Bonne Annee tout le monde!

This was my first New Years away from home, and where better to spend it than in France watching the Eiffel Tower. I am now staying with my friend from UT who is living in Paris for a year. He has a little flat in the East of Paris with his own room and a shared living room and kitchen. We have been going out each day to explore all sides of Paris and see all the big sites. I have been under the Eiffel Tower dozens of times now (but never up it yet because the lines are usually too long), and I have seen it both in the sun and at night when it glows gold and lights up with sparkling lights every hour. It is neat to see as you are walking around town or from underneath where you can feel so small, but there just might be too much hype given to this monument (I saw it for the first time and then that was it, it is just the Eiffle Tower). For New Years, I stood on the steps at Trocadero and watched the Eiffel Tower light up at midnight. It was a little disappointing because there were only tiny fireworks far away, and the Eiffel Tower did not do anything too special, but the energy from everyone around us made the night fun.

Paris is a lively, thriving city, but I think it is way too international and too touristy. I would recommend many other smaller cities over Paris to anyone wanting to visit the real France. In my time here, I have almost forgotten than I am in France. Most of the people I hear around me are speaking a language other than French (usually German or English or Spanish or Arabic) and most of the signs are in English. There are also hundreds of people everywhere, so even intimate places feel like a big tourist attraction.
We visited the Pere Lachaise cemetary which is home to thousands of tombs and dozens of famous graves. I saw Edithe Piaf and I kissed the grave of Oscar Wilde (it is completely covered with red lipstick kisses from fans who saw him as a rebel, jailed for love). The cemetary was huge with it's own street names, and half of it was scattered in the woods with big trees and moss and cliffs while the other half was lined up in rows on flat, trimmed grass. I loved walking through the wooded area past big stone tombs that had grown into a part of the nature around them. I was also a little confused on why some graves were so famous and who was famous enough to get their name on the entrance map. There were plenty of beautiful graves that were much more impressive than most of those of the famous people. The cemetary was also pretty crowded with tourists, which took away from the soulful feeling, but it was beautiful nonetheless and I enjoyed walking through it.

I waited in line in the literally freezing cold for almost 2 hours to enter the Catacombs, but the voyage under Paris was well worth it. For what feels like a mile long trail, the Catacombs is filled with bones and skulls from thousands of bodies transported from old cemetaries around Paris. The bones are stacked perfectly along both sides of the walls up to 6 feet high. The skulls are used to decorate the bone stacks, and they are placed in lines and crosses and other shapes within the other bones. I only wondered where all the little bones were (like the fingers and toes) because all you could see were large leg-like bones.

I visited the Sacre Coeur at night, a multi-domed cathedral that looks like it should be found in India. It is at the top of a steep hill with hundreds of steps to reach the top, so I was winded while staring up at its walls. The neighborhood around it was very peaceful with a lively center with restaurants and street artists entertaining the night crowd. The Sacre Coeur is close to the Moulin Rouge, and apparently it was built there to purify the area a little. The Moulin Rouge itself was not super impressive, filled with lights and its little windmill, but the area around it was exciting. The only time you should go to this area is late at night, otherwise you miss the lights and prostitutes.

Notre Dame was another beautiful place spoiled by hundreds of tourists. The outside is beautifully carved with stone figures, and the inside ceiling stretches infinitely into the sky. I went on a Sunday evening, at the start of a mass, so I got to hear the room echo from the organ. I could never imagine attending a service there though because there were constantly hundreds of people talking and walking around the room. Apparently you can go up to the top floor and look out at the town (maybe even catch a glimpse of Quasimodo), but I could not find the stairs to let me up!

I have two days left in Paris and then I get on my plane at 11am Wednesday morning. I am planning to meet up with a friend from my program from Nantes to hopefully go to the Louvre before I leave. After I see that, I think I will have seen all the main touristy sites of Paris. Paris is a great international city, and there are definitely plenty of famous sites to see, but I would not miss it if this were my last trip here. I think it has lost too much of its French identity and I could have easily been in New York this week and been in the same environment. It is fun, but nothing compared to my home in Nantes.