Tired but smiling in Paris

After leaving home in Portland at 5:30 AM, flying to Chicago, landing 2 PM Chicago time, and leaving almost 6 PM Chicago time, I made it to Paris around 9 AM Paris time.  Which is midnight Portland time.  I really didn't sleep on the plane, since sleeping is hard when your body thinks it is 4 PM.  But, fortunately, 6 years of surgery residency has me trained well for 30+ hour shifts...  It's 8:30 PM (11:30 AM Portland time), and I still probably have a good 30-60 minutes left in me.  Just enough time to write this blog!

Paris is wonderful so far.  I went to Notre Dame (didn't go to the top, since the line was too long, but may go tomorrow if I have time), Roman and other ruins under the plaza in front of Notre Dame, a Holocost memorial, the Latin Quater & St Michel (where the revolution, and every other major protest in France began), Sainte-Chapelle (a very cool church with a ridiculous amount of amazing stained glass), the Conciergerie (the prison that has been in use for hundreds of years, where Marie Antoinette and all of the 2,600 others who were beheaded by the guillotine were imprisoned prior to growing a foot shorter). Oh, I even saw someone in handcuffs being brought in by police to an entrance on the other side of the Conciergerie - I guess they still use parts of it as a prison! I walked some streets, had some great food, and then spent several hours in the Louvre!

The Louvre - I knew it was big and had a lot of art, but until I was there, I had no idea of just HOW big it is.  It is incredible.  You can walk for ever through room after room after room, and never pass the same place twice.  And the building itself is amazing.  It alone is an incredible work of art, with painted frescos on the walls and ceilings, carved reliefs from marble or stone, metal sculptures, etc all built into the walls of the building in addition to all of the art it contains.  Another neat part - when they went to remodel it a couple of hundred years ago, they found the remains (semi-intact) of a building under it from 1200's, and you can walk through that.  All together awesome. 

Other fun things I have learned - 1) The better way to get to where I am staying, as suggested by the guy who was sitting next to me on the plane (who is from Paris but just spent a few months doing an internship in Indianapolis [and for some reason found that city more interesting to him than Paris???]), is only better in terms of not needing a metro connection and being a pretty walk, but was a 2 mile walk with my bags instead of a 2 block walk.  2) There are a couple of different ways to get from where I am staying to the sites around Notre Dame or the Louve, and one way, one of the metro lines is closed and is replaced with a very inconvenient bus.  Fortunately there are other ways, now that i know to avoid that one.  3) There are a bunch of amazing cheese, bread, wine, and other shops right outside my hotel, but they close before dinner, so my thought of "I've been up for 30 hours, with severel meals in there, I can just grab a snack, only worked if I had left the Louvre earlier.  Fortunately, a delicious Crepery came to my rescue!  4) The Paris museum pass is awesome.  If you every travel to Paris and plan to see a lot of sites, get it!  5) The more tired I get, my already horrendously poor French gets even worse (if at all possible).

Tomorrow, I will be see Versailles, the Champs-Elysees, and perhaps some other museums or Montmartre or the Eiffel tower - I'll see what I feel up to after the other two.  I'll post this, but I'll see if I can get some pictures to add on!