Paris--The Deuce

Two of the many pictures I took the last day in our village. We packed our bags. Everything that wouldn't fit into 5 suitcases we donated to next year's assistants.

Whoever comes here to teach is going to love this town. I mean, check out the local park in spring!
Then we sadly cleaned our apartment top to bottom and a nice friend drove us to the train station. It's about a two hour train ride to Paris. We checked into the same cute, dumpy little hotel we stayed at in the fall and ran off to get sushi first thing. Happy to report that Awesome Ponytail Man still works the front desk of the Hotel de la Place des Alpes, if anybody's interested in a cheap Paris hotel that doesn't have bedbugs.

Ew. Bedbugs are gross. Glad we did not have them...Anyways, here's a quick list of Paris Part Two, beginning with the Eiffel Tower which I FINALLY got to climb (mark one off the bucket list!)

Ever wonder how far 700 meters is? I mean it sounds impressive, but I could not believe my eyes when I saw exactly how far this guy walked on a tightrope...
It's from here to that horseshoe-shaped building waaaaay off in the distance. Speaking of distance, here's the Champs de Mars from the first floor. We went up twice as high as this. Cold, but so worth it!!!After the Tower we subwayed off to Pere Lachaise Cemetery... ...where we visited the graves of Abelard and Heloise, Jim Morrison, Edith Piaf, Oscar Wilde and Chopin. Chopin's was all decked out in memory of the Polish president who had recently died in a plane crash.Next up: the Paris Opera house. Yeah, I'm gaping at the ceiling as usual. Then again--how could you not?Dustin and Henry spent some man-time on the front balcony of the Opera. In this shot they are having a deep conversation about the break dancers down below. As men should. Paris is museum central so we hit up the d'Orsay and the Centre Pompidou. The latter had a whole floor of feminist works:Here's an imposing Louise Nevelson piece I photographed in plain daylight. Which was underhanded of me. Literally.The Pompidou had lots of fun(?) stuff in it. We saw a dress made of meat. It's intended for anorexics. You know, so they can get some meat on their bones...amazingly enough that's not an awkward pun of mine, that's the actual artist statement. It was, er, lovely.

So to balance it out we visited Marie Antoinette's estate at Versailles, which is girly enough to euthanize a whole pack of feminists in their tracks.Marie Antoinette...I have no words. The estate itself is quite charming. The houses are charming as well, although perhaps overwhelmingly so. Dustin accurately described it as 18th-century Thomas Kinkade on steroids. Marie's "farm" is actually a bunch of quaint little cottages surrounding a lake, so it's more like a village with a farm attached. This is the lighthouse where they would meet for fishing, hunting, and "walks" that mostly consisted of courtiers making out in bushes.

Speaking of which, Henry loved the lilac bushes.Chomp....but all things considered, he was rather unimpressed with the donkeys.I think I'm practicing my curtsy here. Or possibly thanking France for the best nine months of my life. Next day we boarded a plane and left the land of leafy tunnels......and back to Arizona where Cousin Creed welcomed Henry by graciously allowing him to borrow his awesome Davy Crockett hat. Well if that doesn't Americanize the kid, I don't know what else will.Aren't they cute together? I'm thinking the next great adventure of our lives will be teaching them to kill a bear when they are only three. Dang. Less than two years, and uh...that's not so much up my alley.

If You Don't Have Anything Nice to Say...

...then pretend like your blog doesn't exist for 7 or 8 weeks.

Hypothetically.

We're back in America, if any of you were searching for the most obvious statement of the century. It's nice to be home and yet not very nice at all. (Perhaps only the missionaries know what I mean by this.) You have horrible bread and cheese. Your cream is a joke. So is your mustard. But your drinking glasses are pleasantly large, so I will stay.

I'm searching wildly for something else that is nice to say. Well I guess I could talk about how a couple weeks ago we got together with Dustin's family to go see Danielle's opera and so on and so forth and how it was enjoyable. Because it was.

I could also discuss how we made it home from Europe safely despite the volcano, and how the day after we left London most of their outbound flights froze up due to a British Airways employee strike so we were lucky to get out of there, and how my grandparents are magnanimously allowing us to crash in their basement free of charge while Dustin sifts through the sands of recession for any sign of a job, and how we bought an adequate SUV that I have appropriately dubbed the Bronze Beast, and how its check engine light is on.

See how most of this stuff is exciting? But not always in a good way?

Which is why I now proceed to catch you up on everything you never wanted to know about what happened to us after Megatrip 2010.

Sorry Devin! Typically enough I have nothing scandalous to say about Dustin, but a lot of scandalous-by-default things to say about France.

Devin should really be happy about this though. He is currently pursuing a Thomas Jefferson education. Rule number one in becoming the next Jefferson: develop a rabid, passionate affection for France to the point that your colleagues get highly annoyed. Check. (You're welcome guys!)

After Megatrip we waited a whole month and then went exploring again, this time to Verdun. It started out very nicely with one of those cute little thousand-year-old castles you can find for a dime a dozen in France:
Then we went out to the famous Verdun battlefields of World War I and things took a turn for the macabre. What do you even say about a place like that? It's almost indescribable. Thankfully Dustin provides a little comic relief by munching sandwiches in corners:One suggestion to the French government would be to never, ever try covering up a horrific battlefield with trees. The ground there is so ripped and pitted by these enormous bomb craters that it looks like huge sea waves. Then France decided to "hide" them all by planting a forest. End result? It's still visible, only now it's unbelievably dark and creepy.

Memorials to the dead are everywhere. The Battle of Verdun was very bloody; it wiped nine villages off the map and killed over 700,000 people. It's been more than ninety years and the French still find skeletons in their fields. They bury all these along with other unidentified remains at the ossuary (or bone-yard) of Douaumont:
Every brick in there hides a bone, and the foundations are filled with them. How do I know this? Because for your viewing enjoyment, the ossuary's theater shows a free historical film whose whole introduction is a guy unlocking the foundation vault and you get to stare at piles of old shiny bones for what feels like a million years with no soundtrack but the wind blowing (talk about film noir!) and then after you're thoroughly depressed they send you over the edge by announcing that nobody in that pile was older than 30, and then the rest of the movie starts but of course all you want to do is bawl.

Hypothetically.

I guess I would describe it as sobering. We watched two films on WWI, visited two or three different museums including the ossuary, and got a really good feel for what these soldiers and their families went through. Inside the ossuary they've chosen red lighting for dramatic effect. Consider that a horrible success, people:

And then of course they've got gigantic posters of WWI survivors holding pictures of themselves from back in the day. Normally old people are cute. Bathed in blood-colored light, not so much. C'est la vie. Or should I say la mort?But like I said, I am glad we came here. The French were so overwhelmingly grateful when Americans arrived to put an end to all the butchering. And if Verdun didn't have this quiet aura of the grave all over it I suppose it would be rather charming. After visiting the freaky battlefields we came back out to the town center and ate some hot crepes at the foot of this monument:
When the Third Reich conquered Verdun in the forties they were extra-special-sure to put a swastika flag on this guy, just to get that last laugh on what the city stood for. Too bad us Americans are expert butt-kickers.

But it's definitely not too bad that Verdun crepes are heaven on a napkin. Henry fell asleep while me and Dustin sat on a park bench by the river in the--wait for it--sunshine! Really, in northeastern France in April, it's kind of a big deal that there was any daylight at all.

It was also sunny the day we visited the Monstec WWI memorial, which I figure applies here. It's up on a hill and is much lovelier and more restful than the others, since it overlooks the entire conflict area.

Monstec is a beautiful site. You just have to ignore the fact that this memorial actually served as a Nazi sniper nest at one point, and everything is fine:

So, I guess I'm glad to be back in America. Witnessing Verdun reminded me how much I respect my country for the good it has done in preserving and protecting its brothers and sisters around the globe.

It's also nice to see the family, and I'm definitely not pining away for some good Brie, and I'm totally fine with bread that has no crust to speak of, and there is no way that 7 weeks after leaving France I'm still in mourning for our apartment window.
Hypothe....

Oh, never mind.

MegaTrip 2010: MAP

Hey everybody. It's Dustin. I like maps, so I thought I would contribute to the blog by providing a map of our travels. Yes, I know this trip happened four months ago, but I just thought of this today. Google maps says this route is 2,400 miles, but of course we drove more than that if you count getting lost and stuff. So here it is, the route we took for MegaTrip 2010.