that prompts a debate over the object extending from his rear end: tail or turd? This should give you a good idea of the classiness that my mother and I both embody, especially when surrounded by such august attractions. We sit there for a while watching the people and realizing by degrees that we haven't gotten as much sleep the last few nights as we would have liked to.

It is with great relish, then, that we conclude our time in Paris to be successfully rocked-out and make our way back to the hostel, stopping only for ice cream and sandwiches. We hit the sack early in anticipation of our train the next morning to Bruges, and let Paris linger only in the twisted realms of our little dreamy dreams.

Paris, avec the Mama: Part Deux

Location: Paris, France
Culture Status: Jacked

April 20

Up today at the much more accommodating hour of 9:45, followed by a leisurely wake-up process. At almost noon we actually left the hotel, feeling just delightful and ready to tackle the new day.

We've decided that today we shall try to visit the Louvre, knowing full well that the lines may be prohibitive at this time of day, meaning backed up so far out the door of that huge glass pyramid entrance that treading water over the mid-Atlantic ridge becomes a real issue for those of us in heavy shoes. Our attempt thus represents a certain foolish joie de vivre that is normally reserved for retarded gerbils, but we're pretty ok with it.

Miracle of miracles, the line at the entrance is paltry, as is the ticket queue, and we are able to breeze through the whole thing in maybe 5 minutes. We are thus confronted with one of the largest museums in human history and no idea where we want to go in it.

It is worth noting at this point that before showing up we had decided that we would avoid the Mona Lisa like the proverbial plague, do to numerous reports I have received from fellow travelers that it is A) tiny, silly, and unimpressive, and B) surrounded by more rapturous onlookers than the funeral for Princess Diana's oh-so-beloved pet ferret (woe for the end of the People's Ferret). In truth, the scene one finds at the Mona Lisa is not entirely unlike that of the Ewok village post-meeting C-3p0: there are tons of tiny, hairy people whose language is an indecipherable chittering, all of whom are cooing mystically and staring in awe at a dingy, nerdarific idol who keeps insisting "I'm just a freakin' painting, you idiots! You're surrounded by them! I'm not even that good!" Ok, so maybe the analogy breaks down at some point.

You may have gathered by now that, in the clear absence of truly Rolling Stones-esque crowds, we decided to try the Mona Lisa just for fun, and were presented with a deceptively easy journey. The sad thing is that, in a place brimming with the divine spittle of truly great works of art, it's not a very good painting. I understand that there are a plethora of reasons to circle jerk Leonardo da Vinci and all his intellectual/artistic bastard children, but the next time someone tries to genuinely tell me that this little cereal box cartoon of a painting is the greatest thing the artistic community has seen since ninjas invented pencils, I'm going to drag that person to France, Paris, and the Louvre, take him to the Mona Lisa, and try my damndest to ram his bulbous, empty skull through the bullet-proof glass covering the thing. So, yeah, I flipped it off. And it was good.

We find the Mona Lisa, of course, in the Renaissance Italian paintings, meaning that it is surrounded by literally dozens of paintings of Jesus being stabbed in the side with a spear. It's sad to me that in this, one of the greatest flourishing periods of art in the world, when great artists were successfully trained and adequately patronized, there is a veritable Dead Marsh of creative stagnation, forcing all these wonderful hands and minds to paint Stabbity Jesuses and Pissed Off Nursing Marys ad nauseum. Seriously, guys, from now on we have a policy of only one Jesus painting and only one Mary painting per person per year... Go paint some flowers or viking raids or bikini chicks or kids playing Vice City (if you like meta-art). Anything but halo-sporting virgins with their heads cocked uncomfortably to one side.

Next on the list is the Venus de Milo, the only thing I can think of that's world-famous for not having any arms. And no, kids with Gulf War Syndrome don't count (too soon?). It's neat, and made of stone, and clearly the work of people who practiced sculpting more than I do.

You need to understand that my appreciation of art, even works that I really like, comes mostly from making fun of them (allow me here to give Mom some props; she's great on the funny art banter, and really our whole trip to the Louvre was a laugh riot), so it's hard to really recreate my enjoyment of them in the telling. I admit there were a number of penis jokes, gay jokes, fart jokes, and baby eating jokes told, but I don't apologize for it to you and more than I did to the guards who tried to throw me out of the museum for putting my finger in Hercules's butt. That didn't actually happen, but in a way I wish it did.

Our tour was mainly comprised of the "Stabbity Jesus" Italian movement, Northern School naturalists (I insisted on that so I could the work of Peter Paul Reubens, who I do genuinely enjoy sans joking), and the collection of French sculpture, which was Mom's particular bit of interest. There was art, and it was pretty. Woot.

About halfway through, we began to get parched and our tiny unexercised legs were wearing from hauling our bloated American carcasses around, so we made our way to the Cafe Richelieu, which is actually inside the museum, for a brief intermission. We had juice and salad and coffee and a plate of fine cheeses out on the summer terrace, enjoying the perfect weather and gazing down on the entrance courtyard watching the people go by and enjoying the atmosphere. Really it was one of the nicest restaurant snacks I've ever had, and went very well with the subtle flavors of the museum itself. I'm feeling very worldly and cultured by this point, and the urge to speak with a snotty British accent is almost overriding my simply decency.

After about 6 hours in the Louvre we decide that that's about enough for right then, so we head out. There's enough daylight left for a trip through Notre Dame cathedral at sunset, so we trek along the Seine, enjoying multiple bridge crossings at the Ile-de-la-Cite, allowing ourselves a lovely first view of the cathedral, with the suns setting rays lighting up that famous facade in a golden-orange brilliance. It really is a beautiful place, much more stately than most other famous cathedrals, truly conducting itself like a noble lady, holding down the center of Paris with solid stonework rather than the prissy, immature golden domes and pink marble that one finds in so many other places.

Unfortunately, they decided to close the thing before dark, so we're going to have to come back tomorrow to see the inside, but chilling in the square in front of the church for sunset is lovely enough on its own. Before heading home we stop along the quai for a Chinese buffet (shut up, we love Chinese food and this was delicious), then catch the metro back to the hotel. It's pretty late by now and we're exhausted from all the walking, so it's about time for bed.

April 21

With the strength of a night's sleep behind me I'm a lot less respectful and philosophical than I was last night. Notre Dame thwarted us yesterday, but now that bitch is going down. Ok, so it's going down after Mom gets her Starbucks fix and we get sandwiches at a nearby Brioche Doree (my favorite French sandwich joint, excellent tuna and egg baguette sandwiches). Ok, now that bitch is going down.

The inside of Notre Dame matches the outside, beautiful but not insanely ornate. Most of the prettiness comes from the massive number of stained glass windows, particularly the three main rose windows. I do love the fact that this thing has been around for 800 years, yet somehow sports plasma screen TVs extended above every other pew. These architects were way ahead of their time. I try to take confession there, just for a goof, but I can't find a priest who speaks English. Guys, come on, my soul is burdened here!

Leaving Notre Dame we sit for a minute to watch local showboat rollerbladers doing their thing, marveling at the magnificence of their weavy-dodging abilities, and then head down the stairs to the river to the Porte de Montebello to catch a river tour boat. This was Mom's idea, and I have to say it was an excellent one. Essentially the bit here is that we sit on the top of a fifty-foot river boat, enjoying the sun and the breeze, and float past all the great monuments of Paris while a bored-looking gentlemen rattles off what the deal is with them in French, English, and Italian. Really this was just intensely pleasant more than anything else, and by the time the boat slid back into the dock an hour later, I'm ready to tackle the rest of the day.

The rest of the day happens to involve La Basilique de Sacre Coeur, a crazy-cool church situated right on top of Montmartre in the north part of the city. It's a long metro ride to get there, followed by a short, steep walk up Montmartre (involving a stop for ice cream and my reception of a new string bracelet from a nice Gambian scam artist... hey, I need a new one since the one I got in Venice just fell off a couple weeks ago), but the church itself is awesome. Where Notre Dame is gray, square, French, and stately, this thing is bone-white, round, dynamic, and exotic. The steeply sloping parks below the church seem to be a favorite chill-out spot for tons of Parisians, and given the view of the city that you get from the hill, I can't say I'm surprised. The inside of the church is absolutely cavernous, in an unusual way that affords a clear line of sight to almost every part of it from every other part. After a little walk around, we see that in only 20 minutes evening Vespers will start, so we decide to hang around and check it out (I don't know about you, but I've never seen Vespers given in a huge French basilica). As it turns out it consists basically of French Nuns doing sing-song chants. It's beautiful, both by virtue of their skill as singers and the acoustics of the church, which are not entirely unlike those of the Grand freakin' Canyon. Being without babelfish, though, we can't understand a word they're singing, so we get bored after about three songs and vacate. Stymied from climbing the dome for a good view by them closing it early (aren't there any rules against that?), we sit down on the steps leading up to the thing and listen to a pair of guitar-sporting street musicians who have a terrific repertoire of American 70's folk rock songs.

Though it is still short of 7:00 we decide to head home and recuperate in anticipation of going out tonight. That takes about an hour or so (not counting the great expanse of time devoted to buying our tickets to Bruges for Monday), during which I use my powers of dark divination to find what I believe to be promising music venues nearby. As for food, we decide to just find something on the way, and we're off. As it turns out, we are very carefully accosted about halfway there by the most flamingly gay French man I have ever seen (saying something). He is the manager of the Restaurant Selen, which we are just passing, and he gives us one of the world's greatest food service sales pitches, prompting a call of "hell yes," and we've got our spot for dinner. This place is nice. French food in the most classic sense, and we go all out on this one. Frog legs, goat cheese, leg of rabbit, good country wine... it's delicious. We're there for the better part of two hours, lock in candlelit ambiance, excellent food, and good conversation, punctuated by bits where Frank, the manager/waiter, comes to help us out and joke some more. We both had the time of our lives, and by the time we walk out of there at 12:40, we decide to forgo the music option and just hit the sack on a high note.

Game: Joneses.

Paris, avec the Mama: Part Un

Location: Paris, France
Spring: Bloomy

April 19

Since arriving back from a two-week sojourn to Spain with Jen, I've been crashing on Guillaume's couch, a lovely stay lasting 4 nights and full of every necessary comfort save a delicious Jelly pipe organ from which I might sample to while away the hours. Comfort must go on a temporary hiatus, however, as I must rise this morning at the tender hour of 5 AM in order to march my lanky ass to the train station, bound for Paris. Why such an early departure for such a dedicated couch slacker as myself, you ask? The answer is 5'8'' of loveable goofball named Laura Woolam Jones. She happens to be my mother, and lo, her coming is nigh.

In a spectacular flash of excellent decision making, Mom has decided to come visit me in Europe, for obvious motherly reasons. The original plan was for her to come to Montpellier, but it's cheaper just to fly into Paris, and quite sensibly she insisted that she can't go through Paris without actually going to Paris. Thus, I am to go meet her there for the first leg of a ten-day visitation that will encompass Paris, Bruges, Amsterdam, and finally Montpellier. The rocking shall be awesome, and we shall call it Jones.

My train ride up to Paris is extremely uneventful, marked only by watching half of an illegal copy of "Babel" and being surprised to find fields of canola growing in central France. I arrive at the airport in only mild confusion about where to actually find Mom, since of course the internet just couldn't tell the truth about which terminal Delta flies in to (to be fair, I blame Delta for this, since the Charles de Galle airport has never wronged me, yet Delta has on several occasions expressed it's throat-rending thirst for my unborn children's pure blood). However, I manage to find her outside baggage claim as planned, and there is much rejoicing.

Now linked by a thirst for adventure, we head to our hotel which I have so cunningly booked on this new "internet" thing. Arrival/settling goes splendidly, and we settle in for a well-deserved nap. To be fair, Mom is working off six hours of jet lag and very little sleep, and I am pretty sleep deprived as well. We wake up in an hour or so and set off. First destination: the Arc de Triumph.

I am unsure here as to whether I should describe the Arc (and other things) in this post, or do so in my post about my previous trip to Paris with Jen, which I have not yet written of, but which took place first chronologically. I think that my solution to this dilemma will show not only my own quaint egotism but my utter lack of regard for any of the poor sods who read this stuff: I shall do both.

The Arc de Triumph (one of many French things that I have no idea how to spell) was built in 1806 by Napoleon to commemorate... well, basically how awesome he was and how formidable his cock was. And let me tell you, it must have been both monstrous and durable, for this Arc is mighty. Seriously, it's huge. Bear in mind that I have seen no fewer than 3 other Arc de Triumphs, and this one is the mostest triumphest by far. It is worth noting that the thing rests in the middle of the world's largest traffic roundabout. So if you've got a $50,000 dodgeball tournament coming up, this is a great place to start training. We head across underground, thus bypassing traffic-dodging death, and view the thing for a few minutes. I impress Mom by translating commemorative plaques in French (which I pretty much made up... I think most of them were recipes for apple strudel). Come to think of it, much of our time is spent split between gawking at the thing and trying to decipher what various names, dates, and carvings mean. I don't think we got many of them factually correct, but we sure had a lot of fun coming up with things. Mom in particular thought it was cute that in one two-times-life-sized sculpture of soldiers going into battle, one man appeared to be wearing armor over his entire body, except for a small hole where his genetalia could flap through. Truly a man who believes that his penis is made of steel.

After that we made our way down the Champs Elysees, the street that is famous for, as best I can tell, overpriced clothing and jewelry. Oh, and McDonald's restaurants that are classier than most Red Lobsters. It's pretty and the weather is flawless, so we enjoy just strolling and soaking up the atmosphere. The plan was to walk all the way down to the Louvre, but Mom second-guesses that along the way and we veer right, towards the Seine River, passing beside the great glass buttock that is the Grand Palais. If you don't know, the Grand Palais was the site of the 1900 World's Fair, and is made in large percentage of glass, in a way that you think of snow globes being made of glass, but very rarely buildings. We're off across a bridge (Pont d'Invalides, I believe, but then again I'm just an ignorant American), stopping to marvel at nut-tons of gold gilding and statues, not to mention the insanity that is the Hotel des Invalides, a hospital for retards and cripples that nevertheless sports an incongruously awesome golden dome.

We walk back west along the south bank of the river, making our way to the Eiffel Tower, which has loomed oh-so-pointily in the distance all afternoon. It's a pleasant, sparkly half-hour that takes us there, and then we are beneath one of the great tourist attractions of our age.

You have to understand, there are two basic types of tourist attractions: those that live up to the hype, and those that don't. The Eiffel Tower is one of the first. As famous architectural paraphenalia goes, it marks high on all the important points, such as originality, size, distinction, and pointyness. Yes, pointyness is important; sharp things are just more interesting, in the same way that, say, lesbian ham is more interesting. I just want to see that, and to know what it's about.

We lurk for a time beneath its grandeur, walking the lawns of the Champ de Mars to appreciate it from all angles. Were there hot air balloons taking off nearby, I feel sure that we would have Daring Commando hijacked one of them to appreciate the Tower in more three-dimensional glory. It is at this point that Mom points out that all the trees along the Champ de Mars are shaved flat on the side facing the field, while remaining unpruned on the opposite side. So noticing, I dub them Mullet Trees: business in the front, party in the back.

About this time the sun is setting and we're legitimately tired, so head back, passing through Trocadero Gardens on the way. I stop to flip off the Tower, having sillyly forgotten to do that on my last trip here, and we park ourselves at the top of the Garden stairs to watch the Eiffel Tower go all sparkly on the hour. It does that, you know. Some genius rigged the Tower with hundreds of strobe lights that go off Christmas Tree style every hour on the hour after sunset, turning the whole thing into the world's largest producer of bad mescalin trips. After enjoying, we jump the metro back to the hotel, stopping for an over-priced, though delicious pizza, which we ate in the room while watching "The Office." And bed.