On the road, Day nineteen: Stranded in Paris

Where am I? : Paris, France
How did I get here? 4 hours of trains from Athens to Patras
15 hour ferry ride (complete with bunks this time) from Patras, Greece to Bari, Italy
9 hours of trains from Bari, Italy to Bologna, Italy with one hiccup along the way
11 hour night train ride from Bologna to Paris spent in a very nice, though slightly pricey, first class cabin

The past two days have been spent in Paris. Yesterday was a full day including the Louvre, a long walk to the Arc de Triumph, and the Eiffel tower.


- Mom at the Louvre. -




The quirkiest part of the whole day was seeing Aerosmith's Steven Tyler walking around the Louvre with a little entourage including a scary woman whose job it was to keep everyone away from him and stop people from taking pictures (though I managed to sneak one or two crappy ones). The Louvre was like the Vatican Museum or the Berlin Egyptian Museum, where it's entirely too much to take in at once.


- Cupid and Psyche -

I took some pictures, though not as many as I have in the previous places. The Eiffel tower is huge; again, it was almost too much to be taken in at once, just standing next to it. We didn't stand in line to go up, mostly because we're verging on broke and thought we'd be short on time. We did take a few minutes to have some pictures/caricatures drawn.

Today, we were meant to be travelling back to Germany, but after 2 unfruitful hours in the train station, mostly spent standing in slow moving ticket lines, we discovered that all the trains to Frankfurt were booked full and that we had to stay here another night and take an early train tomorrow. The cheaper internet access at our hotel has given me a nice day spent mostly inside thanks to the rainy weather, and the chance to catch up on some things.

Tomorrow should land us back in Ilmenau by about 5:30, and that means only one thing. More 1,50 euro bratwurst.


EDIT:
Ah, by request here is one of the pictures of Steven; the best one, in fact. The others are blurry and indistinct. The girl in the striped shirt was his personal Louvre guide, and the blonde was his babe, I guess. The threatening woman is off to the right, out of the shot. Steven, of course, is in the green. Appropriately enough, he had on just a teeshirt, some tighter jeans, and a pair of Converse.