Paris, Day 1

Here, at long last, is the beginning of our Paris bloggage. I have the pictures on another site, and you can find them as links throughout the posts. Enjoy!

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As some of you may know (as if we didn't brag about it for the past month), Wanda and I went to Paris on the weekend of February 23rd for a quick getaway just for the two of us, and also to celebrate Wanda's birthday. We left Thursday afternoon, got into Paris Friday morning, and left on Monday to arrive back in Atlanta Monday night very late. Those of you who have finished reading the post below about how we got sick on Wednesday will be wondering about that, so let me put your mind at ease.

We were sick the entire fucking time.

This didn't stop us from having a great (if occasionally surreal) time. I kept crib notes on the whole thing so that I wouldn't forget anything, but looking at them now they are vaguely illegible. I'd blame this on the various fevers but anyone who knows me knows I have the handwriting of a 3 year old terrier. None-the-less, here's how it all went down:

We started with one huge suitcase (for many layers were packed, as weather predictions varied wildly) and a guidebook. We got to the airport plenty early, and it's a good thing, as weather in Chicago (our connection - yes we flew west to go east... it was far cheaper than a direct flight) was delaying flights for several hours and we only had 1:45 worth of layover to make our connection. Luckily for us, the enormously helpful lady at the American Airline check-in counter switched us to an earlier flight (lesson learned : ALWAYS get to the airport early!), so when we got to Chicago we had only about an hour to wait for our outgoing flight to Paris, which was itself delayed, but not as badly as we'd feared.

Upon our arrival, we wended our way through the airport to discover that our gate was a short excursion from the food court, wherein bad Chinese food was available for purchase. We're pretty much Chinese food whores, we'll eat it anywhere, any time, under the assumption that even bad Chinese food is better than a fast food burger. In this particular case, we were wrong. That was some of the nastiest Chinese food ever. That shit made the stuff at Colony Square seem like Iron Chef food.

We survived it, and caught our flight to Paris, about which there are three noteworthy things:

1. There was absolutely the most adorable Chinese baby being carried around. We made eyes.
2. I tried watching a movie without sound (the headphones they provided were the in-ear kind and hurt like hell), and wound up profoundly confused by the end of it.
3. We had Mister Tuberculosis behind us, and every time we were about to drift off to sleep that fucker would unload with the most horrifying coughing and squishing noises imaginable. He also didn't bother to cover his mouth while he did this. Guess what we're both suffering from now...

So, neither of us slept worth a damn, and we hit the airport dazed and confused, but ready for some fun! The fun began almost right away on the Metro on the way to our hotel, as some sort of security problem at a station along the way caused us to take nearly 2 hours instead of the expected 30-45 minutes. We did have a nice conversation with an Irish guy while this happened, during which the entire contents of my left nostril abruptly exploded out of my nostril and on to my shirt. As I had a fistful of kleenex this was easily (if disgustingly) remedied, but not the kind of social graces one wants to present upon arrival in Europe. The Irish guy thought it was funny as hell. This is why I so like the Irish!

Finally we arrived at our stop, exited the Metro station (funny story : the first time I went to Paris in 1992, a friend of mine and I got stuck for more than 2 hours in the Metro because neither of us knew that "Sortie" meant "Exit"), and after walking half a block, we saw this.

That's the Eiffel Tower for those of you keeping score at home. We at this time became rather agitated. Our hotel was less than a block from this point, so when we got there, we saw this. Thanks be to all the gods, our room was ready. This allowed us to shower, refresh, and do 2 important things - get ourselves an immediate lunch date at the Jules Verne, the restaurant located about a third of the way up the tower itself, and to make reservations at a little place around the corner for Wanda's birthday dinner, for which we had packed a very nice set of clothes so we could go out and look adult and stuff.

We left immediately for the tower, and after some fumbling about around the base managed to find the proper entrance to the restaurant lift. Here we are eating lunch at the Jules Verne:

This meal was a) the most expensive meal we ate the entire weekend by a significant margin, and b) a very long, protracted affair. The service was impeccably slow, allowing us to nearly fall into exhausted stupors on several occasions (recall, we're sleepless going on about 20 hours now, and working hard on our second week of flu-ridden-ness). Our menu selections went as follows (this does not count the endless supply of warm, crusty bread they brought to us, which I think kept us alive for the first half of this meal):

	Wanda	Benjamin
Appetizer	Foie Gras and Chicken Terrine	Smoked Salmon with Veggie Mash
Entre	Fish with about a pound of butter sauce	Perfect Rare Steak
Dessert	Rum Banana Cream Monstrosity	Chocolate Strawberry Tart Contraption

We got tons to eat, and afterwards went out to the observation deck to check out the view. Here's our hotel from the Jules Verne observation deck.

We took a bunch of other shots:

The green in front of the tower.

Towards the Sacre Coeur.

My absolutely adorable wife.

Vertiginous view of the tower.

Us, cold.

Upon leaving the Eiffel Tower we proceeded to head back to the hotel for a brief moment to inform the concierge that we would not be needing those 7:30 dinner reservations. I told him we were just getting back from lunch (about 3 hours have passed since we left for lunch, so now it's around 4:30 or so), and he did a classic double-take and said "Mon dieu! You have been gone already zis long? Oui monsieur, I will cancel ze reservation!"

From here we Metroed to Notre Dame because, hey, it's Paris, you just have to go. We walked around there for a bit (obligatory "we're at Notre Dame" photo) then decided to go walkabout for a while, seeing the Centre Pompidou and visiting one of the great newer features around paris : the elf-cleaning toilet! It's free, and all you do is go in, use it, and then leave. It then locks itself for a few minutes while it performs a thorough self cleaning (it sounds like a really enormous toilet flushing, but I hope this is not actually what is happening) and then opens back up again. WAY better than a port-o-potty! While in the vicinity around Centre des les Halles we took the opportunity to grab a snack (you can't tell, but that is a banana nutella crepe, which I will vote for as one of the new seven wonders of the world - it did NOT come out of the self cleaning toilet, much as it might look that way), and a bottle of wine, and then dove back into the Metro in order to get to the Arc de Triomphe.

By now it was dark and getting colder, but we took the time to take this picture, and then decided to walk back to our hotel, since we were quite warm by this time. The nice thing about your hotel being near the Eiffel Tower is that, anywhere you are in Paris, you can find your hotel easily by following that enormously tall building around until you catch it. So, we walked down the Champs Ellyses to George V to Pont d'Alma, following that enormous pretty monument, when suddenly it started to sparkle. I mean seriously sparkle, flash, and otherwise look dazlingly pretty. It must have taken hundreds of thousands of very bright LEDs on random timers to create the effect. It was utterly spectacular, and so we spent a few minutes near the base of the tower just savoring, partaking of a bit of canoodling, and celebrating Wanda's birthday in the most magical way possible. We'll never forget it.

Finally, we reached the hotel. We ordered room service (cheese plate, salad), cracked the label on our wine, and toasted our success at surviving our first day. At exactly 10 PM, both of our sinuses completely jammed up. We couldn't breathe at all out of our noses - total cloggage. To this day we are blaming the wine, not for any specific reason but because it seemed like the right thing to do. We fell into an uneasy, exhausted, and yet totally satisfied slumber.