Paris: Day 2

The walk to the subway was a strange one. Remember how I said Paris looked dirty but smelled clean? I found out the reason for that on my morning walk. Cleaning crews were actually outside with hoses and brushes cleaning the sidewalks early in the morning. It wasn't just a rare thing either. I saw it happen three times while I was in Paris.

One of the main reasons I came to Paris was to see the Louvre Museum, so on day two, I got up early and headed right there. I got up too early, actually. I made it to the Museum at 8 am, but it doesn't open until 9. This meant I just walked around and waited in line for an hour before getting inside. Once I actually got inside, I had a problem. The batteries in my camera were dead. Finding new batteries was harder than you'd think and eventually led to me leaving the museum, buying batteries, and then coming back in.

I had initially planned on spending a few days in the Louvre because it's so large, but once I got there, I decided on a different plan. I walked around pretty casually, and I only stopped in rooms that particularly caught my interest. This meant that I made it throught the absolutely HUGE Louvre museum in about 6 hours. And an amazing six hours it was: the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, Winged Victory, and on and on and on. The famous paintings were nice, but what I actually found more incredible was standing in the rooms with obscure Renaisance art or walking down the long corridors of ancient Egyptian artifacts. My favorite thing was a huge sculpture garden off to the one side of the museum. It was mostly open air and very relaxing.

Since I only actually spent 6 hours in the Louvre, that meant it was just before 4 in the afternoon when I left. There was still lots to see, and so I continued on. Instead of going down into the subway, I decided to take a walk. The walk to the Eiffle tower looked short enough on my maps, but was much further than I imagined (especially after a whole day of walking around a museum). From far away, the tower doesn't look very impressive, but once you get up close you see the sheer size of the thing. It's very intimidating when you're standing right underneath it. After the Eiffle tower, I went and got some dinner at ANOTHER Indian place. My French again wasn't great, and I was too nervous to ask if the dish I ordered had milk. This was something that would come back to bite me on the butt tomorrow, since the dish actually DID have milk in it. I ate it anyway. While I sat eating, I got to see a parade of strange people walk by. I was in the middle of a completely Indian district, so many of the locals were walking up and down the street. My favorite was a guy who was wearing a turban, and then wearing a baseball cap on top of the turban. I'm not sure exactly what the fashion statement he was making was.

At this point, my French was getting better (I actually bought a ticket for the subway for the whole week on day 2 completely in French), but I still had one major problem. When I first came to Korea, one of the hardest habits to get over was saying "yes" to mean "yes." My other Korean moved along fine, but you never really think about saying "yes" so it usually just comes out. The same was true when I was in Paris. My French came back to me quickly, but I kept saying the Korean word for "yes" over and over again in actual conversation. This is a problem because the Korean word for "yes" is "ne," a word that sounds close enough to the French word for "no" (non) that this caused a lot of confusion. It took me nearly the entire trip to actually get used to saying "oui" instead of "ne," but I eventually did it. What's funny is when I finally returned to Korea, I spoke fine in Korean to my cab driver, but when he asked me a question, my answer was "oui." Luckily I got over that quickly.

R