Ridiculously full four days

Again i've not been updating the blog for a little while, so i apologise for that. I do have a fairly good reason - the last couple of days have been fairly packed with doings.


There are four days (including today), but i'll leave out day 3 as it pretty much can be summed up as "Then he rested". I also might have to make this a bit briefer than it deserves if someone else needs to use this internet terminal (only one in the hotel).


Day 1:

We started off by catching the Metro (subway) over to the Eiffel Tower. At first i was quite intimidated by the complexity of the Metro, as it has a vast number of different lines and places you can end up, but after a bit of use it has turned out to be quite simple once you're used to it.


The Eiffel Tower was even more impressive up close than it was from the back of a bus - i took a lot more photographs but i still doubt that any of them will come close to conveying its size and presence. We didn't climb up it, as the lines to do so were staggeringly long, but we did have lunch underneath it on a park bench, which was nice except for being pestered by gypsies and wandered past by police with sub-machine guns - a fairly standard presence throughout Paris.


After lunch we wandered about a kilometre or so up to the Hotel D'Invalides, which was the hospital for injured soldiers in Napoleon's era. It is noteworthy for a number of reasons, but the most obvious is the enormous domed church which is built into it, which houses Napleon's own tomb. We visited the tomb (helpful tourist tip: if you're in Paris and planning to see a number of monuments purchase a museum pass beforehand as it will save money and, more importantly, help you avoid a number of large queues) which was spectacularly ornate. It also houses the tombs for a number of other notable French military figures.


In the Hotel D'Invalides there are also a number of museums. We visited two of them - the World War Museum and the Charles De Gaulle Museum.


The World War Museum was well done, if unexceptional. Probably its most interesting element was that it began its display from 1870 rather than the beginning of the 20th century as most museums simplifiy it to. This is fairly representative of the French view on this, i guess, since that was when their 'German problems' really started.


The surprising highlight of the D'Invalides exhibits was the De Gaulle museum. Unfortunately i don't know much about him, and most of the exhibits were in French, but it was incredibly sophisticated. The display is very new, having only been opened by the French president this February, and the technology and design used is all first rate and incredibly dazzling. The entire place is decorated by an almost holographic light display of De Gaulle which decorates the walls, and you can access information using a number of computer terminals which are controlled simply by gestures. It's quite difficult to describe accurately, but imagine something like Minority Report, where Tom Cruise manipulates a computer using only gestures.


The final visit for the day was the Musèe Rodin. This was a smallish museum devoted entirely to the famous sculptor Rodin. The museum was laid out in an absolutely beautiful way - half the works were displayed in a fairly normal way inside a house, but the other half were distributed throughout a lovely garden that surrounded the house - it was a beautiful, incredibly peaceful way to look at all those incredible works. His two most famous works (which we saw) are The Thinker and The Kiss.


Then we caught the Metro back to our apartment, had a fairly dud dinner (oddly enough, France has been the weak spot for our dining this holiday) and watched the football. The European Cup has been on all week, and we've all been following it closely (and trying not to laugh too much at how poorly France has done).

Day 2:


If day 1 was wonderful then day 2 was incredible. This was the day that we had booked for a World War 1 battlefield tour.


We started off very early and caught the train out to the city of Lille, which is in the north-east of France. We got out there by about seven thirty in the morning and somehow managed to link up with our tour group without falling asleep. We were meeting up with them at one of the two Lille railway stations, and it turned out that other people were also suffering sleep deprivation - there was an accident on a packed escalator which stopped the people at the top from exiting. As people continued coming up from below they began to pile up into one another and some fell over. It was fairly dramatic for a brief moment, and i pulled one woman from out of it, but thankfully someone figured out how to stop the escalator (the stop button being in a completely different place to Australian ones).

After that dramatic little interlude we set off in a small bus for the battlefields. There were 14 of us in the group, and most of the others were Australians, with the others being a Canadian couple.

We drove up the motorway, which meant that we got to our first stop within 45 minutes: the Villez Brettonux memorial to fallen and missing Australian soldiers. The memorial was designed in a a very similar way to the memorial that I had visited for Allied soldiers in Thailand - it turns out that there is a single organisation which coordinates all Allied war cemeteries the world over. This one was larger and a little more ornate, as this was a far more significant spot and represented a far larger loss of life on both sides.

One of the extra details to this memorial was a wall engraved with the names of all those Australians killed or missing during the conflict. We found the name of my great-great-uncle Desmond Webber, who was killed at Pozieres. It was a very strange experience, to reflect upon a family member of mine being born over a hundred years ago, shipping off to that place only to die at an age six years younger than I am now. He couldn't have been too bad, either - he was a sergeant when he died, at age 20.

We inspected a number of the battlefields in that area, and it really helped give a solid feeling for what a bitter, horrifying battle of attrition World War I was. We were standing on what would have been the Allied front line trenches at the start of the war, and less than a mile away we could see a village which was their first objective for the war. It took them more than a year to make that distance, and at the cost of over fifty thousand dead. You can't really appreciate the full horror of attrition war until you see the places and distances it is waged over.

One of the other highlights of the day was the Thiepval Memorial, which is the British memorial for their missing, and only their missing, soldiers from the conflict. It is a brick and marble structure which has each soldier's name engraved in its walls - and as a result, it is huge. Like the Eiffel Tower, but in a more sombering way, it is something which you can only appreciate the scale of if you see it in person.

Our trip back to Paris was relatively uneventful, except that when we got back to Lille to catch our train we went to the wrong train station and found it was shut down completely by police and firefighters. As soon as we realised we were at the wrong station we ran across to the other one, but as we left the first one we heard an explosion, so we assume there was an evacuation because of a suspect package. Fun.

Anyway, we got home safely, watched more football, etc.

Yesterday was a fairly dull day really. Read books, went for a walk, ate at another crappy restaurant. Nothing terribly interesting.

Day 4, aka Today

There was only one major thing about today, but it was fairly major - The Louvre. As the biggest, most famous art gallery in the world we were nervous about how long we might have to line up to get in. The answer was no time at all - our museum passes which we bought a few days ago let us skip all that malarkey, which probably saved us an hour or so.

At times the Louvre reminds you that it used to be a palace - there are some incredibly elaborate ceilings in places - but for the most part it is surprisingly modern in its setup. They have used skylights in a number of places, which is quite nice as it makes it less claustraphobic.

We headed first of all to see the Mona Lisa, mainly because it is the main attraction and we wanted to tick it off the list. While it was very popular we had no problem getting to view it. It is certainly a wonderful painting, but i don't think i would count it as a particular favourite. Still, i can see why people would want to stand and examine it for hours on end.

We spent about 3 hours after that walking about, and got to see a number of important works, including the Venus de Milo. I would definitely recommend The Louvre, but i would recommend research and planning before visiting, as it is so huge that it is easy to get distracted and end up missing a lot of the important works without a plan.

There's a fairly solid chance that this will be my last post before i get back to Australia. It's taken me half the day to write this blog entry because i've had to hop on and off the computer so often, and it's now midnight here. We will be jumping on our plane about seven tomorrow evening, and from there it is going to be a fairly horrible 32 hour or so ordeal until we get back to Canberra. So i suspect my first order of business upon getting back will either be sleep or coffee depending upon the time.

Hope all is well back home, and be seeing you all soon.

Patrick