I got back this weekend from my two week trip to Florida. Not a bad trip, but I have all week to talk about that. Let's get this Paris thing done.

Part 2

Anyways, continuing on with driving in Paris. Parisians have many double standards when it comes to driving. First, while at a red light, you have about one second of grace to hit the gas before someone lays their horn on you, however it is completely acceptable to block an entire lane of traffic by putting on your hazards and leaving your car to go buy bread at the store. Second, it's against the law to not signal while turning, eating or talking on the cell phone while driving (after all, this is unsafe), but it is quite normal to tailgate with about 5 feet of space in between vehicles. I was actually yelled at by a police officer because I failed to signal when trying to park and he almost hit me because he was tailgating. Well, I'm in their country so I guess I was wrong. I should have put on my hazards and blocked him while I went into the store to buy bread. Suck on that, Inspector!

Anyways, the last week was spent in Paris seeing as much as we could (and we saw alot). I always thought that tourism would be really light in Europe during the winter. This is true until Dec. 31. Then everyone showed up. There were crowds that equaled the summer's tourism easily. The crowds were there until we left on Jan. 4. Who knows how long they were still there. So keep that in mind if you ever plan to tour in Europe during the winter. On that day, we went up the Eiffel Tower. Really, really cold up there. Oddly, it was colder half way up than on top. Sadly, it wasn't a very clear day. Well, it wasn't clear until we got back to the bottom. Then we made our way to the Catacombs. The catacombs are a very surreal place. The story behind it is a couple hundred years ago, the city was infested with cemeteries from the centuries. They wanted to build in these places so they decided to move all the bones to the limestone caves outside the city (this part of the city is now within the city limits). It took the clergy 60 years to move 6 million bones and bless them in their new resting spot. The walls are lined with caches with bones stacked up to the ceiling. We became quite desensitized very quickly and began taking silly tourist photos in front of the skulls. (What do you expect from three members of skit team?) The catacombs have 175 miles of tunnels, but only 1 mile is open to the public. The really morbid thing is at the end, they search your bags for stolen bones. I can't believe people actually steal the bones. Do you ever wonder that one day your bones would be on display for tourists? Maybe you should, moo ha ha. It was hard to believe that every skull I saw was a soul. There were so many. You would expect a great New Years' Eve story being in Paris and all, but I was pretty tired that night. It was really cold too and the thought of going back out into the cold and wait for a number countdown in French really didn't appeal to me. Pam and Nate seemed to agree. Either that, or they were fuming internally, ha ha. We watched Finding Nemo instead. The next morning it snowed. Most of the museums are closed so we visited the Pompidou which is the museum of modern art. I've never been to a modern art museum before, but this fulfilled all my expectations. I saw one room that was littered with trash that was supposed to be an exhibit. I did enjoy this one room that was all black and white. We took some surreal pictures in there. We also visited the Sacre Couer which is another church. It's only 125 years old though so it's not nearly as impressive as Notre Dame in that respect. It does look much different than the typical churches you see all over Europe both inside and out.

January 2nd was museum day. We got to the Musee d'Orsay, but the line was a mile long. If you buy a museum pass, you don't have to wait in line to enter the museum. So we spent the extra money and did just that. A one-day museum pass is worth about 3 museum admissions, but if you can save three hours of standing in line, I think that justifies it. You can get a museum pass at most metro stations. I don't think most people know that about museum passes. It's awesome, you just show it to the person who works at the museum entrance and then you get to take cuts in front of everybody. I think that's when the people in front of the line learn about museum passes. Anyways, I saw some Renoir, Van Gogh, and Monet. The most recognizable Van Goghs to me wasn't there. That would be the Starry Night. The second half of the day we went to the Louvre again to see a different wing. This time we saw all the Egyptian artifacts and some Greek ones as well. One thing that's annoying about museums in Paris is that all the captions are in French. I'm not saying it's a fault on their part, it can just be aggravating to want to know more about what you're looking at and then you can't read it. If you happen to see an English tour guide, you could always piggy back there, ha ha. The plus side of this is you can get through the museum really quick since you can't read anything. That night, our friends Patrick Tsai and Sheryl Chow were in town and met us for dinner. They were recently engaged. We walked along the Champs Elysses (which is about 2km) from the Louvre to the Arch du Triomph. We ate at this restaurant called Spicy which is just off the Champ Elysses. If you want a fine French dining experience, you should go there. It's a little pricy though. Maybe they should have called it Pricy instead of Spicy, ha ha. The food isn't all spicy though and the creme broulee is extremely good.

On January 3rd, Pam went home so we took her to the airport. She was flying Air France so there was a long line for security because of the recent terrorist threats. She told me later that first line took 3 1/2 hours and she waited in two more lines after that. All the flights were delayed that day. After that, Nate and I went to Invalides where Napoleon is entombed. It is also the French Army museum. I don't know why there are so many jokes about the French never winning any battle. Napoleon conquered quite a bit. That guy has huge size issues. He rode a smaller horse just so he could look bigger. His tomb is enormous. It's hard to believe there is a very tiny man inside that tomb. Even Goliath would have had alot of space in there. But nothing could be bigger than Napoleon's ego. Again, I wish I could have read the captions. Some interesting things in the musuem were the mummified remains of Napoleon's dog and horse. There is also this suit of armor chest plate that has a cannonball hole in it. It went right through some guy. It looked brutal. I wonder if he felt it. Anyways, that was our last full day in Paris. We took lots of pictures on our last day. Even though I spent so much time there, I still wish I could have stayed longer. The plane ride home was long as I mentioned a few weeks earlier. We came into Los Angeles from the north which is weird cuz I usually come in from the east. I saw my old house in Camarillo from the plane. It was really clear that day and I was surprised to see how massive Los Angeles is. There can't be a city that takes up as much space as Los Angeles. It may not be very tall, but it is very broad. I just saw a grid that spread to infinity. Normally the smog blocks it after 5 miles or so (or even less). Anyways, I like living in a city, but I'm not so sure I have to live in a city this big. In comparison, Paris is only about 8 miles wide. Another observation I made while in Paris was that every day the sky looked like a painting. I wondered why the sky never looked like that at home, then I realized it's because it's rarely cloudy and it's always smoggy. I have some great desktop wallpapers of France now.

Phew...now I can go back to current events. I had been cut off for the past two weeks. My remote access account didn't become available in time for my business trip so I had no internet access. This little thing would have been great help for my sanity when in the hotel room night after night. The weekend was the worst though. I watched one movie, but then I had no idea what to do with the rest of my time for that weekend. It was too cold to go to the beach and too far from anything else that Florida has to offer. Panama City is known as the Redneck Riviera, ha ha. That's where all the kids from the southern colleges go for their Spring Break. Summer doesn't really start in Florida until about mid-February so I had to work in some pretty cool weather, but not nearly as bad as the Midwest. I could never live there.