This is a shop front near our apartment. I am wearing the "vest-s-cape" I made at the ASG convention in Los Angeles.
Larry and I are in Paris now. The trip is supposed to be a celebration in honor of his 60th birthday. I hatched the idea rather suddenly when I got an email advertising lower cost to Paris. I checked the dates and thought--why not? Larry didn't need too much persuading to agree to the plan. We agreed that it would be good to have a balance between a familiar place and something new. We decided to spend a week in Paris (the familiar favorite) and try 5 days in Budapest and 5 days in Prague (new places). I am going to include some mundane details of our trip in this blog so that I can remember how we got here, what the apartment and neighborhood were like, and places to return to or to avoid. If anyone else is reading this, I apologize in advance if it is a little boring.
First, the how. We flew Delta to Atlanta, then its flight partner Air France to Paris. The first leg left Seattle at a convenient early afternoon time. We were able to take the light rail to the airport with no problems. The flight was on time and actually reached Atlanta a little early. We had only 1 hour between flights to make the connection, which seemed a little risky. It all worked out fine. I liked flying Air France. The plane was packed, but still confortable. We flew on an Airbus that must have been pretty new. Each seat had its own entertainment console. They passed out eye masks, ear plugs, and had complementary pillows and blankets for those people who wanted to try sleeping during the overnight flight. I reclined and got comfortable but couldn't sleep. Instead, I watched a couple of movies, including Midnight in Paris. That was the perfect film to watch on the way. It got me psyched up for walking in the rain here. Air France also provided me with a vegan dinner with champagne and breakfast, all at no additional charge. In these days of fees for everything, I felt like the flight was a value. The flight arrived early, too. We managed to exchange money and find the correct RER B train to town to get to our apartment. The manager was waiting for us. I was psychically prepared for little things to go wrong on the trip over and was relieved that things actually went so smoothly. If you'd like to see where we are staying, just check out the website www.yellowflat.com. The owner's photos are better than what I could do!
On our first day here, with jet lag hovering over us, we decided to just follow advice from Rick Steves--buy a 4 day museum pass and first see the musts. In our case the top of the musts was the Louvre. We headed off with guidebook in hand and our pockets filled with just a few euros so that if we would run into pick-pockets we wouldn't lose very much. We made it to the Louvre and bought a 4 day museum pass at the Tabac shop. They required cash, which we didn't have quite enough of, so got some more at a nearby cash machine. The Louvre requires everyone entering to be scanned, which makes sense. You just can't get in quite as easily that way. There was no advantage to holding the pass in terms of speed of entry at the Louvre. Since there are so many choices of wonderful things to see at the Louvre, we decided just to follow suggestions from Rick Steves' book. We set out to find Venus de Milo and ran into a few glitches, not to mention thousands of people. The place was packed! We temporarily scrapped the plan to see Venus d M, and instead followed the signs for the Mona Lisa. That we did find, but couldn't get very close to it due to the hoards of people. We decided to find Venus, then leave. Actually we did see many nice paintings en route, but just quick views. It was too crowded to be comfortable. Two hours at the Louvre isn't enough to see much, but it was still worth doing. Perhaps we'll return near closing time when it's not supposed to be so crowded.
Although the Louvre had its ups and downs, we did manage to see two other nearby museums that were definitely worth a trip, even if they hadn't been on our passes. We went to the Decorative Arts museum and found a fashion designer featured: Hussein Chalayan. For more information his name or try connecting http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/05/fashion/hussein-chalayan-on-exhibit-in-paris.html. He had some pretty wearable clothes, but mostly far-out creations including a dress with straps held up by balloons. The museum also had a special exhibit of some gorgeous vintage autos that we passed in a distance.
Our last museum stop was the Musée de l'Orangerie, which is an art gallery of impressionist and post-impressionist paintings located on the Place de la Concorde in Paris. It has the Water Lilies paintings, which were featured in Woody Allen's film Midnight in Paris that we just saw on the flight over. That was a fun context for us. We saw some other lovely Impressionist paintings and decided that we were glad we left the Louvre. Here are some photos taken on the way back to our apartment.
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