We'll Always Have Paris

First, we have to apologize for being absent for so long. Thank you to all of our many fans who were worried about us (Hi, Cathy!). Our lack of posts comes from some combination of a lack of time and interesting subject matter. Those may seem to be mutually exclusive, but we have just been really busy with everyday life...school, homework, the gym, friends. We continue to make progress with our Spanish but it is still a slog and we often feel like we cannot speak correctly at all.

On March 25th, we broke out of our rut by heading to Paris on our every-five-week school break. Getting to Paris is amazingly easy for us. Yes, we could fly, but it is even easier to take the train. A five minute walk from our place to the station gets us on a local train to Hendaye (in France), which takes about 45 minutes. When we arrive, a very short walk brings us to the Hendaye train station where we got on the TGV to Paris. The train takes about 4.5-5 hours and is very comfortable. On some trains there is even free wifi. Cruising through the French countryside at 190 mph (!) while surfing the web is definitely a marvel of modern technology.

What can we say about Paris? The city is beautiful even if it's raining; the food and wine are fantastic (separate post to come); and there are literally so many things to do that a week is not enough time to do them all. We didn't even make it to the Louvre.

One of the things we did do was explore as much of the city as possible by foot. (We made good us of the Metro as well.) Of the 20 Arrondissements, I think we walked through 16 of them. Here are some pictures from our treks:

As has become a habit, we decided to take a tour in Spanish to practice. In this case we did a free tour of the city that lasted 2.5 hours. It was difficult for a few reasons. First, it turns out that Spanish-speaking tourists love to do tours, so there were about 70 of us on the tour (split into two groups of about 35). Second, unlike our bodega tours in Porto, this tour was outside so the street noise increased the degree of difficulty. Finally, also unlike our tours in Portugal, our guide was a native Spanish speaker - from Argentina - and she spoke really fast. Overall, we think we did okay, but it was definitely hard to follow all the details.

Although we missed the Louvre, we did go to both the Musee d'Orsay and the Rodin Museum. The Musee d'Orsay is in a beautiful, old converted train station and has a fantastic collection of Impressionist works, which Jeff particularly enjoyed. This is the museum's cafe where we enjoyed a glass of wine:

Although the museum was really crowded, including large groups of French school children, it was a worthwhile experience.

We did make the trip out to the Palace of Versailles, but only to the gardens, which are humongous. We did this with a tour, but because it was in English, there were only nine of us (seriously, the Spanish tour that left from the same place at the same time again had two groups of 30+ people). Learning about the history of Versailles was interesting, and the gardens were particularly impressive because they had just turned on the fountains, and we got to see many of them flowing accompanied by classical music. Louis XIV definitely knew how to make a statement:

All-in-all, it was a great trip, and we are not too sad about missing the Louvre, because we already know we will be returning to Paris in September to meet up with Shana's brother Adam and his fiancee Erin.

Adieu,

Jeff and Shana