Paris Megapost

Hi! I have a cold, so I've decided to stay in the hostel today and get some downtime... blog a little and maybe play some poker.

I like Paris. The people here are way friendlier than the stereotype. If you put a little effort in (just a "Bonjour, parlez vous Anglais?" and a "Merci" afterwards are fine) then nobody gets annoyed at the language barrier at all. The city is a bit dirty, but it's easy to get around and easy to get what you want. I love that there are little fruit shops dotted all around the city. You can buy fresh fruit like one street away from the Eiffel Tower.

The hostel is a little cramped, but the location is nice and everyone here is very friendly. The tiny common area almost forces people to interact. I've been hanging out with an Australian girl called Keira, who's just been on exchange for 6 months in Montreal and can speak a little French, and two young English girls (both 18, I think) called Lindsey and Kathryn, who are a lot of fun. But really everyone in the hostel is happy to hang out with everyone else. This is the common room:



Notable things that happened so far: I ran into a couple of guys from Canada who play poker for a living (small stakes NL) and recognised my nick from 2+2. We then tried very hard to not talk about poker for the rest of the night. Also, at a karaoke bar near here I paid 8 euro ($A 16) for a pint of Heineken, which would have to be the most I've ever paid for a beer.

Here's Paris so far in photos. The first place I went was the Arc de Triomphe. It's hard to get a sense of scale in the photos, but if you look closely at the top, there are people standing up there which will give you a idea of the size of it. I've just learnt via Wikipedia that it's large enough that at the celebrations for the end of WW1, someone flew a biplane through it:






To get to the top of the Arc, you have to climb a ton of stairs. I believe this is in order to keep fat Americans off their national monument:



From the top of the Arc, I got my first look at the Eiffel Tower:



This is looking out towards Montmartre, where I'm staying. The large building is the Sacre Coeur.



Out along the Champs Elysee... the big building at the end is the Louvre.




The Champs Elysee continues on the other side of the Arc, but is then called the Avenue de la Grand Armee. It actually leads away from central Paris, despite Paris's big high-rise district, called La Defense, which is located at the end.




Next up was the Eiffel Tower:







This photo should need no caption. This is only a few streets from the hostel:



Yesterday I went to the Louvre. Here's some photos of the complex. I don't have any photos from the inside, because most of the things you want to take photos of, you aren't allowed to. I think the painting I enjoyed most was Raft of the Medusa by Gericault, thanks to the extensive discussion of it in a book Stu loaned me. The girl to the left of shot in the last pic is Keira:






After spending a lot of time in the Louvre, we wandered a little way down the Champs Elysee:




That's all I got. Now I'm going to try to book my ticket to Dijon and then play some poker.