September 4-6, 2006: Paris!

After the first couple of days in London, I went to Paris, and my buddy went to Belfast in Northern Ireland. My plan from this point was to hit up various spots around Europe by train. I had 6 days to see what I wanted, starting in Paris. Naturally I wanted to spend time in Paris, so I did! I arrived at Republique Square in Paris around twilight on Monday the 4th, and left in the morning of the 6th.

Upon my arrival at the hostel near Republique Square, I met two of the chicks with whom I was to be spending the night (4-bed mixed dorm room). They were from England and Scotland and invited me out to dinner, where I had the best roast chicken I've ever had (albeit a little expensive). Shortly afterwards I -- despite the best attempts of the traffic and general riffraff outside -- fell asleep on the uncomfortable bunk bed which smelled of cigarette smoke.

The next morning I had no particular plan and decided to check out the area I had landed myself into. The weather was great! About 25 degrees or so, sunny, and comfortable.

The first remarkable feature I encountered was the Canal St-Martin. These are pics of it at various spots. The water was not really particularly pleasant looking stuff. The canal itself was a pretty decent feature though, as I followed it from pretty quiet early morning areas with people sitting around doing nothing to a pretty busy area near Gare de l'est.

I saw this and just had to take a picture. At first I thought it was a blue André the Giant stencil, but later I started to think, maybe it's Erik Estrada! Or, maybe it's just some political character or something. Who knows. This was taken above the trains coming out of Gare de l'est.

Also included is a photo of Estrada himself!

Later that day I visited the Eiffel tower, of course! What else would I do as a tourist in Paris! These were taken at the touristy grounds around the Eiffel tower and at the Place du Trocadero, which sort of overlooks the Tower.

After the Eiffel tower, I went to the Arc de Triomphe and the Champs Elysées. I didn't really get a great picture of the Arc. While I was taking the first one, right up close, a guy wandered right on in and I didn't even notice. So, he's a permanent part of the picture -- and my memories -- now. He almost looks photoshopped on. The next one was taken from the middle of the road down the Champs Elysées a little bit.

This was the Place de la Concorde at the other end of the Champs Elysées. Some interesting architecture, plenty of traffic, etc. The first pic was taken from the same spot in the middle of the road as the other one of the Arc above, but facing the opposite direction: There wasn't a lot of room to stand between the traffic, which was screaming by literally inches away on all directions. It was crazy.

Let me tell you about The Green Street Cleaning Machine. This friendly device kept chasing me down wherever I went! I took two pictures of it while it was spinning around at me, but while I was trying to take pictures of fountains and stuff at Concorde it kept coming at me with the intent to kill or at least destroy me. In fact, if you look closely in a couple of the other photos, you can see it in the distance, like an elephant trying to hide behind a tree, patiently waiting for its prey -- me -- to come closer so it could play its little cat-and-mouse game with me.

Hehehe. Pee joke.

These were taken outside the Louvre, which was closed. It started getting too dark to get any photos after this.

This blurry night photo shows the view from my hostel room. My instructions for finding the hostel were "Look for the 'HOSTEL' sign across the street from 'Mac Donald's'".

Finally, the next morning I took off by train to Stuttgart, Germany. I'm not sure why I chose Stuttgart -- most likely due to my ability to go north from there -- but München (Munich) would probably have been a better choice, as I've heard good things about it. Stuttgart was nice too, as you will see in my next post!

These four photos were all taken in France: The train station, the train, and two photos from the train between Paris and Strasbourg.

I've uploaded the full set of Paris photos to my photo album.