[album]http://www.thefreefood.net/photos/album/paris-july-2004/,http://static.flickr.com/14/88621185_dc8e3b7e20_s.jpg,View more…[/album]

Ah, Paris. City of love, city of beauty. City of grime and funky sewer smells all over the place.

OK, so Paris has some olfactory issues sometimes. A lot of the them even, at least compared to London or Rome. I haven’t quite figured out why, but once you get used to it, it doesn’t much matter. You just sort of put up with the odd whiffs and keep walking.

It doesn’t matter how much you walk in a city like Paris. You will always find ways to walk more. Yes, you can take the bus, or the Metro, but you don’t do that. You walk until your feet swell.

Also, no matter how many pictures you take of the Eiffel Tower, you will feel compelled to take more. It doesn’t even matter if they all come out blurry and crummy. You won’t care. With 800 pictures of the Eiffel Tower under your belt, you’ll be able to sufficiently overwhelm anyone who wants to see your pictures that they won’t care that roughly 784 of those pictures are indistinguishable.

That said, I think that my pictures of Paris are pretty decent. My Rome pictures are probably better, largely because I had more time on my own to take pictures. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

One of the fortunate things about this trip was that it coincided with the end of the Tour de France. We got to see Lance Armstrong in Paris just before he claimed his record sixth Tour win. That was cool. What might have been even cooler, though I didn’t get pictures, were the people from all over the world turned out to see it, including the wonderful Texans who climbed in trees and hooted and hollered while waving American flags. American diplomacy at its finest.

And then there’s all the art. You can try to take pictures of good art, but it just doesn’t do it justice. All I can say is go to the Musée d’Orsay if you ever get a chance. Oh yeah, and the Louvre is cool too.

Anyway, enjoy the pictures. It may be a biased, touristy, incomplete picture of the City of Love, but it’s the best biased, touristy, incomplete picture I could come up with.

Posted on October 2nd, 2004 by Lee
Filed under: Uncategorized