It has been an awful long time since the last time either of us published a post. A lot has happened since then. My wife and I are both living in the US now! I moved back here last October, and she got here about a month and a half ago.
At the moment we are living in Lebanon, Oregon. We are staying with family, and next month we’ll be moving on to Seattle. All are more places we should add to the blog, but right now, as the title mentions, I want to talk about our weekend in Paris so long ago.
It hasn’t quite been a year since that trip. That trip where we flew from Beijing, and after a layover in Moscow landed in Athens, Greece. We spent time in Athens, Santorini, Rome, Venice, Milan, Cinque Terre, Zurich, Paris, Lisbon, Madrid, and finally Barcelona before returning to Beijing.
We were only in Paris for a few days. We flew there from Milan, Italy. We had only spent a day in Milan after taking the train there from Zurich. Our trip was planned quite rapidly, we had made the arrangements for all the hotels ahead of time for the 32 nights we’d be traveling. We stuck to those hotels in all but two places. We also took care of all the airplane transportation, but we handled the trains as we went along.
Anyhow, we flew from Milan to Paris, if I remember correctly it was only about a 30 or 40 USD flight per person. We landed in the outskirts of Paris around 11 or 12 at night. Next time I’m going to have to keep better notes!
Once we got there we found a bus to take into town (again, this kind of transportation we kind of winged it, and we did a pretty decent job if I do say so myself!) and ended up somewhere in downtown Paris after midnight. Luckily the subways were still running! Most of the other passengers from the bus took taxis to their destinations, but we are adventurous, and cheap! Of course when traveling for 32 or 33 days you’re going to have to be cheap at times, and during our travels we only took a taxi once that I can recall, and that was a 7 EUR ride from downtown Fira on the island of Santorini, Greece to our hotel after we turned our rental ATV in! The alternative was a 4 EUR bus ride that would drop us off a ways from the hotel, so it seemed worth the expense there 
But I digress.
So the subways were still running, and we hopped on and after Google told us what routes to take we made our switches and ended up at our hotel. While on the subway there were many high school age kids, maybe younger college kids as well, who were all chanting about something, we never really could figure it out.
Well we got to the hotel, it was after midnight, so early early on September 20, 2014, and we pretty much just went straight to bed. After we got up in the morning we wandered around and found some food, nothing great, just some chicken and potato things of some sort.
From there we walked back to the subway station and took the subway over to the Eiffel tower. We were only going to be in Paris for about two days, so there were a few things we had to hit up: the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, and Notre Dame. My wife, Ziqin, had been there before. She had gone there in 2013 when she was visiting a friend in Germany prior to us meeting up in Italy for our honeymoon. Anyhow, there I am off topic again, you’ve really got to keep me on track or I’ll never get to the end of this post!
At the Eiffel Tower we looked around, there were long lines everywhere! I am not a fan of long lines, but I will wait in them when the situation dictates. So there were lines at three of the corners I believe. At two of them they were lines for the elevator, well what kind of wusses take the elevator? We promptly walked to the line for the stairs! We paid a few bucks and up we went! Being the OCD guy I am, I counted the steps. There were 330 steps from the ground to the first floor observational platform thingie. We of course took lots of pictures the whole way up! I took pictures of the views, and of course Ziqin took pictures of us!
We climbed another 342 steps to the second floor. From here you had to take an elevator up to the next platform, so we did that. We had some amazing views of the river Seine and all the buildings along it.
From the top we could see many people enjoying the park down below, we could also see an interesting combination of lush greenery and urban structures.
We spent some time looking around, and then we took the elevator back down to the second floor and walked down the stairs back to the ground.
After that we were much in need of nourishment! We went and found some delicious (though a bit overpriced) crepes to eat, and then we walked around some more. We walked over to the bridges that are covered in the locks of couples who wanted to leave their mark on Paris. I have heard that the locals hate these locks, so I apologize that my wife and I added our own lock there.
We also went over and saw the Notre Dame, wandered around and looked at the outside of the Louvre (we were planning to visit it the next day), and walked along the river Seine. As we wandered around we also saw several of these weird looking motorcycle things.
It is kind of sad that we have waited so long to post, I have probably forgotten far too much about our time there in Paris, but luckily my wife, Ziqin, will remember most of what I forget, she has that interpreter’s memory of hers!
Ziqin will also remember all the foods we ate there! Whereas I remember little, it seems like we actually ate at a Japanese restaurant there in Paris. Anyhow, that evening we walked some more along the river and took in the wonderful views of the Eiffel Tower lit up at night.
We eventually made our way back to the hotel and the next morning we awoke early to go to the Louvre! At the Louvre the lines were even crazier than at the Eiffel Tower! Luckily the lines moved quickly, and we were soon inside. We started out by visiting the Egyptian exhibit. We saw mummies, sarcophagi, ancient tools, and several works of art. From there we made our way to the area with all the statues. There were some pretty interesting ones.
And of course no first-time visit to the Louvre could be complete without seeing the Mona Lisa! Around the Mona Lisa there were hundreds of people! The painting is small, as many of you know. What’s funny is it sits directly across from a huge painting that no one really paid attention to. I found it quite humorous that no one was looking at the giant painting across from it, it was almost sad. All this other artwork there gets bypassed because the Mona Lisa is famous, as is its painter.
After a few more hours of wandering around, seeing amazing works of art, ancient living areas, and a plethora of old tools and weapons, among other things, we left.
We did some more wandering around, ate some food, and overall just enjoyed the Paris atmosphere. We also took in a spirited protest and momentarily thought the Paris version of S.W.A.T. was going to take us down!
I guess I should elaborate on that last part a bit. We were wandering around in a less-touristy part of town, where we noticed there were many police vehicles around. They looked a lot like US S.W.A.T. vehicles. We then heard a noisy protest, we never did find out what they were protesting. The majority of the participants were of African decent, and many dressed in what us Americans would call African attire. I am not well-educated about the different cultures in the continent of Africa, so I can’t really take a guess at what country they were from. The protest was coming right around a corner and heading towards us as we crossed a street.
Right as I passed one of those police vehicles the cops started pouring out! For a moment I thought that perhaps we had wandered somewhere we weren’t supposed to be. However the cops did not bother us, it appeared they were redirecting the protest, perhaps they had gotten off the course they were supposed to take. We ducked into a grocery store to stock up on some food so we could save a bit of money and not have to eat out for a couple meals.
Upon leaving the grocery store we wandered around more, and we happened upon the spot where the protesters’ march had ended and the speeches had begun. We don’t speak a word of French (and come to think of it, I don’t even know if they were speaking French) so we have no idea what was going on.
It did rain on us a few times while we were wandering around, actually we got rained on at least once in every single country we went to during that trip. That evening we retired back to our hotel and the next morning it was back to the airport, and on to Lisbon, Portugal! A city where we’d be offered Hashish by 7 separate dealers in a six hour period. But you’ll have to await another post to hear about that! Unless perhaps we already wrote about it, I’d have to double check all of our posts to see
