"La France!" - Part 2

Week one complete, on to week two. We left Montpellier on the 9am train to Paris. One more thing that should have gone off without a hitch yet ended with me being "lucky" to be on the train. Once we got on the train we had to try and find two seats near each other. Even though I bought two seats next to each other that is apparently no guarantee of actually getting it. So we wandered around and eventually Joy would narc on a guy with no ticket to get him booted leaving his smelly seat vacant and calling my name.

We arrived in Paris and hopped in a cab for destinations unknown. I told the cab driver the name of the hotel and the approximate street location and he had no idea where to take us so he dropped us off near where I told him. After foolishly asking a crepe vendor for directions we phoned the hotel and asked how to get there. Surprisingly this was not that helpful. We took cover from one of the afternoon deluges and a short time later arrived at the hotel. Now let me just say that all is not what it seems on Expedia.com. I've stayed in nice hotels. I stayed in a really great room at the Waldorf in NYC and so I foolishly thought that if I spend an equivalent amount of money for a hotel in Paris I ought to get roughly the same accommodations; at the very least the same service. Not the case in fact. A lady showed us to our room and to the shock and dismay of all of us the room was adorned with a painting over the bed that I would guess at having been painted in the "I'm selling this out of my van down by the river" style. Even the lady that worked there smiled, chuckled and said " 'zis is 'ze first time I have seen 'zis " and called down to have us put in another room. I don't know what is happening with hotels these days but all of the charm is gone from the rooms. If you want to have a room with anything not corporate looking you have to get a suite. This was a four star hotel, with Capote and Hemingway listed in the guestbook. What in the hell? The location was good, no doubt about it. But even the service was lack luster. When we informed the hotel restaurant that we would be taking cocktails and dessert in our room they informed us that we most certainly would not be. So we ordered drinks and waited in the bar. The drink price is directly proportional to the serve time. If your drink costs 20 Euros, it will take twenty minutes to arrive. In our case we ordered two drinks which meant we were to wait 40 minutes for their arrival. We waited. Drank our underwhelming drinks and went to bed.

It rained a lot. When it wasn't raining it was cloudy and not very warm. We had one nice day all week and it was sunny and 72. Thank god I packed sweaters. I thought for sure I was wasting my time with them when I packed them. We walked all over town, hitting the a lot of the more famous landmarks. The Louvre:

Joy and I are suckers for sculpture. We wanted to get to the Rodin sculpture garden as well but with all the rain we decided not to go. The Louvre is quite lovely though. It would be nice to be able to experience it without all of the crowds. We also saw the Arc de Triumphe:

Invalides:

Notre Dame:

Montmartre:

The Eiffel Tower:

We saw a lot of other noteworthy lovely things as we walked around the city but I don't have photos of those to show you. I've been to Paris several times before and each time I go I see something I hadn't seen before. Sometimes it's a cool fountain:

Sometimes it is something that you don't even know the name of:

The most amazing thing that I saw on this trip is Sainte Chapelle. A small chapel built by the monarchy to house religious relics. There aren't any relics left but the stained glass windows that make up the walls are breath taking. We didn't get the full effect because it was over cast the day that we went. Even still, very cool. pics:

We spent a lot of time walking around drinking hot chocolate or Kir Violette or coffee or beer. You had to dodge the rain, you see, and what better way to do that than to sit at a cafe and have a beverage and talk like a hillbilly. I don't have the videos of that but Joy does and they are pretty funny in our opinion.

It was a fantastic trip. Certain things put a damper on it at times most notably the loss of my luggage. Oh well. I really enjoy spending time with Joy and I was really happy to finally meet Philippe. If I had the chance I would have changed the weather in Paris. It was Joy's B-day present after all and I would have liked it to have been less soggy. If I get a chance I will try and scan the film that I took so that you can see some of those. It's more of the same as what you see above.

Thank you so much for all your hospitality. I'll send grocery money to make up for my having eaten all of your food. I hope to see you again very soon.

Music: "Little Acorns" - The White Stripes

"La France!" - Part 1

Well my beautiful babies, you're finally going to get to see pictures of my recent trip to France. You're not going to get the full effect though because I deleted ALL of my photos from the trip yesterday...... Why? Simple, I'm an A-hole. I copied all of my photos onto my backup hard drive and then formatted my computer and reinstalled windows. All of this before checking to see if said files actually made it to my external drive. Result: I have no photos from this most recent trip that are of good quality. I was able to download the web album that I had created a few weeks ago, so I have about 160 of the 220 photos that I took; they're just 1/12th the original file size. They still look fine on the computer but I had big plans for some of these photos, damn it. I wanted to have B&W copies made of some of them to hang in my house. That's no longer an option.

So the trip began on a Saturday. I flew from Detroit to Amsterdam, like you do, and arrived on time and in good spirits. This was about the time the wheels fell off of my vacation. As I sat, danish and coffee in hand, waiting for my connecting flight the baggage transfer attendant was getting laid. At least that is what I keep telling myself because when it came time for him to do his job and transfer my luggage he balked. Everyone else arrived in Paris with a bag to claim from the conveyor. I waited to see if maybe it just got hung up somewhere and then did what I am accustomed to doing when flying Northwest; I walked to the lost luggage counter and filed a claim. After talking to the representative for Air France (Northwest's partner in France) I was in good spirits. My luggage didn't make my plane but made the next one and would be arriving shortly. I had a train to catch and couldn't wait so I left them all of my information and went on my way with the understanding that I would be receiving my luggage that day. No later than tomorrow. (tomorrow would be Monday at this point as my flight from Detroit was overnight).

I walked to the train station at Charles de Gaulle. It's only like 5 minutes from the arrival gate so I made it with time to spare. It was a pretty good looking station. Modern, light-drenched, sparsely seated. I bought a couple of waters and waited. I was actually a little glad not to have my luggage at this point. Taking a big suitcase on a train is not cool. They have luggage storage areas that are constantly burgled. Sometimes unknowingly. You've got like 3 minutes to get off the train at your stop and you might accidentally grab the wrong suitcase. That's the best case scenario. I feel that if that were the case, you'd likely get your bag back. Sometimes you just have the misfortune of sharing a train with an underpants thieving miscreant and he's just gonna straight up steal your shit. Plus it's pretty tight on those trains and it's just really nice to sit down, take off your high tech backpack that you bought for this trip and put some extra clothes in "just in case", and relax. Maybe read, maybe catch some sleep with the peace of mind that comes along with knowing that nobody can steal your suitcase. I did both. I even drank some coffee from the dining car. It was delicious; tasted like freedom. "What's that? We're coming into a station? Well, you fools can jockey for position all you want by that door, I'm going to finish my coffee and scope out these French girls walking by my window. " That was pretty much my inner dialogue.

I arrived in Montpellier a few hours later but nearly 24 hours since I took off from Detroit. So I was a little tired and I smelled like sleep, though hadn't really slept much. Kind of an interesting phenomenon. Joy greeted my at the train station. Joy was the reason I was going to France, you see. She has moved to Monpellier and is living the good life in the south of France while I am left to contend with the many splendors of Novi, MI. We're still bff though so it's cool. I took two weeks to visit her for her 30th B-day and check out her town. Montpellier is a really cool town. She blogged about my visit Here.

We had a grand adventure! I got to meet Philippe for the first time and I have to say I think we hit it off pretty well. He's very busy this time of year with work though and so we only got to hang out at night. We had many fine discussions and he introduced me to Roquefort, a regional French cheese. I'm not going to lie, it has the aroma of gym socks. It does taste good though. We put it on bread with butter and chased it with wine with Philippe shouting "la France!" all the while. Here are some photos of Philippe:

Sorry buddy, I don't have much left to work with. The top photo has Philippe wearing the Detroit Tigers shirt that I brought for him. You'll have to take my word for it since you can't see it. He looks cool in it.

Days 2-6 saw me making daily pilgrimages to Monoprix. I still didn't have my luggage and was trying to buy clothes as needed. Joy took me to the Levi's store on Wednesday and I got a pair of sweet 512's. I actually bought two pair, but the really dark pair I purchased fits me like a sausage skin. Strange, they are the exact same size according to the tag. Oh well, whenever I get my receipts turned into Air France, I'll get reimbursed for them.

The week was very chill. We walked around a lot and checked out the sites. I rented an apartment in the Canourge that was spacious and breezy so we hung out there a few nights and watched movies and had drinks. Some pics of the apartment and the view:

There is a church tower that can be seen from the window of my apartment that Joy took me to check out. It's massive. It's littered with bullet holes from the last time the Protestants and Catholics couldn't get along. It was closed so we couldn't go inside but here are some pics of the outside:

That's me down there. I'm not little, this place is just humongous.

Around the corner from the church there was a big beautiful garden with walking paths and the craziest tree you can imagine. It's lots of holes and hiding spots that people fill with wishes written on scraps of paper. Joy and I wrote some wishes and I did my best Nick Deyo impression to put the wishes were no one else would see them. Observe:

Writing the wish.

Placing the wish.


Completionary shooters.

We walked around a bit and found a patch of flowers that we decided to take photos in. I know what you might be thinking, "Great Odin's raven, Aaron! What is going on with your hair?!?" Well, I'll tell you. It was hot, the weather, and I decided to get my hair cut. Joy told the dude who did the cutting that I was in his care, so style away. But no mullets. He went for a surfer-ish sort of theme and came up with this. I changed it the very next day. The length was perfect, but the styling was all wrong. Here we are in the flowers:

I'm not drunk, this is my inquisitive face.

Here are some additional pictures from our wanderings about town. You will notice that at some point I am wearing a new shirt. My luggage arrived on the sixth day of my stay. Thankfully just in time to salvage the one day trip that I was looking forward to most.

A mustache to rival my own.

Ponder'n some thing or'nother while drinking a beer.

House I purchased while I was there. Calendar is filling up fast, get your party reservations in now.

La Comedie at night. Aaron Alberts, not pictured, is busily wolfing down a small bowl of mango sorbet from the Haagen Dazs kiosk.

As I mentioned earlier we spent our last full day traveling to St. Guilhem. Beautiful old, like old, city about a 45 minute bus ride from Montpellier. It sits in a mountain valley and it has water running through the streets all year round. There is so much water that they route some of it into drinking fountains for people to enjoy. It's good too, I had some. Anyway we walked around town and checked out the monastery that is situated in the town center. Really cool old monastery with a quiet courtyard ringed by places of worship that drown in kaleidoscopic light from the stain glass windows. We also walked along one of the sight seeing trails that leads out of town in an effort to try and hike to some ruins that over look the city. First off, it was hot as balls that day. There is no shade, and we ran out of water 3/4 of the way up. Which as it turns out is as far as you can really go anyway because the road is blocked. It did offer some really nice views of the valley and town below. Had we the time we could have gone swimming in the river near the town or even canoed down it, but there was a bus to catch if we wanted to get back to Montpellier. What a phenomenal day though. I got to see a great place and spend the day cracking up with my favorite person. We even had a photo shoot. The pictures didn't turn out all that well though. The light there at mid day is just too harsh. It was so bright and direct that even the tables reflected up onto our faces. I managed one great shot of joy but as it is on film and not digital I'm afraid you won't get to see it. Actaully, Joy took a good one of me too but same deal, it's on film. Anyway, here is our day, or at least the photos that remain of the day.

Continued in my next post "La France!" - Part 2