Gay Paris!

Well, Christian and I just spent 36 hours in Paris!

It was crazy and lovely, and it smells like PEE...not everywhere...but it's certainly a smell that you notice more often than in other cities.
 
It was a real treat to speak some more French. We took a bus tour that allowed us to get on and off. ( highly recommend that!) I went to Notre Dame Cathedral for a look around. ( Limey was not into the crowds) We skipped the Louvre as the line-ups are ridiculous....Though I did have a tour around the Salvador Dali museum and that was VERY cool. I thought his water color illustrations of the bible were cool and his bronze cast sculptures AMAZING!!!
 
We did a ton of walking....which included paying 4Euros to climb the narrowest spiral staircase ( that smelled like pee) to the top of  Eglise Sacre Coeur that overlooks all of Paris! Beautiful! It took me forever to get down as my knee had been pushed past its limit by that point. ( Maybe the French piss in the streets because you have to PAY to use most public washrooms? I slipped into a chi-chi restaurant to use the washroom and got SERIOUS FRENCH ATTITUDE from the waiter on the way out. He walked me to the door saying, "Merci, ehn, Merci beaucoup!", in a tone that was dripping with sarcasm. I pretended to be American.)
 
We went out for a nice dinner. We had Chinese food....because that's what one does in Paris - goes for Chinese! It shouldn't have surprised me - but it was odd to be in a Chinese restaurant where they were all speaking French....( you can take the girl out of Alberta...)
 
We tried to visit the Catacombs...but they were closed...SO - instead, we went to some huge, Gothic looking cemetery where Jean Paul Satre and Simone deBouvier are burried. That was cool! I will have to try to post some of those pictures....because, YES, Christian and I were disrepectful enough to set up his digital camera to take our pictures as we eached leaned out the doors of side by side sepulchers! Possibly the COOLEST thing that we saw in the cemetery came as a complete suprise. Sandwiched in amongst row, upon row of gothic - Buffy - the -Vampire-Slayer graves was a GIANT white-tiled, mosaic CAT!!! Seriously! It had one giant paw up in the air and had a random scattering of red and yellow mosaic flowers all over it's body...and across it's belly, in blue tiles it said, " Ricardo". There was a little plaque that said, " Our dear friend, Ricardo, who died too young."
Now, again....I don't want to be one to show too many of my Alberta colors...but I would be willing to put money on Ricardo having been one hell of a DELIGHTFUL gay man in his lifetime! More people should put such creativity into their tomb stones!
 
Saw all the other tourist sights...The Eiffel Tower, L'arc du Triomphe...a bunch of fountains....and got ourselves home in time for me to repack my bag and hit the sack in preparation for taking off to Scotland the next morning! PHEW!
 
Next up: Edinburough, Arbroath and a Scottish hen-party......