Paris
The city of love! Or rather a lot of love locked bridges and and art and history and good food and the city where we spent the most of our time over the past three weeks. We dropped our luggage on the first night and ran to catch the sunset on Champs Eysées- a colorful (though this word seems a little outrageous to use here as everyone knows nothing can compare to the famous Colorful Colorado sunsets) and cloudy sunset enveloped the Arc de Triomphe as well as all of the surrounding tourists. The next day we set out to do all of the extra touristy things we could fit in, including the Louvre and Notre Dame. Art isn't really my scene, as I am hardly artistic with anything other than a camera, so the Louvre was all about finding the best angles of all of the sculptures and imagining having light saber fights with all of the annoying people wielding an excessive amount of selfie sticks. We did get to see the ever famous Mona Lisa, who was wholly underwhelming as she was by far the smallest painting in the room, and surrounded by so many people trying to take her picture (with said abhorrent number of selfie sticks that were quickly being siezed by security for 'endangering other visitors' as people kept (un)intentionally smacking each other trying to get their face as parallel as possible with hers) that we quickly moved along to other parts of the museum, which used to be Napoleon's palace during his years of reign. Notre Dame was impressive and intricately adorned with numerous saints and angels and gargoyles and most childishly notable, flying buttresses (not for the obviously laughable nature of the name, but the fact that Cogsworth, the clock in Beauty and the Beast, calls attention to them in the tour he gives Belle upon her arrival to the castle) which were gorgeously Gothic- as it should be when the construction took over 700 years to complete. All this hype made me really mad that The Hunchback of Notre Dame is probably the only Disney movie that eluded my childhood and thus I never got around to watching it, so that is definitely leading on the summer bucket list now. After this busy day, we decided to take it slow and nap on a warm, wonderful afternoon on the (somehow more dead than Colorado) grass in the Parc du Champ de Mars, or better known as that park in front of the Eiffel Tower. Recharging with beignets from the cutest little French Patisserie on an unbelievably picturesque back alley, we made the climb up the Tower to catch the sun setting over Paris. Windy and cold at the top of the 81 story landing, we out muscled other tourists for the best spot to watch the sun hide behind the clouds, and then hustled back down the 600+ stairs (if you can believe it, I didn't trip even once, and I was in flip flops) to watch the elusive twinkling lights that illuminate the Tower for 10 minutes a night. The last day in Paris was bittersweet as it marked the end of the glorious, spontaneous three weeks, but we celebrated with a boat cruise and a nice dinner and half cooked chocolate cake with salted caramel ice cream, so it was all okay. We then somehow woke up at 5AM to drag the ever present and ever stupid 50 pound backpacking packs back through Iceland and onto Boston, where we are staying the night and exploring the city that will become my brother's new home in a month before heading back to reality in Missouri! One more post from Boston on deck!
The last of the remaining locks on the famous Love Lock Bridge. In the background, the pink and white graffiti is covering sheets that have covered the chain link fence of the bridge after the locks were cut off. They were removed because the weight of all of the locks combined was about to cause the bridge to fail, so the city of Paris is trying a new #unlocklove campaign, telling people to set their love free with graffiti on the new bridge rather than continuing to lock locks onto others and cost the key into the river Seine. You can see how well that's going.
Looking up in the Louvre.
View from the second deck of the Eiffel Tower looking Southeast.
View from our hotel.
Looking up at the Eiffel Tower.
Second floor featuring Derrick just after sunset.