on the agenda this morning was a walk down the champs elysee, starting at the arc de triumphe and ending down at the louvre. if its good enough for david reyne its good enough for us. the arc de triumphe was unexpectedly damn impressive, and then down on the champs elysee we were hungry for breakfast so we did the obligatory thing of taking a table on the champs elysee for some ridiculously inflated food and drink. i think we figured that if we went to one of the cheaper croissanterie franchises that we might not get stung as much, but our croissants and coffees came to something like 20 euros. pretty freaking ridiculous, considering that the champs elysee is kind of pretty but really is just a glorified shopping strip complete with the same mcdonalds, the same h&m, the same stores you see on any major shopping strip in any city. i mean louis vuitton is there but hey, its more or less just an upmarket bourke street, oxford street whatever. it aint fifth avenue, but you know, fifth avenue is just a freaking shopping strip too. these places are NOT tourist destinations people, or at least maybe they shouldn't be. its like times square - its somewhere you think you have to go, and really if you are in new york you do have to go there, but you sure as hell don't hang out there because its kind of a hole.
anyway our walk concluded, as we had predicted so astutely, at the old louvre which is apparently some kind of museum that i think is owned by tom hanks, where albinos get in for free, and the only painting they have is the mona lisa. basically they say that the louvre has some kind of historical significance but both you and i know that its just a movie set that hollywood producers built a couple of years ago to film the da vinci code. we started our louvre adventure with a glass of wine to steady the nerves while we took in the floor plan and tried to figure out where the hell to start and what the hell we wanted to actually see in this crazy labyrinthian maze of real 'art' art. we saw some ancient egypt stuff and the statue of david, some renaissance paintings (yeah just a few) and obviously we couldn't avoid the mona lisa because every sign in the louvre points to it. i guess there are two categories of people, you either think seeing mona lisa is some kind of spiritual experience or you are completely underwhelmed and just basically don't get what the big deal is. you can guess which category i fall into. we went to see napoleon's apartments where we discovered that napoleon had neither a sound system or a plasma tv in any of his apartments, and that they were not open plan and did not have ducted heating.
we were again looking to picnic in the evening, the whole baguette and cheese thing proving to be too tempting to pass up given that we were in paris. paris! we headed for montmartre, a wonderful hill with wonderful views of paris, and at the top the sacre coeur. the hill was green with grass, though you could barely see it for all the people having their picnics up there. as the sun went down we realised that the hill was a meeting point for the city's young hipsters and bogans alike, meeting up for a nibble and a catch-up before hitting the town for a big friday night. the people next to us had a birthday cake for it was someone's birthday. at one point everyone got kicked out of the park by an angry guard with a whistle because it was closing time. he appeared at the top of the hill and gradually shooed everyone to the bottom. to get back to the sacre coeur (and the patches of grass that were not yet closed) we had to climb back up again. why on earth he didn't shoo people out the top makes no sense to us even now. we watched the sun go down and the lights come on. we had a bottle of wine. we went into the sacre coeur for their evening mass, sitting in for a good half an hour of a service listening to a priest speak in a language we didn't understand, just taking in the sound of his voice reverberating around the church, taking in all its glory et cetera.
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