29th December

Today we wanted to go to Versailles.  We were feeling a bit tried from yesterday so we slept in and then we went out to Republique and got a huge delicious breakfast bread thing.  It was delicious.  Chrissy thought it was smaller than it was, and then it was 3 times bigger.  She ate one third.

Then we caught the train to Versailles.  This took a while.  Ad then when we were in Versailles we went to the ticket office before we got to the palace and didn't have to wait in line.  Charles got in free since he's a resident of the EU and is under 26, but Chrissy had to pay 20 euro.  

Then we went up the Chateau and we went in the entrance.  It was totally confusing and we didn't know where to go.  We went into the main chateau museum and it was a long tour of identical rooms which were confusing and forgettable, even though each one was amazing.  The highlights were the room with a thing in it, and that other thing that was in a room.  Refer to photos.

Then we went to the garden which was all snowy and slushy and slippery and we walked a LONG way looking at all the fountains that were off, and eventually we got to the second building which was called the trianon which was kind of more interesting i thought.  The last building was called the little trianon, and then there were a collection of little whimsical farm buildings made for marie-antoinette to play in.  Then we had to walk back to the main house which was SO HARD, oh my god, it was bad.  then we stopped for McDonalds but it was too late for lunch and i felt bad, we both felt bad.

Then we got the train back, but instead of going home which would be sensible, we went to Muji.  Chrissy bought a bag because her other bag strap BROKE!  And then instead of getting a train home we decided to walk home, which was also totally crazy, but we passed some interesting shops, including a bookshop which was totally interesting.

Then we got some salads from the better bakery, then we got home at ate them and they were super delicious, oh my gosh.  now our legs hurt.  Our last full day in Paris!

28th December

(Christina)

Oh no!  We forgot to blog for a day!  We got home so late last night that we were too tired.  It was a huge day!

First off we met Lisa at Republique as always, and she took us to an AMAZING bakery we'd never seen before.  We had ham and cheese croissants which SOUNDS pretty average but was actually totally amazing.  We felt full and energised.  

We wanted to go to Printemps, which is a department store.  We found a brochure with a 10% discount at Printemps so thought it might be interesting.  On the way we went to UniQlo, which is a Japanese brand that just sells basic clothes - not fancy ones, but good quality and fairly cheap.  I was thrilled to find that they had a bunch of dresses that were a collaboration with Milk - another Japanese brand that is usually to expensive for the likes of me.   But since it was a collaboration with UniQlo, they were only 19 euro!  So I bought one.  I also FINALLY bought a jumper (thanks mum and dad) which is warm grey cashmere.  Charles bought a scarf and a new plain black t-shirt because he was sick of all his old plain black t-shirts.

We finally got to Printemps, but it turned out to be exactly the same as La Fayette - all really expensive name-brands.  Boring!  We took the metro to the Champs-Elysses and went to a museum called Palais de Tokyo.  It was only - ONE EURO - for each of us to enter.  The price was 1 euro for "artists" and "students studying art" so we claimed to be art students which is kind of TRUE.  We didn't need to prove anything!

The gallery was interesting contemporary art, my favourite piece being a sculpture that was a circle of jeans with concrete in them instead of legs.  We had lunch at the museum too!  It was fairly cheap!

Next we walked up the Champs-Elysses again - this time with Lisa.  She and I went to Sephora, the big cosmetics shop, and she bought some nail polish and I bought some extreme red lipstick.  It's rad!  We walked all the way up the street to the Arc, took some photos, and then took a metro away from there.

Next stop was dinner.  Lisa had a place she wanted to take us that was on the left bank.  It was a pretty classy place!  I had "vegetable soup" which turned out to be "vegetable" singular, pumpkin.  Lisa had the duck, which was not off, and Charles had a delicious beef… stew.  (his imagination was broke).  They were all really yummy!  Right outside the window next to our table there was someone in a Smart Car who was totally parked in by these two other huge cars.  We enjoyed watching him do a 7-point-turn to escape.  In Paris people just bump into the other cars to get in and out of a parallel park.

Next - Tour d'Eiffel!  We took a metro there and immediately went right to the top.  I was so scared!  The lift goes fast and it makes your ears pop because the tower is SUPER TALL.  It was foggy at the top so we couldn't really see anything, which is kind of a relief because it's scary at that height!  We went down to the second level and could see lots from there.  By the time we left it was about 10:30 and way past our bedtime!  So we went home to bed!  The end!

27th December

(Charles)

Today was our BIGGEST day YET.

We met at the bakery at République for breakfast croissants and pain au chocolat. YUM. We sort of wanted to go the the Champs Elysses again, but some museums over there were closed on Mondays so we decided to visit Montmartre instead. 

SO, we hopped in a metro out to Montmartre and wandered around for a while trying to find our way up the hill to the big church, Sacre Coeur. The church was nice, but the view from the top was really interesting. As it was approaching coffee-o-clock, we stopped for espresso and cakes. YUM. 

Suddenly I realised (with the help of LP) that there was a Dali museum in Montmartre. Christina suddenly got sparkly eyed and so we had to go, so we wandered around a bit more to find it. The museum was pretty good, a small gallery with mostly sketches and sculptures, it was a bit busy for a really relaxed look, but it was worth seeing and pretty cheap. Probably the best bit was the Dali quotes on the walls. He was clearly completely mad and totally awesome. 

NEXT, Lomography Shop Paris! I've wanted to go to a lomography shop for ages and finally we were able to go to the Paris gallery store. I was very relieved to find it open since lots of things were closed most of the day. They had ALL the fun cameras and films and things. I bought some interesting film and an awesome case for MY Diana mini camera. (Chrissy has claimed the camera AND the case. So that's that). 

Lisa and I want Lomo LCA+ cameras but they're too expensive! (250eu!!)

NOW was the time for walks in the Bastille area. We somehow decided to walk because it wasn't too far and because the big train stations are a bit tiring to figure out all the time (Gare du Nord is closest to the Lomography shop). So we walked to République and then got a metro two stops. Suddenly it became clear that it was lunchtime and we quickly stopped to eat. After food, we started walking around an "area of interest" according to LP, in the first street we found a cool contemporary art gallery, lots of great windows, and a little cute clothes shop where the shop assistant / designer was actually sewing while looking after the shop. Sometimes Paris is just too cool. As it got darker, we found more shops and more people came out to walk around. It was super fun running around all the cool shops.

Eventually we ended up at the Pompidou Centre and took lots of cool photos. 

Dinner was in two parts -- first, Crepes, second, super cheap pizza, salad and wine from a touristy sort of Italian restaurant. I ate too much cheese.

It was basically a super rad day. We three are an awesome travel team!

26th December!

(Christina)

We met Lisa at around 10:30 today an went straight to some markets in the south of Paris.  They were fun markets - lots of stalls and interesting stuff, mostly antiques.  I bought a hair thing and Lisa got a little set of kitchen scales.  It was obscenely cold and both of my feet went numb.  We stopped to have brunch at a bakery.

Then we took the metro to the left bank - or the south bank - to see a cool museum that Charles found, Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain.   It turned out that the exhibition was about a particular French comic book artist called Jean Giraud  or Gir or Moebius.  It was super interesting and awesome.  I wish I could read French!!

Then we walked around the cool streets on the left bank, over the river from Notre Dame.  We went to Shakespeare and Co bookshop (a famous English-language bookshop, mostly run by poets and authors and beatniks), and had lunch at another bakery.  It was all very pretty, but not many shops were open because everything shuts on Sundays.

Home now yay!  Another dinner of home made sandwiches!

PS. In Paris we mostly eat sandwiches. The bread is soooooo nice.

Christmas in Paris!

Today was Christmas! yay! Unfortunately, we were both feeling a bit sick so we took the day off from doing too much stuff. Chrissy wanted to go to church, so we went to a service at Notre Dame this morning. There was a nice choir, but we were so far back that it all sounded a bit washy and unclear. Even though everything was in French, I found it only slightly more boring than a regular church service. so, not that bad?

For lunch we settled for macdonalds, since we were too tired to find somewhere good... Boring. In the afternoon we watched Xena and then for dinner we went to a supermarket and got stuff to make sandwiches. Bread in Paris is generally SUPER DELICIOUS. Yum.

More interesting stuff tomorrow!

Photos 24 December

24th December - Christmas Eve!

Today was the second day of our two-day museum pass, so we met Lisa early to go to as many museums possible!  We were a museum viewing three-headed monster!

First we went to the Louvre, obviously, and headed straight for the Mona Lisa.  Lisa and I lost Charles on the way there and discovered that we'd overshot the entrance to the Mona Lisa room by about 50 metres!  Poor Charles thought we'd left him forever!  Anyhow the Mona Lisa was pretty okay, much smaller than I thought, and kind of annoying to view because of all the billions of people there.  BILLIONS.

Other things we looked at at the Louvre: Venus, Ramses, a MUMMY, various Egyption relics, Ancient Greek stuff, lots of paintings of Jesus.  Charles and I would like to go back again!  It was really good and we hardly saw anything, even though we were there for over two hours.

THEN we went to another museum called Musee des Arts Decoratifs (or something).  It was all about hand made stuff and design, I think.  We mostly looked at a bunch of fashion by famous designers (Vivienne Westwood, Jean Paul Gaultier, Christan Dior), which was cool.  Then we went into a gigantic maze of rooms with art deco stuff, art nouveu stuff, old chairs, renaissance stuff.  We felt tired and wanted to leave, but to get out you had to go through another gallery of "animal" stuff, which included crocodile skin boots, a giant metal rhinocerous, and also chairs made in the shape of dogs.  At the end I didn't really know what the museum was trying to achieve.  We also noted that there were about 5 floors we didn't even look at.

Following that, we walked in the freezing cold snowy weather to Musee d'Orangerie, which is famous for housing some of Monet's Waterlilies.  The museum was basically two large oval rooms with four huge curved paintings covering almost the entire wall space.  Look it up!  Awesome.  And beautiful too.

We were tired after three museums, so took a train to a place where Lisa said was a good Japanese restaurant.  We all had ramen, and it was pretty good DESPITE the staff all being Chinese (lisa overheard their conversation - she's a handy person to have around).

We went to a famous department store called Galleries LaFayette which was in full-on crazy mode because everyone was buying last minute presents.  We saw lots of fashion by famous designers (Vivienne Westwood, Jean Paul Gaultier, Christian Dior), which all had dresses for thousands of euros!  A BIT out of my price range, you guys!

After we got all crazied out, we all went home.  The end!  Happy Christmas!

23 December

Paris blog 2010/12/23

Paris was very snowy today! Totally annoying! The air isn't that cold, so the snow is sort of wet and sticks to you, BUT, the wind is super cold and annoying. So, we all agreed that it was too cold to wander around and we decided to do museums today and tomorrow. We met Lisa at Republique and bought a Paris Visite pass for 5 days so that we don't have to keep finding change for the metro all the time. We decided to do the Centre Pompidou first because it looks so interesting. The line to get in wasn't too bad and we bought 2 day Paris Museum passes. The first thing that happens at the Pompidou centre is that you have to go around the outside of the building on the escalators. This is totally awesome. The view was great, even though the weather outside was frightful. We took a lot of photos at the top. The main galleries are modern art to 1980 and then 1980+ and the 1980+ section had a focus on women artists. It was totally awesome. 

We then spent AGES in the bookshop and interesting thing shop. Lots of books were on special, but they were usually really heavy and annoying. Lisa and I agreed that we wanted a cool book for around 10 euros which was small enough to carry with us. We couldn't find anything meeting all three conditions.

LUNCH was at a nice place nearby that specialised in grilled cheesy sandwiches. Nice and inexpensive.

THEN, we wanted to do another museum, but it was pretty late, so we went to Musée de Arts et Metiers since I remembered it was pretty small. Getting in was a bit weird. They wanted us to produce our museum passes to get ANOTHER ticket, and then a lady waved us through while trying to get us to join a tour or something which we didn't care about and then ANOTHER person scrutinised both tickets. Weird. We had no idea what was going to be on at this museum, but the temporary exhibit was a retrospective on video games and it was totally rad. The focus was playing the games and they had lots of representative games from the last 30 years set up and ready to play. Obviously, NES had Super Mario Bros, Gameboy had Tetris, N64 had Goldeneye, there was Lemmings (Chrissy played) etc. It was super awesome. We were all blown away.

The rest of the museum was a bit dusty and tired but was still reasonably interesting (or maybe we were tired).

Luckily the museum shop wasn't selling awesome video games and consoles or charles may have spent all his money.

THEN we got tired and had to come home! Baguette and salad for dinner from the boulangerie. Yum.

Extra info: We went to a supermarket and got some deserts and some more bottled water. When we got home, the water turned out to be all salty. Weird? Who wants to drink salty water??

December 21st!

21 December

Here's a blog post detailing what we did yesterday, since we were too tired to write a blog.

We got up at 4:30 from our hotel in Stockholm and went directly to Arlanda airport.  I was feeling cautious excitement at the possibility of being in Paris by noon, and Charles was feeling cautiously grumpy at being woken up so early.  We DID make it to Paris, and we took the train into town.  Paris metro stations are easier to navigate than Japan ones because people aren't in such a pushy hurry, and because the signs aren't in Japanese.  French is easier to read than Japanese in English.

We got to our hotel to find that it is PRETTY small.  I could not swing a cat in here!  If I wanted to swing a cat.  It has a place to sleep and a place to wash, so it's okay really.

We went out immediately and had lunch at a local lebanese place.  Nice!  Then it was straight to the Champs-Elysses for a walk.  We walked all the way along the lovely street, looking at the pretty Christmas market stalls and the big shops.  It was pretty similar in feel to Omotesando-dori in Harajuku, the same wide street with big fancy shops and big fancy people.  We had a good look at the Arc de Triumphe at the end, and agreed it was pretty good.  Here's Charles wearing it like a hat!

Here's me eating it!

We just walked back down the Champs-Elysses again.  Stopped at Louis Vuitton to see what all the fuss was about, but I still don't really like chequered bags.

THEN we took the metro to the stop near the Eiffel Tower, and saw the Eiffel Tower.  It's really big and cool!  There were lots of christmas market stalls there too and we enjoyed looking through them.  Charles bought a crepe with nutella in it… delicious.  At the actual tower, there were one thousand dudes selling stuff.  Mostly they were selling miniature Eiffel Towers, which they carried around on huge rings and shook about.  Some people were selling hats and scarves, because it was really cold, and some were selling animatronic barking dogs.  Some really annoying dudes were selling roses which they kept shoving in my face.  The WORST dudes were the ones trying to tie a string around my wrist and then get 2 euro for it.

Anyhow we saw the lights come on, but it wasn't super spectacular because it was so foggy!  What a terrible day to go up the tower!  Good thing we didn't go up.  Saving that for a better day.

Then: home to our hotel!  Yay what a lovely day!  By the way, there's a REALLY NICE view of Paris from our window.  Not like a spectacular panorama, but a nice view of parisian streets.  Cute!

22nd December

22nd December

Today was our first full day in Paris.  We met Lisa at our hotel at around 11am.  We walked all the way from our hotel to Baby, The Stars Shine Bright, through Bastille. It should've been around a 30 minute walk but there were many interesting camera shops that we were all interested in.  At Baby, I tried on a few dresses but one Alice and the Pirates dress was really nice.  I didn't buy it, but I DID think about it all day.  Might go back and buy it tomorrow.  What do you think?

We had lunch at a nice restaurant, and I foolishly got an entree AND a main (they had some special lunch deal), which turned out to be a ridiculous amount of food.  I didn't finish, but I did nearly explode.  Lisa and Charles had normal amounts of food.

We decided to walk to Angelic Pretty and then to Notre Dame.  On the way to AP we spotted a Muji and had a nice time in there.  Muji is a really cool shop.  We bought a couple of things and best of all, picked up a catalogue.  Awesome perusin' ensued!

We went to the address where AP was supposed to be, but found a shop called Boddywood instead.  It stocked a lot of Milk dresses, and also Hellcat Punks (not want), Vivienne Westwood stuff, and Melissa shoes.  I could tell that before I saw them because of their heady perfume.

We figured out that AP was actually ABOVE the shop, and asked a shop girl who took us around the back and up to a bright pink apartment where they had the Angelic Pretty shop.  It was kind of awkward - a super tiny room with bright pink and red walls and huge dresses, while the shop girl stood and looked at us, and I tried to be casual… but I did not buy any AP dresses.  They're too crazy!  Oh my gosh!

After that experience, we took the metro to Notre Dame.  When we got outside again, it was raining!  We hurried into the cathedral, where it was warm and dry, and especially beautiful.  It was SO nice.  It's really big.  I don't know… it's great.  It's real good.  Go there?

We walked to the city hall (Hôtel de Ville) where there was an  an outdoor ice-skating rink.  For christmas i guess?  It was pretty, and the roof of Hôtel de Ville lights up!  Over the road was a famous department store called Bazaar Hôtel de Ville, where we spent a while perusing and having coffees.  It was nice!

Then: it was raining even more!  We took the metro home and picked up some delicious cold salads and tarts from the bakery.  We're eating in our hotel room!  Fighting over who gets to eat what salad!  (ps the prosciutto salad is the best)