Our final day in Paris!

The final day of vacation is always bitter sweet, but this time is more so than ever! OUI!!!

It is just passed midnight here in the 10th Arr. in northeast Paris, as I sit in my 6th floor apartment loft's round bed under the vaulted ceiling skylights that show through the bitter cold clear night the light of the top of the Eiffel Tower. As I peer through the skylight and watch the lighthouse-like beacon on the top of the Eiffel shinning across the city, across the chimney crowded rooftops, I ponder how a nine day get away went by so fast, and all that had transpired since we left Seattle the day after Christmas.
- Engagement at the Eiffel Tour on Tuesday...Noel said yes as the tour sparkled at sunset!
- Went up Eiffel Tower for the first time, to get off my bucket list since I had been to Paris 4 times below and refused...this on Wednesday...gulp...it was hazy but beautiful.

- Join birthday dinner for Heidi and Noel at Au Pied de Cochon on Wednesday...yum! - Surprise LIDO cabaret on the Champs-Elysees for Noel's 40th on Wednesday!

- Party at the Eiffel Tower in the 8th Arr. with the gang at Jo and Wes' hotel to ring in the New Year on Thursday!

- Under the Eiffel Tower with a bottle of Vueve Clicquot and love ones to welcome a NEW DECADE 12:01am Friday!

- Got locked in Pere Lachaise cemetary on New Years Day after dusk with the Spletzers...spooky and delicious!
- Had lunch at Cafe Deux Moulins, the restaurant from Amelie in Montmatre on Saturday! So fun!!!

- Amazing dinner at Robert & Louis' in the Marais for the Spletzers wedding present from Noel and I, and then in turn they bought a bottle of bubbly to celebrate our engagement, and last had Chip and Gordon from Chicago join us on Saturday!
- Ate at Marie Antoinette's farm in Versailles for lunch then had the most amazing Jewish falaffels in the Marais for dinner on Sunday!

- Saw some of my favorite artists throughout the week in some of my favorite museums! WOW!


Our final day started with with many disappointments since we all split up and found that nothing transpired. Heidi attempted her favorite craft store but it was closed on Mondays. Noel went to Julia Child's cookware store but it was closed for inventory. Andy went to the Paris catacombs but they were randomly closed with no explaination. As for Lori and I, we were to meet Noel at Les Halles mall to shop H&M and Zara among others before heading off to the museum. Well we found Noel but H&M was half empty and Zara had no mens...oh well.

We went to the Centre Pompidou at 11am when it opened. Outside of the amazing Orsay and Orangerie this is definitely some of my favorites since it is the modern museum housing Surrealism, Dadaism, Cubism, etc. Yes, I saw my Magritte, and Ledger, and Matisse, and Dali, and Picasso, and Delauney, and Ernst! Ahhh...LOVE!!! That was the 5th floor. The the 4th floor was art from the 1960's till today...and what an amazing modern collection of multi media, movies, fontography, and such. Finally the top floor, the 6th, had a special Surrealism in Photography exhibit which was amazing, along with a current French painter Solanges who is known for his black on black huge oils.

After art, Noel, Lori and I met up with Heidi and we all went to see Galeries Lafayette and Printemps. Lovely stores! Lafayette Gourmand floor was as amazing as London's Harrod's Food Hall. Heidi then went home to meet up with Andy and the three of us watched the sun set on Place Concorde and saw the Champs ferris wheel, Concorde obilisque and Eiffel Tower in the distance all glow before us. WOW!!! JE T'AIME PARIS!!! Once the sun set we were off to hit the rest of Noel's chocolate shops on his bucket list...so to the 7th Arr. we went...Latin Quarter. We actually found them, one with carved chocolate statutes from Rodin to Raphael's angels, and the other with a huge chocolate volcano and trees. What an art form. The first was famous for their Maker's Mark filled chocolate in which we partook.

Once home we all at what was left in the fridge: lots of cheese, fruit, champagne, pate, cornichons, tomatoes and the warm baguette we got on the way home. What a terrible dinner (NOT!) and then ended with many peices of different chocolates.

Time for sleepy now...must get up in 6 hours (though we have a 9 hour flight to sleep if need be). The flight back is weird, unlike coming to Paris where we lost a day, on the way back we leave at 11am and get to Seattle at the same time (9 hour flight, and 9 hour time change)...so odd!

One more look at the Eiffel Tower and then off to dream land in this beautiful city that I cannot wait to come back to already.

AU REVOIR PARIS! JE T'ADORE!

Dimanche 3 Decembre 2010 PARIS!

We (Noel, Lori and I) had a wonderful day at Chateau Versaille. If you are totally ignorant to french culture, this is the palace in which may King Louis' presided, Louis XIV "The Sun King" being one of them along with Marie Antoinette, being a couple of famous personalities. The day was clear and sunny but only a high of 32F...BRRRR! We walked the palace and the gardens and all was wonderful. We lunched in deep in the gardens where Marie Antoinette had her get away place from the palace. It was so cold all the fountains and ponds were frozen over...poor swans.

We were back in town by 3pm and bee-lined to the Musee de L'Orangerie in the Tuileries to see Monet's water lillies in the Nyphees. GORGEOUS! I had seen them in 1991 and 1993, but it had been too long, and Lori and Noel were water lillies vigins. The colection down stairs in the same place was lovely too...tons of Cezannes, Renoirs, Rousseaus, Picassos and more. Lori then went off to a boat cruise and the Spletzers met up with Noel and I at the museum. The four of us went back to our favorite place in the Marais, L'As de la Falaffel. The Jewish district is so fun and the falaffels are to die for! (not to mention the hot Israeli boys that work there). We all went home and had Jewish desserts from their boulangerie and wine...of course more wine!!!

The 2nd day of the decade

This was one amazing day in Paris!

The five of us went off to the flea markets in the north and once passing all the Turkish stands of rip off Nikes and North Face, got to the French antiques. What a beautiful (huge) collection of Art Deco, Art Nouveau and Romantic period furniture, chandeliers, art, sculptures, and more. We saw 200k euro huge chandeliers that were incredible. As we walked around it starting snowing, it was around -3 C / 28 F, so we peeked into a cafe for our favorite "vin chaud" and it was extra yummy! (mulled red wine, orange slice, cloves, cinnamon and sugar).

By 1pm we met Jo and Wes at the Moulin Rouge in Montmatre. Love the sex shops at the base of the mountain. The 7 of us went on our self guided AMELIE tour, and ended up at the restaurant where it all happened "Le Deux Moulins". Lunch was a blast! The best french onion soup ever! Lori and I reinacted the bathroom scene between the Pharmacist and the ex-boyfriend through the frosted "toilette" window! Hilarious! Then we all continued on the Amelie tour seeing all the places where the movie was filmed, and ended up at the beaufiful Sacred Coeur at the top of Montmartre. Lovely. It stared snowing a little again, and what a view of Paris from there.

We all went home and rested.

Lori went to the Winter Circus at night, and Heidi, Andy, Noel and I met up with Chip and Gordon and had an amazing dinner in the Marais at Robert et Louise. The dinner was a wedding present to the Spletzers...but then they inturned got a a bottle of wine to toast Noel and my engagement which was so sweet! We had a table right near, or more so in, the kitchen where we watched them cook or beef and lamb in the fireplace. So cool...and yummy! The 6 of us went for a night cap (or two) in the Marais a couple blocks aways and hung with all the Parisien crowd trying to blend in on a Saturday night. The we bid adue to Chip and Gordon and walked the 12 blocks home north to the 10th again.

Ahhhh....what a great day! Tomorrow off to Versaille! OUI!!!

First day of the new decade: 2010

Bon jour mes amis!

Wow...we have had such an amazing whirl wind Paris trip, Noel, I, Lori, Heidi and Andy all living in the 10th arrondisment. Noel and I got engaged under the Eiffel Tour on Tuesday night the 29th. Heidi and Noel had there bday on Wednesday the 30th, and we had a great time (Heidi having an amazing private French lunch and Noel up in the Eiffel Tower and Musee Rodin) then dinner at Au Pied de Cochon and a cabaret show at the LIDO on the Champs de l'Essey. The LIDO was an amazing extravaganza of topless dancing girls, and boys, and ice skating and fountain dancing, and circus dancing with a horse, and acrobatics, and Bollywood dancing, and Cabaret the musical and so much more!!! Ooo la la!!! http://www.lido.fr/us/cabaret-paris.html

So a little mixed up, but let me tell ya a little about our first day of the New Year, of the new decade...the teens...in Paris. Tonight we had a lovely dinner party in our apartment with Jo and Wes of Seattle/Vallarta (friends of Eric via Noe) and Chip and Gordon (friends of Noel from Chicago). The 9 of us had an lovely New Years dinner of roasted chicken from the 7th Arr. (on Rue Clair, by the Eiffel Tower), veggie and salami pasta, different french cheeses, and many bottles of Beaujolais Noveau wine. Before our 4 hour dinner in our flat, we came from a couple hours in Pere La Chaise cemetary just northeast of us. It's an amazing historic cemetary from the 1700's up till today, with huge museliums and crypts. We saw the plots of Edith Piaf, Gertrude Stein, Max Ernst, Oscar Wilde, Chopin, and Jim Morrison of the Doors. We missed Ingis, Delacroix, and other artist because the sun was setting and we had to leave. Well...Lori, Noel, Wes and Jo went one way and met at a cafe outside, but Andy, Heidi and I went the other direction (this place is HUGE!), and ended up getting locked inside the cemetary at 5:45 when the sun sat...and hiked down to the main entrance only to find it was locked. Soon 5 Texans, 2 Italians and a Frenchman met up with us, and for almost an hour we were trapped in the cemetary. It was dark and spooky. The Frenchman called the police and the Texan straight guy say "let's scale the 10 foot wall and save the women". Finally a security guard came and saved us, but before then, I was dropping hints to the Texan girls that this is how horror movies start out...that we were all going to die one by one... HILARIOUS!

Earlier in the day, we all woke up at 1:30pm...shocked...kinda...

We had got home on New Years Eve from partying with Jo and Wes in their hotel by the Eiffel Tour at 5am! YIKES! We had gone to their hotel at 9pm and had cheese and champagne and partied in their room until 11pm then schlept to the Eiffel Tower with all the crowds with Vueve Clicquot in hand. What an amazing experience at the base of the Eiffel Tower it was, all shimmering and bright and with the lighthouse strobe above. How fun it was! Then back to their hotel room to have some Origina and vodka drinks. Chip and Gordon showed up at 1am with a guy they had met at the Trocadero (across the Seign from the tour), and we partied till 2 and decided to all venture out to find a bar open. As we walked we were all kinda over it and found out the Metro subway stopped at 2am...suddenly it was 3am and were were screwed...no metro and no taxis to be found, and we were on the other side of town. We all started walking home hoping to find a taxi. It was 20F degrees, and we found one taxi but they were going to charge us 50 Euros ($75 US) and we needed 2 taxis...so we kept walking. Chip and Gordon walked off to the Marais and the 5 of us kept walking home for 2 hours!!! We got home at 5am and were all DEAD TIRED! Yikes!

Earlier in the day Noel and I went up the Tour Eiffel since we had reserved 9:30am reserved tix. It's such a fabulous experience to go up in the tour! What history, what fun. The visibility wasn't great, but still cool. After we that we went to my favorite place Musee D'Orsay. Love Manet! Monet! Degas! Latrek! Cezzane! After the museum we met everyone near that in Rue Claire which is a beautiful street for shops and restuarants, incredible boulangeries, boucheries, fromageries, cafes, etc. We grocery shopped for the New Year dinner and ate cheese and has coffee. We met some great peeps. This lady in the cheese shop was so cute she ended up selling us on a magnum of champagne along with all the cheese. LOVE PARIS!

The day before? Ok, it's now 1am in the morning and I have too much wine, but...let's see...

We went to Musee Rodin which I love, and now has a Matisse show too. We also went to a couple chocolatiers that Noel was in heaven with. The French ladies were so friggen cute. Parisiens are so lovely.