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.

Marseille & Lyon

We spent most of a day in Marseilles, which spell check informs me has an "s" at the end if you write it in English.

Also, did you also know that "accordance" is not generally used in everyday speech? Yep. We go back to the States in less than two weeks. Culture shock here we come.

In any case, Marseilles is charming. I think I read somewhere that it has like 1/4 the population of Paris which seems about right; not too crowded but not depressively empty either. Oh good. "Depressively" seems to be another of my own inventions, thank you spell check.

On a side note: you know, it is probably so much the better that we're coming home in 11 days because instead of achieving my desired levels of fluency in a foreign language, we now have a cockeyed situation in which I start speaking the wrong language at the wrong time. At the bank the other day I ended up blurting sentences like this: "Yes actually, nous sommes ici depuis Septembre. So that means that nous avons ete ici pendant presque nine, I mean neuf, mois. Months."

DERANGED.

I'm glad the bank guy thought it was hilarious. Laugh it up, fuzzball.

Spell check is telling me to change "depuis" into "deputize." Thank you again for your diligence, dear spell check. In any case, getting back to Marseille, okay, essentially it's a nice town and you could probably go there when it's sunny and that might be really great too, but if not, be aware that in February it is cold although not unbearable. And the off-season is probably less crowded/expensive so choose your poison.

We start this evening with one of my favorite photos: MIL being slinky. Anchors aweigh, mee-ow!

A trireme (HA! take THAT spell check!) carved on a wall, overlooking the harbor OOOHHH see what I did there...? (Gotta get my kicks from somewhere.)Harbor. Said obvious narrator. User of fragments. Destroyer of spell check.A little baby boat for Henry.

Yeah that's a cool church on the hill isn't it, good thing I'm not too lazy to find out what it is. Ahem.Or this one. An encyclopedia I am not. But in other news, it's like thisclose to the sea.Front door. (Of the church...not of a house...but you knew that.)Window overlooking the sea. (Again, it's the outside window of the...oh never mind.)Mosaic time. Now this one is actually of somebody's house, APPROVAL.After wandering around for a bit and dealing with highly inconvenient restaurant hours we found a Moroccan restaurant willing to open up (Marseille has a high concentration of immigrants) and the food was pretty good. Mostly I just have to say that all Arabic music rocks. Bring on that desert yodel.

By the end of the day, Henry loved this town:Henry also loved the restaurant in Lyon where we stopped for lunch the next day on our way back up to Bar-le-Duc:He's wearing sunglasses to shield himself from the glare of his own coolness. And here's a neat castle up on the hill in Lyon.

You know, (or possibly you don't) I think by the end of Megatrip 2010 my batteries were lower than my camera's for probably the first time ever, meaning I have about six photos of Lyon. Total.

But basically we did what you should always do if you only have a couple hours to spare in a French city: pop into an authentic-looking restaurant and eat your brains out. It's the best and most French experience you could possibly have, certainly better than wandering around the sidewalks looking at stuff.

Also, the looks you get from French people when you waltz into a restaurant with a noisy toddler are pretty epic. We like to amuse ourselves by counting down the seconds until they've gulped their last Perrier and escaped.

Speaking of escape, my goodness--that's the END of Megatrip 2010!!!

Which now frees up more blog page space for the original, Blog-given right of every blogger: to pass countless hours examining my own bellybutton and the fancies that flit around my head as opposed to an endless recitation of what I did for the last two weeks of February.

I'm just saying, you'll probably end up wishing Megatrip had been longer.

Pisa & Aix-en-Provence

Is he pushing it over or holding it up? Only YOU can decide.

So, to continue with the Neverending Story...on our way back up through Italy we made a pit stop at Pisa. It's kind of touristy but still cool.

Know what else is cool? Running into Friendly Bird Lady outside the Leaning Tower. This modern-day Mary Poppins hails from China which meant that Don was able to bust out his Chinese, as was also the case in Rome and a couple other places.

Bird Lady seems like a very cheerful person and had lots of bread. Those pigeons loved her. Henry maybe not so much, what with his extreme stranger-danger phase he's going through right now...but at least he didn't burst into tears. And really, that's all I can ask for.

Luckily, Bird Lady thought Henry was cute despite his unrelenting scowl--which I'm beginning to realize is how he copes with new experiences. (It's also how he copes with old experiences, as well as everything in between.) Bird Lady: "Want a pigeon?"

Henry: "............."

That's my boy. Shyer than a wild animal. In any case we wandered in and out of the cathedral buildings at Pisa and holy cow get a load of this ceiling:If I were Catholic I would probably never pay attention to the church service, I'd be looking at their ceilings the whole time. Actually, Mormon chapels are not exactly known for their exciting decor (Protestant iconoclasm and all that jazz) and yet I still find myself gaping at the ceiling for minutes on end.

After Pisa we drove for hours up the Mediterranean coast into Southern France. Although we went right alongside and sometimes through cool towns like Monaco and Nice,unfortunately we weren't quite close enough to get any good pictures of the coastal area. But we could see that the next lane over probably did have spectacular views, if that helps at all. Ahem.

Spent the night in our hotel in Aix-en-Provence and woke up next morning to go to the local market. Aix's downtown is smaller than I had imagined it but very characteristic. It would probably look a lot more charming bathed in sunshine, but, you know...this fluorescent overhead light look you get in February is borderline acceptable.

So here are some shots of the farmer's market. They have a lot of local products made with honey and of course almost every stall sells Herbes de Provence--and who doesn't like eating lavender?! I tell you what, using flowers to spice your food is GENIUS. They do it all the time here.

We only caught the tail end of the market. I imagine it's probably in full swing by now; two months ago it was still respectable:

Somebody parked their bike next to the lettuce stall:Debbie and the ocean of flowers:We stopped by a local candy shop to try the famous Aix-en-Provence regional dessert: CALISSONS. They are small oval-shaped candies about the size of your thumb consisting of a soft, chewy fruit underside and a flavored candy shell on top.

Apparently calissons are a big freaking deal. They must be, considering they cost like 14 euros for a pack of six.

Umm, calissons are good, don't get me wrong--but they're not 14-euros-for-a-pack-of-six good. Seriously, are these things made of crushed diamonds? I would rather learn to make my own, thanks (not that I ever will.)

So like the total hobos we are, we ate their free samples and ran off.

Hee hee.

And um, what else was cool...oh yeah. Radioactively blue roses:Insert clever Smurf comment here.

Grandpa and Henry having lunch at an outdoor cafe. Yep that's a giant Gothic church just behind them; after a while you see so many that they just sort of blend into the landscape:

I have no idea what Henry's showing me here, but it better not be something he just pulled out of his mouth. Yum.

We took a post-lunch stroll through some cute picturesque streets and as I was coming in for a picture of this ginormous lion-head door knocker, an extremely friendly security guard who works at this building jumped into my shot. French people are so fun:

Also strolled past this scooter and could not resist:Handprints! Haha. And last but not least, Dustin's ever-deepening relationship with fountains. They bring out the, uh, "best" in him(?) Yep. Definitely liking this side of Dustin right here.

SlurpWell I think it's safe to say that at one point or another we all enjoyed Aix, especially Dustin, who would like to come back and go fountain-licking there again someday.

I really have no problem with that idea.