jean-louis drove his citroen into our hotel and caused us to lose internet.
as the french say, "le kidding!"
since we last spoke, frijolita and i moved from paris to brussels to koln (cologne), and lost our free internet access. so i decided to wait a bit and do a huge update all at once. so ...
paris
f and i went to the eiffel tower -- in fact, we did the whole "we're just tourists in paris" thing that day, going from a museum to the eiffel to a seine river cruise.
the tower is ... well, i wasn't really excited about visiting it, though to avoid that while staying in paris would be like avoiding, say, the sears tower and the art institute while staying in chicago -- meaning, you should do it, but only once, to say that you did.
but having said that, i must say it was quite wonderful. overcast skies made me worry about getting drenched on top, but luckily the weather held out for us. and i had another mathematical breakthrough -- actually, f found an addition to my famous Odor Formula:
lim ([me + f in elevator to top of eiffel tower] + smelly frenchmen) = anger
but the tower was fantastic, the views were sublime, and i really got the true sense of paris -- how large, how dense, and how old the city is.
we also visited the musee d'orsay, which houses some of the more impressive ... er ... impressionist works. we saw all the big posters-taped-to-dorm-room-walls paintings, and also discovered that, for the ancient greeks (and even 19th century parisians), statues were the equivalent of the internet. i mean, where else could have seen things like this?
or even this bit of bizarro pedophilic water sports porn?
this actually is taken in brussels -- it's the most famous statue in the city that i saw, called the manneken pis, and ... well, it's a boy peeing. and the locals have about 300 different costumes they use to dress him up. the day we saw him he was a soldier.
and why, pray tell, is the little tyke's bladder so full?
these are just a few of the 260+ beers on tap at the belgian beer festival, which was just incredible.
the grand platz contained a very neat, very crowded (at times) rectangle area where the breweries set up shop. the prices couldn't be beat -- three tickets (in the form of specially designed, unused bottle caps) cost €2, meaning that the best beer in the world, all on tap, cost about US 2.50 ... you cannot beat that. and we didn't try, believe me.
we made a day trip to brugge, which is this charming little tourist-infected city north of brussels. everything in it dates from, like, 1300 or something, and believe it or not, it was very, very charming. we rented bikes at the train station and terrorized the city with our american-rules bike riding, and went from quaint little lace shop to ancient cobblestone street with nary a smashup. brugge at one time was, as the french might say, le king shit city of europe.
this, taken on a street that lines one of the many canals in brugge, might be the best picture taken on the trip. frijolita really did a great job on this one ...
finally, we leave this segment at the cologne cathedral, the first edifice i've seen in europe that has left me speechless when first seeing it. so speechless, in fact -- and because it's after midnight here -- i'm going to leave you with the image. for now.
as always, the europe pictures can be found here.
au revoir, vaarwel und Auf Wiedersehen.
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