Napoleon Complex

Waking up this morning was a little rough. Drinking in Paris seems so natural. The wine is good and inexpensive. Back in Canada, Heineken is considered a premium import. In Paris, €1.15 for a tall boy at the supermarché. It's not unusual to see someone walking down the street enjoying a beer and the cafés are littered with wine glasses until as late as I've been awake. There should have been a law against the second carafe of wine I ordered at dinner last night though. It was a glorious evening, but I don't remember taking this picture.


Once up and moving, we set off to visit Hotêl des Invalides. We feel like we picked the most amazing place to lay our heads as it is so easy to get anywhere from here. When planning our trip, we made and canceled many reservations, but thanks to the advice of my uncle Mark and auntie Dawn, our hotel in Bastille is now considered our Paris home. For breakfast, we got off the Metro at Invalides and I ordered 2 café allongés, 1 croissant and 1 chocolate croissant. I placed the entire order myself (I am trying very hard with my French skills) and we ended up with 2 café allongés, 2 croissants and 1 chocolate croissant. Perhaps the vendor could see that I pushed the threshold of my red wine tolerance last night and threw in an extra to quell my pain. We devoured our pastries and coffee in a little park.


After breaky, we made our way to the entrance of Hotél des Invalides. All we really knew about the place was that Nepoleon's tomb was there.


Because we have museum passes (highly recommended! Especially if you go to the Louvre. The line for tickets is stupid long and with a pass, you just walk right in). My true love thought we should start with the Charles de Gaulle exhibit. I thought "Charles de Gaulle?"... Oh right, the airport name. It turns out he gained some serious street cred back in the 1940’s. The exhibit was very informative, but I couldn't help but feel like putting on some Daft Punk and grabbing a cranberry vodka as I perused the tech-awesome environment.




















The Charles de Gaulle exhibit was a tough act to follow. We saw the French army museum. I'm not a really big person, but there's no way these army uniforms would fit me.


There were some really big guns here. Like really big.


I bet this is the result of a really big bullet.


We checkout out the world war 1&2 exhibit. Very interesting and most of the artifacts were from the allies. I'm not a fan of war, but I'll salute to freedom any day.


Not as classy as yesterday's lunch, we went to the Hotêl de Invallides cafeteria. It's so funny to us how beer is considered a soft drink.


Napoleon sure loved himself. If you've never seen his tomb, O. M. G. I was so impressed, I levitated (this is not photoshopped, seriously).


The ceilings here are amazing.


On our way from Hotél de Invalides, we were introduced to another local scam. The old 'I found a gold ring on the street and I'll give it to you and you will give me euros for a sandwich trick'. It's slick, I don't even remember if the ring was on the ground or not. Anyway, we didn't fall for it. A block later we saw another person trying it so I started yelling "scam! It's a scam!" and she buggered off. There was also a bike and a car we passed. If I lived here, I would ride this bike during the week and sight see with this car on the weekends.


Oh, Canada!


The glorious Louvre.


Yesterday we saw the Denon wing. I like Denon, his statue has a smile.


Today it was Sully. To start, we saw a photo exhibit by Mimmo Jodice. He used photos from people who worked at the Louvre and people from paintings.


We also saw Egyptian sculptures and artifacts, plus French paintings. Have you ever noticed that most Egyptian statues are of people sitting? The Greeks probably saw this and said, "no way, we're going to do some serious posing action with our sculptures". And that's why the Greek sculptures are awesome.


The French paintings were great. My true love and I decided that we would take a little break every once and a while and make up a story about a painting. In this painting, my true love noted that they were playing a game of graveyard and everyone got caught, except for one guy. It was also dinner time and he refused to quit, so everyone else was ticked cause they were hungry.


There's a lot of noise at the Louvre, so we listen to music. I heard the latest albums of Bon Iver, City and Colour and Patrick Wolf while we walked.


Following the Louvre, we made our way to the Metro where we happened upon a city park with tee pees hung with info boards. Very cool set-up. Most of them were about amazing creatures in nature and some were about how America is destroying the planet.





We eventually left the square and made it back to Hotel Royal Bastille for some wine and cake!


Tomorrow, I don't even know what we're doing tomorrow cause my true love is napping right now. I guess you'll have to check back!