Paris in long and short form:
Short - Paris is a $h!thole, but my favorite city so far.
Long - If you can ignore the subways that smell like urine, the beggars harassing you on the streets, and the French attitudes, then Paris is a lovely city. We only spent a day and a half there so we definitely want to go back. The highlights: climbing some 300 or so stairs to the top of the Arc de Triomphe and seeing amazing views of the city, getting lost for 4 hours in the Louvre (which is still not nearly enough time!), and seeing the Eiffel Tower lit up at night.
On Saturday night Joey surprised me by planning a date to a nice restaurant. It was a small little restaurant that served traditional French fare and really good wine. It was one of those atmospheric places that you don’t mind spending 2.5 hours eating your meal. After dinner (and an excellent creme brulee), we went to the Eiffel Tower. What amazed me the most was how massive it is! It looks like this elegant spindly thing in the pictures, but from the ground it is an entirely different story. It has a massive footprint and is much taller than you would think. We were too late to go to the top, but we looked at it from the park adjacent to the site. It was lit up a nice orangey color, but then at midnight the whole thing went white and flashy - like a couple hundred high power strobe lights were strung throughout the building. It was really beautiful and the perfect end to our wonderful date. Good food, great company, and amazing views…how much more romantic can you get?
We went to the Louvre, expecting to have a short visit because we had so many other things to see in Paris. We saw Hammurabi’s Code (the first written set of laws) and the Mona Lisa of course. Everything was going well in our plan to just see the highlights of the collections until we wandered into some sculpture rooms. Now I must admit that I am no art lover. I think it’s great that people have artistic talent, but it is hard for me to get excited about paintings. I did discover, however, that I am amazed at the skill involved in sculpting. Its one thing to put a brush to canvas and create something beautiful, but quite another to chip away at a big rock to create a smooth, captivating, 3 dimensional object. Just think, if the sculptor takes too big of a chunk out by accident, the entire thing can be ruined! It was absolutely amazing that the tiniest elements, like wrinkles in skin or embroidery on clothes were completely detailed. Joey shared the same amazement that I had, although he was left wondering why everyone walked around naked all the time in those days 
One of the great things about Paris is how it blends its rich history with new interpretations of art. There were many times that we would walk down a very 18th century street only to see some brightly colored piece of abstract weirdness. It gave the city such a variety that we haven’t been able to find in any other city so far.
The French people were very annoying, and I can admit that my French is in very poor shape. I could understand things when they were written, but not really when spoken to me, and my attempts at speaking my broken French were less than appreciated. At one point I ended up directing our taxi driver to “number very zero”, instead of “number three zero”. If you know French, you might understand how I could make that mistake, but the words “three”and “very” are about as basic as you can get! I also told another taxi driver that I knew “muy peu” French. This was particularly embarrassing because muy means very in SPANISH, while peu means small in French. The meaning is correct, although I really need to stick to one language at a time. Sigh…looks like the 5 years of French I took in school didn’t exactly pay off. I did better in Mexico using my one semester of Spanish in college than my 5 years of French in middle school and high school.
We have the next 2 weeks off (meaning no traveling), but after that we have !!!Rome!!! and Brussels. Ta-Ta!
