Our first full day in Paris! Ah, what a joy to wake up in our tiny room and still be stumped by the design of the shower. Stupid, stupid French shower! After we’re done, the floor looks like a pool. I guess if we wanted precision engineering, we’d have gone to Germany.
We probably didn’t mention the toilets yet – those are actually pretty clever. There’s two buttons for flushing… one for if you peed, the other for if you pooped. The buttons produce different amounts of water. Pretty eco-friendly. Why aren’t we doing this back home?
Mission #1 – get a new watch.
The one we bought from the wandering African peddler a couple days ago has proven to be a total piece of crap. Shocker! Every day it gets slower. Soon it will be running backwards. Lucky for us, there’s a watch store right next to the hotel. Even though the saleslady understands that we want the cheapest digital watch they’ve got, and that we are planning on throwing it in the trash as soon as we get home, she still makes a big production of packing the one we buy in a special zip-up storage case and elaborately signing the proof of purchase section of the warranty card.
 My sexy new watch |
Mission #2 – get a new camera.
The waitress at Breakfast in America recommended a big store called “FNAC”, which seems to be a higher end Best Buy. Even though we’ve got pretty good directions, we can’t find the place. Why not? Because it’s underground – you enter through the subway station! Don’t ask why. No answer could possibly make sense, that’s why we didn’t ask. Once inside, the cameras can wait. First we gotta see what THE SHIELD DVD box sets look like in French. We were hoping that on the covers, Michael Chiklis might be wearing a beret, or perhaps have on a striped shirt and be threatening some perp with a baguette instead of his Desert Eagle hand-cannon. Alas, they look a lot like the American boxes do. I was thinking of getting one for the fun of it, but the regional encoding means we couldn’t play the DVDs back in the States. Plus, they’re way more expensive in Euros.
None of the salesguys spoke English, so we managed to muddle through the tale of why we needed a camera using our extensive mime techniques. We wound up with a new Nikon Coolpix, which we tricked out with a 2 gig storage card. We’re not missing the old camera at all – as Katie compassionately said, “it sucked anyway”. The salesman asked which color we wanted and, of course, Katie wanted the “rosé” (pink actually). The salesman looked at Jordan and just shook his head. Poor guy, must be married.
Back at the hotel, Katie’s ready to be a tourist, but all Jordan wants to do is read the camera manual. To thine own self be true, right? The camera has many cool functions that Katies doesn’t care about, so we’ll figure them out on the road. After a quick lunch, we’re off.
Mission #3 – find a tour bus.
Visiting the most amazing city in the world but don’t know the geography at all? Not sure which monuments are worth actually entering? Then get your bearings on a tour bus! Brilliant idea by Katie. We jumped onboard at the Louvre.
 Jordan at the Louvre |
The “L’Open Tour Bus” company has a fleet of double-decker buses that we’ve been seeing everywhere. The upper deck has no roof, so you can cruise around in the sunshine with a full 360-degree view of all the sites. They give you a pair of cheap headphones when you buy a ticket, and you plug it next to your seat, select your language from the panel (each button is marked by the flag of a different country), and the pre-recorded tour tells you all about what you’re seeing.
Of course, we choose to hear English, but you can’t choose English, you have to choose “Britain” to hear English. And the voice clearly has a British accent. Whatever, we only saved your country from the Germans and named some of our best food after you. No problem. It’s fine there is not an American flag to choose from. We get it.
 on the bus |
 Arc De Triumph - built by an angry little midget |
 yeah, that's the Eiffel Tower behind us! |
You can get on or off the bus at any of their stops, and buses arrive at each stop every 10 minutes. It’s actually a pretty great system. We rode around for about 3 hours and we saw tons of stuff. The company runs 3 other routes, so we converted our 1-day tickets into 2-day tickets with plans to ride the remaining routes the next day.
Jordan wants to point out that he ordered our dinner baguette sandwiches in French for the entire conversation (including saying “Coca Cola Light” instead of “Diet Coke”). Way to go, Jordan!
Riding on a bus all day is tough work. We were a little beat. Sitting around J-le-P for the last 4 days hadn’t gotten used to the tough schedule that young tourists must maintain in Paris. We needed a break, so we decided to see a movie. Our bus let us off in a slightly sketchy area near one of the train stations, far away from our hotel, so we knew it was subway time. You readers may not know that Katie is the Queen Of Public Transportation (“QOPT”, for short). Language is not an obstacle for the Queen. Any city, any language, and she will get you from point A to point B – even if there are transfers!
We got a local magazine and found listings for films in “version originale” – meaning, movies shown in their original language (not dubbed into French). We decided to see INDIANA JONES 4 at the Bibliotheque Nationale, which our guidebook said had a good modern theater. Off we went, with the QOPT leading the way. Unfortunately we read the listing wrong and arrived 90 minutes early, so we went to a nearby café for dinner.
It is at this very café that a momentous event took place:
We finally found chocolate mousse in France.
We also had good pizzas and beer and chatted with a really interesting Australian named Nick, who spoke a bunch of languages and was teaching at the Sorbonne while pursuing a comparative literature degree.
INDY 4 was pretty bad. The print wasn’t great, nor the projection, which didn’t help, but the movie never grabbed us and was frankly disappointing. The big reveals were given away at the beginning of the movie. The part with the ants was pretty good, but otherwise, it was a snoozer.
