Musée du Louvre, Paris

Part Five: Paris, France #2

For breakfast, Teri and I tried a couple cafés in Montparnasse for the first couple mornings. It seemed to be the same breakfast everywhere: croissant ou tartine (baguette with jam), fruit pressés (fancy name for orange juice), et café (espresso). The next couple mornings we stopped at a boulangerie and picked up a pain au chocolat. I could learn to live like this. Easy.



We did a lot of walking (and shopping), and managed to pack an extraordinary amount of activities into each day.









These carousels were everywhere in Paris:



Also everywhere was the Olympic bid logo, Paris 2012. Its gaudiness kind of took away from the charm of the buildings. (After all that effort, Paris lost to London.)



One day we took a day trip to Versailles. We, uh, wandered around the grounds of the Chateau de Versailles, but didn't pay the 20 euros to go inside.





There were almost as many tourists here as there were in Bruges.





We soon left and walked back into the town.



They had nice fruit:

Part Four: Paris, France

Paris. What can I say? I really liked Brussels, Bruges, and especially Amsterdam, but...there's something about Paris. Until I arrived there I'd been travelling solo, and though I met lots of interesting people this way, I was quite excited to meet up with Teri (who also blogged about our trip, here and here) and her cousin Panagiotis.

On our first afternoon Panagiotis, our skilled tour guide, drove us around the entire city. What an introduction to Paris! We basically saw all the famous sights in that first night. Through the car window:



We stopped at a park. My memory fails me; this was probably Place du Luxembourg or the Jardin des Tuileries:



Soteria & Panagiotis:



Evening was falling...





Not a great angle, but an example of some of the gorgeous apartment buildings in Paris. How much would I love to have such a balcony, with the black iron railing, overlooking a Parisian park? Well, a lot.



We had dinner at Café Parisiann, which turned out, to our disappointment, to specialize in American-style food. I guess we should have been tipped off by the name. We redeemed ourselves, however, by going for a chocolat at Les Deux Magots, a café famous for the patronage of the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Hemingway, and Picasso. We sat on the terrasse and watched what was happening on St. Germain.



That night we sampled a couple Paris clubs in the area of La Bastille.



The next day we took a tour on one of the bateaux-mouches, tour boats that go along La Seine. We had one of the many views of the Eiffel Tower that were to come:





Later that day, L'Arc du Triomphe:



And the Champs-Elysée:



After lots of walking, we stopped to refuel:



Back on the street, things looked pretty in the twilight:









Lido!



We didn't actually go to Lido, but to a cinema next door where we saw Lemming, a David Lynch-esque French film. When we came back outside after the movie, there was a street party in progress. Apparently someone had won a soccer game:



Our taxi driver on the way home to Montparnasse was impressed with Panayiotis' multilingualness (English, French, and Greek); he turned out to be a Greek in Paris too.

To be continued...

Part Three: Amsterdam, Netherlands

The truth is that I had been getting nervous about going to Amsterdam alone. If one more person had expressed incredulity at the fact, or told me that they would never go to Amsterdam by themselves, I might have cancelled that leg of the trip altogether. So as the train pulled into Central Station I was a little on edge, double-checking that my money belt was safely in place. Once I had navigated through the crowds in the station, bought a map, and found myself on Damrak, though, I knew I'd be fine. The Damrak reminded me vaguely of Yonge Street in Toronto; Amsterdam was just a big city like any other, I thought. Since living in Toronto I find that I'm most comfortable in big cities with lots of people bustling around me, perhaps a bit strange considering I grew up in Fredericton (emphatically not a big city).

The thing I love most about exploring new cities is really learning my way around: studying the map until I can leave it behind, relying only on my sense of direction. There's something liberating about the first time you set out in a new city without a map in your bag. This task was especially interesting in Amsterdam, where the city centre is laid out in a ring with three canals nested inside of one another. If you're used to orienting yourself by large streets that are roughly straight, like I am, it can be a bit of a jolt to realize you've been going around in a circle. I must confess that I got a wee bit lost on my first night there, but by the end of my time there I was giving directions to new tourists. I get asked for directions fairly often no matter what city I'm in. I suspect it's because I don't look very threatening and have a (bad?) habit of looking people in the eye, making me approachable. I used to joke that the city of Toronto should pay me to wander around and give directions to confused tourists.

This was the first time I've really been completely surrounded by a language of which I had absolutely no comprehension. At first people seemed to intuitively speak to me in English, but by the end of my stay I was getting regularly approached in Dutch, and I liked to think it was because I'd begun to fit in. I kept hearing the same phrase when I entered shops, and something sounding vaguely like "helppen" clued me in.

The Damrak:



Once I found my hostel I navigated my backpack up one of the narrow, winding staircases that are so common in Amsterdam. I later learned that most houses have hooks built into the front of the roof for moving furniture, since not much can fit up those staircases. Here's my hostel, tucked into an alleyway as are most things in Amsterdam:



I'd barely taken off my backpack when I met a girl from Portland who'd been studying in Amsterdam. She was kind enough to show me around a bit, and so we set off again. At a coffeeshop, where I was drinking coffee, a new friend with no inhibitions whatsoever crawled up into my lap:



Afterwards we got Indonesian take-out food, which was very tasty, and ate by one of the many canals:





The next morning I went on a canal cruise with a girl from Poland I also met at the hostel. I discovered that shooting through fingerprinted windows doesn't make for great photography. Here you can at least see one of the houseboats:



And a cool-looking building...



So, there are lots and lots of bicycles in Amsterdam. And absolutely no one wears a helmet. My mother would have been appalled.







Aww, look, they're a couple:



Bikes in Vondel Park:



And then there was the food. I really liked stroopwafelen and siroopwafelen, which are basically two thin waffle wafers with sweet gooey syrup in the middle, as well as dropje, Dutch licorice. A Dutch bakery (with bike, of course):



I also tried Dutch pancakes (apple and cinnamon!) at a pannekoekenhuis (pancake house), where they had powdered sugar and syrup in mass quantities:



In every city I seem to find one funky, comfortable neighbourhood that I fall in love with. In Toronto it was the Annex, in Montreal it's the Plateau, and in Victoria it's Cook Street Village. In Amsterdam, it was the Jordaan. "Gezelligste" is an apparently untranslatable Dutch word that roughly means something between "cozy" and "kitsch." Here's the Jordaan Cafe, which had a lot of gezelligste:



And a view of the street from inside the cafe (notice that people even talk on their cell phones while riding bikes):



Not terribly interesting from the outside, but this is the Anne Frank house. I did visit several museums and such while I was there, they just weren't as fun to photograph. I especially enjoyed the Van Gogh museum though. The World Press Photo exhibition also happened to be in Amsterdam; it was absolutely amazing and horrifying.



More scenery (I couldn't seem to stop taking photos of canals):









Chairs outside a thrift shop near Waterlooplein market:



The panoramic view from the cafe on the top floor of Metz & Co, a department store:



And back on the Damrak...



And when the excesses of Amsterdam started to become just a bit too much, it was on to Paris...