Great Art, Good People and Notre Dame at Night

The link to the Paris pictures in the previous post should be working now.

Thanks to those of you who are leaving comments, it's good to know that there is an audience out there (even if 75% of them are Kelts). To answer a few of your questions - yes, my phone works and I can get calls and texts, but it costs an arm and half of a leg so I probably will not reply if you text me something stupid (Scott). I am still following the Dodgers. My mlb.tv subscription has never been worth what I pay for it until now. The home games come on at 4am local time so I watch them as soon as I wake up and can get through a game in about an hour, although with the current losing streak I think I might need to mix something up. The current Dodger-with-Landon-out-of-the-country W-L record is 4-6. The All-Star break can't come soon enough. It's nice not having to worry about accidentally seeing a highlight of the Dodger game before I get to watch it. It's like living in some alternate universe where baseball doesn't exist and people really give a shit about cricket.

So yesterday (Saturday) we spent the majority of the day at the Louvre and then about an hour in the Musee de Orsay. The Louvre is impressive, but Chad and I were left a little underwhelmed. The building alone is worth the price of admission and the collection itself is massive. The Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo and other highlights are great, but the art collection is not necessarily 'diverse.' That is why we went to the Orsay because I wanted to see some Monet and Degas and Chad wanted to see some Van Gough. Unless they were in some hidden basement, we did not see any at the Louvre. That's not true, we did see 2 Monet's in a special exhibit but that was it. The Orsay did not disappoint, and there were even some unexpected surprises like 'Whistler's Mother.'

Our new travel mate Jarad met up with us at the Louvre (he spent an extra day in Amsterdam), and after the Orsay he suggested that instead of going back to the hotel to take a power nap and then journey out again later, that we should just go find a bar and start drinking right then - at 5pm. Sounded good. We looked in our travel guide and decided on a bar in the Marais district named The Lizard Lounge. This turned out to be a great choice as we met some really cool people and were there until midnight. Jarad and I tried (somewhat successfully) to hit on two French girls, but there is only so much you can say using hand signals so we moved on to the American girls who were in great abundance surprisingly. We moved to a second bar, Stolly's and when that one closed, our new drunk friend Val led us all to his favorite Irish pub, Le Galway. On our trek somebody motioned for me to look up and when I did I was staring right at Notre Dame. It was a cool moment. It's not every night you drunkenly stumble upon a historic landmark like Notre freaking Dame. Usually I just stumble. I tried to take some photo's but they didn't turn out. Tired and very inebriated, we made it home safely sometime Sunday morning.

Sunday morning we decided that we still needed to see more art, so we went to Musee de l'Orangerie to check out it's main attraction Monet's water lilly series (Nympheas). We didn't do it on purpose, but we definitely saved the best for last. One of main goals for the Paris section of our trip was to see some great art and I can say that we definitely succeeded there.

Tomorrow we board a 3:50pm train for 9 hour train ride to Pamplona via Irun. This trip has always centered around Pamplona and San Fermin, so it will be nice to arrive in Spain. There was a great article on cnn.com today about the Running of the Bulls, but don't read it if you are one of those that are 'concerned' about us running.

Anyway - here is Chad with his latest:

He fell asleep - he will write later today.