France

So this Dan. Ela is busy doing photo stuff, so you may catch me doing some blogs here and there. I'm excited to write about our trip to France. So first how the trip came about. It was our ten year anniversary and I wanted to plan something memorable, but Ela was pregnant. It didn't make any sense to head anywhere exciting so I picked Vegas. Ela has never been a fan of Vegas, but I thought we'd have fun and relax. She bought into that idea, but I could tell she never really wanted Vegas. So I talked to my Mom about babysitting while we went somewhere that meant more to our 10 years of marriage than Sin City.  So now that Vegas was off the table, naturally France made the most sense. So I surprised her with the trip. Of course she was really nervous and excited.

So we were lucky to get a direct flight to Paris from SLC on Delta. I was excited to get my own mini TV on the back of the seat but it was one of those old school planes that just had the old TVs on the ceiling of the plane every 8th row or so and mine was incredibly dark. They showed We Bought a Zoo and Larry Crowne. It was all for the best though because it was a red eye and there was zero temptation to stay awake and watch those. (Although I did watch We Bought a Zoo. What can I say, it had Scarlet Jo... er I mean Matt Damon in it.)

Here's a shot of the sun setting on our flight. Night, night.

 When we got there we took a subway to down town Paris. What this photo does not show is me and Ela getting our suitcases stuck in the the little ticket gates. We had to have people put their tickets in and help us push our suitcases through. Hawaiian shirts could not have made us look like bigger tourists. Oh, and Ela did have here giant camera on her to snap this photo.

So after a quick nap at the Marriott Hotel, we started our tour of Paris. I planned for our first day a walking tour of all the best chocolate places in Paris that I had researched in a Paris book.  It took us around the whole city, so we could get a feel of all of Paris while we ate chocolate.

This first place had a fantastic caramel chocolate.

This one had the best macarons ever. Macarons are meringue-based cookies with cream in the middle. I've always hated them until I tried the caramel one here. Holly cow, it's the best thing I've ever eaten.  The mint one was not what we were expecting, it had real mint in it, kind of like eating mint leaves.

This picture is thrown in to show one of my favorite things about Paris. You never see construction. They always cover it up with what looks like a building, or in this case, a sidewalk. They just don't have any eye-sores there, every where you look is another picture.

 A cool monument to Napoleon

 Our third stop on the chocolate tour we decided to stop and eat in their little tea room. We got a pastry, mille feuille, and some hot chocolate.

The hot chocolate was basically a melted bar of chocolate

Here the drip actually hardened on the tip of the tea pot. That was probably my favorite thing we did in France.... well, second favorite.

Ela liked taking pictures of all the cool doors in Paris. Here was one of my favorites.

 This was at the Louvre, which was across the street from our hotel. We actually never went inside the whole trip. It was always my dream to walk up to the Mona Lisa and pretend I didn't know what it was and I blew it. Also of note, we set the camera on timer, I would feel awkward making some poor fella snap a photo of my wife and me making out.

 Bridge over the Seine river that ran right through the center of Paris.

 Louvre again. We found the holy grail just laying right next to it; eternal life for us.

 Our first dinner and wow was it good. Mmmmmmm, I'm thinking of it right now. Ela's steak was like butter. And mouse we had for dessert, mmmmmmmm.

 We caught church while we were there. They had a second chapel that the missionary translated the speaker into English over an intercom. It was funny when the speaker was really old, but we couldn't see him, so we just had this young missionary's voice talking about his grand kids. Sunday school was in English too. Luckily Priesthood was in French so I could try the vast amount of language I learned.

 This is Pompidou square. Hooray for modern art!

 Angela couldn't get enough of the fine art movies inside the Pompidou Center.

These pictures are a little out of order, but whatever. Monday night was our anniversary, so I booked a romantic restaurant called the Royal Paris. It had it's own private courtyard. The night was great, and my favorite was the ceviche appetizer and the grape juice. The grape juice was like $10 a bottle, but it was worth it. 

 Ela has creme brulee inside half a pineapple. Mine was some sort of pastry with cream and caramel, I was sold after they said cream.

So Paris has an awesome bike system. For one euro, you get a bike for 24 hours. It's called Velib, a combination of the word bike and freedom. The racks are everywhere, and you get to pick one up, ride it where you want, and lock it back in the bike rack wherever you go. It's better than having your own bike. They even have a basket and bell.
So this golden dome behind us is the Arms museum, or Napoleon's tomb, I never figured that out.

 Paris at night from the Eiffel tower.

 Arc de Triumph

 This was the coolest site to see, the Sacre Coeur. The inside has a giant painting of Jesus.

 This was down in the crypt. This stain glass window was making the coolest light on this chair and Ela caught it.

The Sacre Coeur had a great view of Paris.

Here's Notre Dame. Rudy was inside with his letterman jacket signing autographs, while the football team played in the back.

The stain glass window was massive.

  

This park was a great place we stumbled across. 

 Ela even got another rest in, while I tried to re-familiarize myself with stuff I learned in Humanities class. I swear this sculpture was called Neptune and his Ladies, but I could be remembering wrong.

 

This was the closest we got to Rodin's 'The Thinker'. I wanted to see this the most, but it was closed both times we went. 

This is the Grand Opera where the play The Phantom of the something or other was based on. It was incredibly lavish.

 Here's Ela doing her own rendition of 'Masquerade' and 'Think of Me' for over 1,000 tourists.

 Because of weather, buying more macarons and the Opera, we missed our train to Nice. We husstled as much as we could though. One more note on the weather, it was perfect, it only rained the days we left town.

Nice had beautiful water, but very rocky beaches.

Ela stayed true to herself and stayed modestly dressed amongst the throngs of others who did not.

 So our first full day in Nice we heard that the famous Cannes film festival was just right next to us and was premiering that night. We thought it would be fun to see the stars and the sandier beaches. We heard that all the stars were staying at the Carlton hotel, so we just walked into the lobby and acted like we knew what we were doing. I ended up chatting with one of the heads of Canadian film for 15 minutes, it was pretty cool. Multiple stars went walking through the lobby and Ela snuck this picture of Alec Baldwin.

 They were setting up this stage to watch movies for the festival. We got such great seats because they actually weren't showing movies to the public until the next day, so we left shortyly after this photo. The movie that headlined the festival was Moonlight Express. It actually opened in all of France that night, so when we went back to Nice, we saw it at a movie theater. It was an enjoyable movie. It came out in the US about a month later.

So you can make fun of Segways all you want, but they are AWESOME! I can't think of a better way to tour a city. They are so much fun and easy to cruise around on the sidewalk. This shot of Nice includes Sean Connery's house over my right shoulder.

 This little town is called St. Paul and it's just outside of Nice.

 Our final dinner was a fantastic pasta place. Nice used to be part of Italy, so it's more like Italy than France. The pasta was great, but this gigantic flan was even better.

 Still room for a couple more macarons at midnight.

 Our hotel had a wonderful breakfast. All types of food and of course croissants. We also grabbed some crepes at one point. I would put France as number 1 for food outside the US, even better than Albania.

And that's the trip. We did get the nice plane on the way back with the TV on the back of the seats and we got to watch multiple good movies. Thanks Mom and everyone else for watching the kids.