More late reporting...

Hello and welcome back to the program. It's been a couple of days since the last pictures and info, and I do apologize if you wanted something more a little sooner. It's not like I could blame you. :)
The last I left off was Wednesday evening. So let's see...
We got up a little earlier on Wednesday (still not saying a whole lot), got dressed and ready, and went our metro stop ("ours" because yes, we owned it personally), Les Gobelins, up to Chatelet, transferred to the Number 4 train, and got off a few stops later at the Musee du Louvre stop along with two thirds of the rest of the passengers on our train. The Louvre itself is across the street from the steps out of this station, so we were facing it when we came up to the level of the street. This part of the building looks almost like something with some sort of government function. Very tall and square with regularly-spaced windows. As we walked through the arched entrance, we were in a large sort of breezeway underneath the whole thing, and then we continued on and were in the big courtyard with the famous glass pyramids. After waiting in a short line, we took the escalator down into the larger pyramid, and we were finally in the museum foyer. Quite a lot of pomp and overture before finally making it into the actual museum, but it was really fitting. The museum was so impressive! Every room had ornate sculptures and impressive paintings on the ceiling and the molding high up above us, there were tall windows and grand staircases, and corridors of the museum went for ages and ages in all directions. Just the facility itself was huge, elaborate, and awe-inspiring, and that wasn't even the point of the place. The works of art! Just the sheer volume of the artwork was overwhelming. Every culture that has contributed significantly to the world of art was represented, from the Etruscans and pre-Hellenic Greece to Renaissance Italians to French painters of the 19th century. One of my personal favorites was the sculpture of Psyche and Cupid by Antonio Canova. Good sculpture is impressive anyway, but this one was not only a technical marvel but a beautiful scene as well. We also saw the Mona Lisa (not very big, but very well-protected at the museum), sculptures by Michelangelo, incredible carvings from the Northern Renaissance, Louis David's pictures of Napoleon... The list goes on and on. I don't know where to begin as far as posting pictures, because I could go all day, so I guess just shoot on over to Google to look up some of this stuff if you're interested.
As great as the Louvre was, it also offered up one of our biggest disappointments of the week when we discovered that its collection stopped around the year 1840, which meant no impressionists or moderns at all. No Van Gogh, no Monet, no Picasso, etc. We were really, really looking forward to these a LOT, so it was a big disappointment finding out that yes, it was true, the world's biggest and most famous art museum really was missing this stuff. Here is what our faces looked like when we found out.

As we were going through the Louvre, there were two things that I was thinking about. The first was the whole idea of artistic integrity vs. technical ability vs. aesthetic merit. These three things, when you get right down to it, are what qualify some artists to have their work in a place like the Louvre, and they're so difficult to determine. By artistic merit, I mean the messages, meanings, symbols, etc. in a piece. The "intellect" behind it, if you want to call it that. Technical ability meaning the skill of taking a blob of colored stuff off a palette and making it end up doing what you want it to on a canvas or paper or whatever. And I guess "merit" isn't really the word to use concerning aesthetics, but what I was thinking about was in relation to me and my personal taste, because yes, that may make me selfish in the grand scheme of artistic appreciation and all, but at the same time, it was my eight and a half euros admission price, so there you have it. Anyway, I was thinking about how most of the great classical work was loaded with meaning, symbolism, cultural reflection, etc., as well as technical ability, but how most of it just isn't stuff that I particularly like as far as the picture itself. It's like if you compose a perfectly shot piece of photographic genius. Great lighting, superb contrast, etc., but it's a picture of, I don't know, a gum wrapper or something. Nice job on the photography, but it's not a picture of something I care to decorate my home with. These paintings were the same way a lot of times. Gigantic painting of Napoleon crowning himself. Enormous historical bearing, great skill in the painting, certainly deserving of a place in the world's greatest art museum, but not a picture that I particularly care for. And then, of course, you have all of the artists who painted hum-drum, everyday things and ordinary people because these pictures represent the common man, and blah blah blah. And I love that. I appreciate what they were doing, and I like the pictures of farms and kids and bedrooms and bowls of fruit. I am really, sincerely into it. So it's not like every picture has to be a breathtaking sunset. Anyway, I'm just kind of blathering on here, aren't I? I have no real point with all of this, no nice conclusion for you, no message. I was just thinking about all of this sort of thing as I was going through.
The other thought that I had, and there's more of a point here, is how rich the mind of God is and how far-reaching it is that we were made in his image. In all of our depravity and the great distance we are from salvation on our own, there is still within every person a spark of the divine. Not the nature of the divine, of course, but more like a deeply set thumbprint. I was thinking of this as I was looking at the sculpture of Psyche and Cupid. It is such a beautiful picture of an embrace with so much tenderness and warmth and all of the things that should be in an embrace- protection, longing, trust... And it's all based on ideas and deities created by human minds to explain and put a face on the longing in every human heart for communion with the source of all beauty and love. Every human being has an innate attraction to things that are beautiful because whether we realize it or not, we are born of the creative mind of the same one who made the whole idea of beauty in the first place. As I was looking through the museum at all that was there and being blown away by it, I was reminded of how great of a scheme God came up with to show his glory even through the endeavors of people who don't know him. If he can use the foolish to confound the wise, like the Bible says, there doesn't seem to me to be any reason that I can't look at the art of an individual who had no idea that they were glorifying God by showing off his handiwork and worship God through it. If there is nothing redeeming or ultimately worthy of worship within any human being anyway, all of these creations, in any way that they're appealing, are a testament to a creator, and I was in awe of Him again looking at all of these things. Maybe I even make a little bit of sense here. Who knows? Anyhow, moving on...
After getting over our brief and very slight disappointment at the Louvre, we decided to head over to Montmartre, the highest and pretty much the only hill in Paris, and have a look at the city from that vantage point. We took the train over to Gare du Nord, which you've probably seen in movies and stuff at some point. The ground floor of the station has all of the platforms for trains that go to other cities in France, as well as the Eurostar line to London, and the station has at least three levels of local and regional trains under the ground floor. It also has a small mall with a candy shop (or that's what I hear, anyway; we were all too health-conscious to find out for ourselves, naturally) and 200-ish other stores. The train platform at the top was not in black and white like it should have been, but it was still easy to imagine teary-eyed lovers, handkerchiefs, big puffs of steam, sappy music, etc. Very picturesque, and very famous too. Here's a picture.

After we left Gare du Nord, we took a brief detour through McDonald's, because the McChicken is different in Japan than in the USA, and I wanted to compare France to those two. You know, high gourmet survey from various world countries. So I was full of McChicken when Kirsten and Lindsey got their most expensive meal of the week in a nice, authentic French Brasserie. Try to explain that one to a waitress in rudimentary French and sound sensible. This meal was when Kirsten and Lindsey discovered that "well done" doesn't exist in France. Everyone survived, though, and we carried on to the outlying part of Montmartre.
We were looking for the Moulin Rouge, specifically, and if we'd thought it through a little bit, we probably would have been a little more on the lookout for the shady part of town we ended up in. The clubs around Montmartre (but not the Moulin Rouge itself, according to Kirsten) were the birthplace of the can-can, and that was like a hundred years ago, so you can probably imagine that it's not the most squeaky clean area in aught-six. It wasn't anything too horribly embarrassing or decadent, but we were all pretty glad to be around during the day. I can only imagine the difficulty we'd have navigating a neighborhood that houses the Sex-O-Drome after dark.
On the way back home, we went through Montparnasse, which is supposed to be a fairly artsy part of town. I wanted to head that direction to find one of those street artists that rip you off on a portrait of yourself and get ripped off. Montparnasse wasn't noticably artsy, and we didn't see any portraitists, but as it turns out, it was pretty close to our apartment, and we didn't even realize it, so that saved us an additional metro ride. We went on home and geared up to siege Paris with a vengeance and take it over by force on our last day.
Thursday actually started off with a bit of a whimper. We took the number 4 train all the to its terminus at Porte de Clignancourt, where there is apparently one of Europe's best flea markets. The prospect of great deals on chintzy and ridiculous stuff that we'd be ashamed to own when we got back and got a bit of perspective was just too much, and we wanted to make sure to go and be suckered out of a large portion of our remaining funds. As we got off the metro, we realized that it had been upwards of an hour since we'd had some sort of pastry in our hands. This is an indictable offense with the amount of great pastries in France, so we ducked into a little shop and recharged before heading over to a couple of guys to get directions to the flea market. Turns out the flea market is only open on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, so that put a hit on the first portion of our day.
As it turns out, it wasn't too much of a problem because it just gave us more time to take in Montmartre, which was my personal favorite part of the whole trip. Thursday contained Montmartre done properly, and it was fantastic. We took the directions the map offered and climbed the Martyrs' Hill to the Sacre Cœur church at the top. This church looks sort of like a cross between the Taj Mahal, some sort of Mosque, and an orthodox Christian cathedral, which is what it actually is, apparently. There are a million steps up each side of the hill, all swarming with tourists snapping photos, and yet somehow, even the crowds don't manage to ruin this area. It wasn't so packed that anyone was actually in the way of each other, and the view facing either the magnificent church or the lofty view of the city in front of it more than made up for the lack of solitude. We went down the stairs facing the front of the church (we'd come up the side) and took some pictures of the carousel and this famous spot before taking to the neighborhood for the rest of the afternoon.

The area around the foot of Montmartre is full of tourist shops full of lame t-shirts, postcards, Eiffel towers in all sorts of colors and sizes, mugs, etc. We picked up some postcards and mini-posters and looked around some of the shops that were full of cooler stuff, and then I finally steered the caravan toward what I'd been looking forward to all week, the famous square with all of the portraitists, Place du Tertre. There are so many artists in this area, so many degrees of talent on display, and so many different degrees of expense involved in purchasing anything. After looking around at everyone doing the charcoal and chalk portraits and thinking "ehhh..." we spotted the only guy in the whole square doing any sort of "artistic" portraits in watercolor. He was definitely a real artist, and we could have scanned a black and white photo into photoshop and made it look like charcoal anyway, so we thought we'd see what he was up to. By the end of the day, we'd purchased a portrait of Kirsten, a portrait of me with Kirsten, and a really fantastic portrait of Lindsey. The guy was very friendly, spoke good English, and was eager to talk about our ideas on art, Kirsten's background in art and design, and our trip. He also only asked fourteen euros for each portrait, which was a steal. Here are Kirsten and I looking as glum and serious as possible while getting our portrait done. Because, you know, it's the arts. No joking matter. Yikes.

The girls had the fantastic idea of making me look like an ugly goober by having dress-up night on our last night in France. They both had dresses and nice shoes and earrings and the whole deal, and I was certainly not punching my weight by any stretch of the imagination haging out with them, but they let me anyhow, for whatever reason. We went out to take pictures and then had our best dining experience of the whole trip at a nice French restaurant around the corner. It wasn't too horribly expensive, especially considering the quality of the food, and I was even able to get flaming crepes, so it was well worth every second and every penny. We had a great time being all sophisticated, and there is a good amount of photographic record to prove that my girlfriend is positively the most radiantly lovely lady on the face of the earth.
Exhibit A:

After cleaning up the apartment and packing, it was just a train ride or two up to the world's least convenient airport and a trip home. You've all traveled before. You know how it is. There's really no way I can recap every single thing we did in France, obviously, even in a post as obnoxiously long as this one. If you're reading this and you can get with us at some point to look at all the pictures and hear all of the stories, it would be great. Ultimately, though, I can say that it was a really hospitable and lovely country, a lot of fun, and well worth your time if you ever have the chance to go. Thanks for sticking with me through all of my longwindedness. (Although if you've read all of the Japan ones, you know it could have been much worse.) So ends the travelogue. A bientot.