jOOOe ne suis pas là

Last week, Haleigh and I took a vacation to Paris. The real one. In France. I'm just as surprised as you are.

Full image gallery in chronological order here.

Vacations for us tend to be a rare occurrence. To my shame, I have a hard time detaching from work. On the other hand, with absolutely zero shame, I also have a hard time leaving my hounds behind. Tango is getting older and slower, so every day lost with him hurts. Moby doesn't have separation anxiety per se, but she is very skittish with new situations, so I just hate leaving her in distress.

Did you guys have a good time?

I've fielded this question at least a dozen times today. Yes, of course. I wouldn't say the trip was particularly relaxing though... We averaged ~10 miles of walking per day, and by the last night we just ordered dinner in and went to bed early. Out with a wimper, I suppose.

We timed our arrival so it was early evening by the time we checked into our hotel, so we walked around for a quick bite and then hit the rack early. I've never been jetlagged in my entire life, and this was the 9th country I've visited. IDK if it's universally great advice, but it's always worked for me to immediately get my body clock on local time by staying up until a reasonable local bedtime.

Walking back to our hotel, I snapped a photo of a tourist grabbing a late night crepe. Truly, a sentence I could never have predicted. This trip was a first and fantastic experience walking around with my Leica and dabbling in street photography.

Day One: The Louvre

I don't think I was adequately prepared for how big and overwhelming it was. I also wasn't prepared for how crowds act in museums nowadays. It's extremely weird to see kids and adults alike taking selfies with paintings or just otherwise not being present in the moment at all while documenting everything on their phone. By the end of the week, I found myself not so much observing paintings and sculptures, but watching how others interacted with them.

We spent most of the day looking for the Code of Hammurabi, but what I actually enjoyed the most – both at the Louvre and later at the Musee d'Orsay – was the sculptures. The level of detail and preservation were just insane. I really liked this statue of the labors of Hercules, and tried a slow shutter around it to capture movement of the crowd (because God knows I wasn't going to get an image without people in it, so may as well embrace it creatively).

Sunset initially looked really promising and we knew it was going to rain most of the rest of the week, so we finished the day at the Eiffel Tower, taking the typical tourist shots of the monument. We waited for over an hour for the lights to come on (they shimmer at the top of every hour) and it was cool to see but it didn't really come through in the images very well.

Day Two: Musee d'Orsay

We actually started the day with a quick visit to a library museum one of Haleigh's teacher friends recommended. We were definitely in the right place, but it was definitely not a museum. We walked in, looked around for about 5 minutes, and then walked over to a cafe across the river for some creme brulee and coffee.

We did a bit more exploring on foot for most of the rest of the day. We saw our first of the 107 functional water fountains around the city, the Arc de Triomphe, Champ d'elysée, Pont Alexandre III, and a lot of less remarkable scenes (including the poster image of this post)

The Musee d'Orsay itself was fine. IDK, I'm not a huge museum person, that's more Haleigh's bag. But you can tell in the gallery how tickled I was to watch grown adults taking selfies and portraits of their friends posing with paintings. I just... all I can see is our future as the helpless adults in WALL-E.

There was also a massive line to take a photo in front of the massive clock windows, which evidently are iconic or whatever. Again, I was perfectly content to take an image of the crowd silhouetted in front of the window from across the room.

We rounded out the evening with Souffle for dinner, which was objectively the worst meal we had in France. For Haleigh, it was a texture thing. For me... IDK, it was expensive and I left still hungry. But prior, I discovered the Saint Germaine spritz, which... look, 3 of those and I'll eat whatever shitty souffle you want me to. I think our first sign that this was a tourist trap was that every other group in the restaurant was clearly American. I can't describe exactly why that sullied the experience, but I can only say that it definitely did detract from it.

Day Three: No Plan!

TBC, Haleigh had a plan. But our agenda was deliberately clear so we could call whatever audibles we wanted to. We did a little shopping, but the highlight of my day was – and it causes me near physical pain to admit this as a red blooded American – literally the best cheeseburger I've had in my entire life.

I have several photos dedicated solely to this experience in Le Marais Des Enfants Rouges.

It was just good. Simple ingredients, homemade buns. If a frenchman offers you bread, you say Merci, puis-je en avoir un autre?

We then bought some fancy chocolates and poked around a few more shops before heading up to Montmartre in the afternoon. En route I collected a couple more storefront images, and absolutely loved that the caramel guy waved at me. He doesn't know what a gift that is to have a photo of a Parisian welcoming us. I'm sure he'd deny welcoming so much as soliciting business, but... look at that face. Canonically nice guy. Photographic evidence.

We took a funicular up the hill, whereupon we were treated to a view, and yet another chainlink fence full of locks. Sure enough, people were selling locks there on the spot.

I took a lot of photos of the church and on the street, but the two keepers were:

and

Day Four: Notre Dame + Private Wine Tasting

For our last full day, we did the typical Notre Dame experience. I got yelled at by an usher for taking a photo of a ceremony, but apparently God's judgement did not extend to the 50 people around me with their iPhones out taking pictures AND making noise.

After we explored the church, we had a guided tour around the island. I forget our guide's name (he was nice) but the funniest part was him making an anecdote about how people swam in the Seine during the olympics a couple years ago, but now no one does that because it's dirty.. and at that moment, a column of cops came swimming by on some sort of exercise.

We finished the morning with an architectural tour by river boat. I wish I could say I was creative and anticipated this framing on my own, but... Tour guide literally pointed it out. She wasn't wrong, I love having this image in my gallery :)

We did a quick walkthrough of Sainte Chapelle (was small, maybe 30-45 mins and out), but the stained glass alone was worth the detour.

Finally, we rounded out the trip with a private wine tasting... Hosted by an Englishman named Ollie. You might think "wow how authentic, wouldn't it have been better with a French person?"

IDK, maybe.. but by this point of the trip, I was honestly relieved to be able to speak with someone I shared a mother tongue with without feeling judged for defaulting to English too quickly. I had one experience earlier in the week ordering at a cafe where I made the attempt to order in English, didn't understand a follow-up question, and said (in French) "I'm sorry, I'm an American, I don't understand French that well." Their response will haunt me: *heavy sigh* "It's okay. You tried."

Anyway, the wine was delicious. We had a dry white and ended up taking a bottle of Croze-Hermitage home. The most valuable thing I learned on this trip is my favorite region for French wines is to the SouthEast of France. I asked if my palate leans that way because of my affinity to Italian wines, curious if it was a terroir thing. But Ollie said probably not, wine from there is just the best.

Heckin' Ollie. We wanted to be pen pals by the time we left. Good guy.

In Summary...

We had a fantastic time. We did and saw a ton, just maybe didn't build enough time into the schedule to truly unwind... But I don't think Paris is generally that kind of trip.

Now we're back to the regular grind.