The Last of Paris and Beginning of Wine Tasting

Sunday (June 6), after Nadal WON Roland Garros Andrew and I went for a walk to the Moulin Rouge. We were both expecting it to be kind of a big deal, but it was really just this:

 

Monday (June 7), Andrew and I left Paris for Bordeaux. We put off wine tasting until yesterday (June 9) because I have been recovering from a cold and I wanted to wait until I got my taste back. We did some wine tasting in a small town called Saint Emilion, just east of Bordeaux. As soon as we got into this town, I fell in love with it. It was so quite, clean and beautiful. There were vineyards everywhere, it was like Alberta in that respect, but instead of the fields being yellow they were green.

This town was filled with vagabond cats that were really cute and some were really friendly. We saw that a lot of houses had left milk out for the cats, like this one shop.

We went on a tour of one vineyard... "chateau" as the French call it. It was really neat because this town had underground caves linking the vineyards together.

They had SOOOO much wine in these caves.

We learned that there were many different sizes of wine bottles. The regular 750ml bottle is the second from the left, although I have seen the Saints each polish off a bottle the size one of the right, almost every Sunday.

After our wine tasting and tours I still don't think that we know a "good" bottle of wine from a "bad" bottle of wine. Oh well, we will have to keep experimenting.

Tomorrow (June 11) we are off to Avignon.

Night Pictures

Friday night, we grabbed a bottled of wine and went down to the Eiffel Tower to watch the light show. Here are some of the pics we (ok Andrew) took.

The lights you see in this picture turned on and off very quickly, making the whole tower sparkle.

(We spent about 10 minutes trying to get one decent picture of the two of us.)

We thought we saw Jenna there, but it was somebody else with plumbers bum.

Yesterday, we went for a walk in Montmartre (the area we are staying in) and there were street performers. The guy in the red is juggling a soccer ball on this little platform and he climbed the lamp beside it, while juggling. It was really neat. This is a famous spot and it is beautiful, if you look really hard you can see Notre Dame Cathedral, Pantheon, etc.

The last couple of days we have been busy watching tennis and trying to book our next couple of weeks. It looks like we will be in Bordeaux for some wine tours, then Avignon for some Roman sites, and then Nice for some beaches.

Pathetic

Yes we are.

So today is the semi finals for the men's singles at Roland Garros (French Open, tennis). Andrew and I have been looking forward to watching these games (the semis and finals) for a really long time now (even though Roger didn't make it to the semis and we are slightly crushed - thank goodness for Nadal!). So today we get into our shirt and shorts, put sunscreen on, get a blanket to sit on, and bring our hats and sunglasses to watch the game on the big TV outside of l'Hotel de Ville (in city centre). It was so hot out (27) that we only lasted a couple of hours, not even seeing the first of the two matches. Andrew and I were actually asked to play a match of tennis with these other "semi pros" or ex semi pros behind where we were watching (they have a clay court in the middle of city centre set up), but we had on our flip-flops and were too hot so had to decline. We were so hot we had to go back to the hostel and watch the games from there. Here we are in the forum.

Before we went to the games we went to the top of l'Arc de Triomphe and took a few pictures.  Here is the Arc from below. It is big.

View from the top.

When we got to the Arc (and we have been warned by scams that start like this), a foreign woman approached us and asked if we spoke English. I put my head down and kept walking. Andrew looks her in the eyes and says to her, "Nope! I'm sorry!". I thought that this was pretty funny.

Tonight we plan on going back to the Arc after dark to see the city lights and to see the Eiffel Tower light show. We'll post some pictures when we get back in from that.

Paris: Jour Un, Deux, Trois Et Quatre

Ok so that's enough french. We got to Paris May 31and went on a walking tour... a free walking tour. It was a tour of the city and gave a little bit of history.  We took a few pictures along the way.

The Eiffel Tower. We will be visiting it soon.

An Egyptian obelisk, in Place de la Concorde, where the giant guillotine used to be and thousands of executions took place.

Arc de Triomphe. We will be visiting the Arc today.

It was a really good tour, but by the end of the 3 1/2 hour tour Andrew and I were really tired. So we went back to the hostel and watched an episode of Glee, watched a UFC fight and ate popcorn.

On June 1, we were rejuvenated, so we hit the town running. We got our museum passes (which allow you to go into almost any museum in Paris) and began at Notre Dame Cathedral, which was beautiful. We climbed the North Tower and had a great view of Paris.

After ND Cathedral we were all churched out so we went to Pantheon. The architecture of these places are amazing!

It was around noon by this time so we went to Jardin de Luxembourg for a picnic. The gardens here in Paris are not the same as those back at home. They don't really have any grass, and when they do have grass there are signs saying not to walk on it. They are also obsessed with symmetry, to the extent that all the trees are made rectangular or square.

This is a well known gay area in Paris. There are always rainbow flags flying around and men in short shorts... notice the street name? It also smells bad... Coincidence, we think not.

We thought that it would be a good idea to go to Le Musee D'Orsay. So we went, we saw... and I almost died. I don't like museums. I don't have an appreciation for art. I get it, it's old but that doesn't mean it is good. Also, the museum was packed! We saw some Monet and Van Gogh (which I do really like), but then I was done. So I was following Andrew around, which I am sure is pretty annoying, but then I found some benches. Andrew could now go look around and then come and get me when he moved on. Thank goodness I don't think Andrew has an appreciation for art either.

Then if we hadn't been to enough museums already, we decided to see Napoleon's tomb and walked through the Military Museum (very quickly!!!). We only went through the WWII portion (which was large), and it did not compare to the one in Caen. However, there were lots of French WWII items of display, including lots of rifles and uniforms that were in great shape (because they were hardly even used in the 2 weeks or so it took Hitler to invade France, which, by the way, had the largest land army at that time...).

June 2, and then we went to the Louvre. So I thought I didn't like museums when I came to Europe, then after June 1, I really didn't think I liked museums, but after this day I knew 100% museums just aren't my thing. We get to the Louvre at around 10am. The line to get in isn't bad and we decided that before the masses came we would go see the really famous pieces first. So... we went over to the Mona Lisa. The rooms leading up to the room holding the Mona Lisa are 40 degrees because there were so many people. Once we get into the room where the Mona Lisa is there are tons of people and every one of them is holding up their cameras trying to take a picture of a picture... Don't they get it... they can buy Mona Lisa replicas, magnets, towels... pretty much anything you could ever want, and yet they are still taking a picture. You can even download high definition Mona Lisa pictures on the internet for free I am sure. Pictures of pictures...

After we had seen some of the famous things Andrew wanted to see we were wandering through the museum and I found the best thing in the entire museum (other than the exit): the 2rd floor. Here is where they keep some french pieces, none of which are extremely famous, so nobody is up there and the temperature drops about 10 degrees because the rooms aren't packed with sweaty barbarians.

Picture taken after we left!

After being at the Louvre for a good part of the day (ok maybe only a few hours), I was tired (I believe that museums suck the life out of me, much like malls), so we went grocery shopping and went back to the hostel for supper and another episode of glee and a movie. We did, however, get lots of walking done through the city's large and beautiful boulevards.

June 3, we got to go to Versailles Palace and it was gorgeous. The gardens were so beautiful and we spent all day there. We managed to get there quite early, so the gardens (which span 800 hectares of land) were relatively empty. The sweaty barbarians, however, were soon to follow.

The palace.

The gardens.

We Did It!!!

After 8 years, we finally got married!

When we first started talking about a wedding in Ireland we decided to have a very simple wedding. So I bought a dress online and Andrew was going to wear the suit he already had. When the online dress finally arrived it turned out to be really ugly!! So onto plan B, it being April 30 (the busiest day for accountants and the day before we left) I got Mom to go shopping for me and we decided that if she found something she would call me and I would go out to meet her. So she called and she thought she found a dress. When I got to there I pulled a few dresses and fell in love with one. I think it is the complete opposite of what I thought I was looking for.

So because I had a beautiful dress, Andrew went and got a new shirt and tie.

Jim Slipp (an old partner from BDO) had sent an email of Ashford Castle to me when he found out we were getting married in Ireland. It has to be the most beautiful castle ever, but because we had decided to have a simple wedding we decided not to get married at a castle.

Two days before the wedding we decided that it would be nice to get a few professional pictures of us. So we found and booked a photographer. His name was Ik (pronounced "Ick"). Then we (me and Mom) decided it was a good idea to get someone to do my hair, because I am hair challenged.

Mom also suggested that we go to Ashford Castle for dinner and to spend one night... I had said no before, but she wore me down. Plus I would have felt a little awkward going to a pub in my dress, as this was the plan until now. So we booked a room at Ashford.

The day before the wedding Andrew was doing his laundry and decided he was going to wash his new white shirt. Unfortunately he also decided to wash his blue jeans with his shirt (I can't blame him, the day before my white tank top turned blue because I washed them with my jeans). So now Andrew has a blue-ish dress shirt. We laughed about it and just thought, oh well who cares (I think Andrew was secretly trying to look like Brian on his wedding day because Brian had a baby blue suit - gay or not gay?).

The morning of the wedding, we decided that I needed a bouquet, Andrew needed a flower for his suit and I needed a flower for my hair. So at 9:30am we went walking and we found a flower shop downtown Galway. 

After the flower shop stop, I went to go and get my hair done and picked up Andrew's (we thought we would try and get it dry cleaned to see if it would come out). The blue didn't come out. Then it hits me that his blue shirt is really going to look blue because I'm wearing a white dress. So when Jack came back from picking up the flowers at 2pm (wedding is at 4pm and I need 20 minutes to get into my dress at the hotel) Andrew and Jack went on a mission to get a white dress shirt. They ended up going to a suit store that Pierce Brosnan apparently shops at.

They made it back just in time to pick us up, drive to the hotel and gave me just enough time to get into my dress.

The whole time I was adamant that I was going to wear flip flops with my dress because nobody will ever see my shoes anyways so may as well be comfy. Right before the ceremony, Mom left to go and get Andrew and Jack into the ceremony room and I decided that if nobody is going to see my flip flops, nobody will notice if I don't wear them at all. So I left barefoot and walked down the isle to marry the man of my dreams.

After the ceremony, we had professional pictures taken and then we went to Ashford Castle to have dinner and where Andrew and I spent the night.

The day was perfect. I have been cold pretty much ever since we landed in Ireland and for the first time on May 20 the sun came out and the clouds disappeared. Naturally, Andrew and I were complaining about hot it was because now we were too hot. It was the nicest day we have had since we got here and it made it really for picture taking, etc.

Here a few pictures of Ashford and us on the grounds.

The B Team.

Me and Mom.

Drinks at in the Prince of Whales room at Ashford... a bride drinking Guinness (what they call Irish wine). Classy hey?

At the piano bar at Ashford. (When we were having supper a couple bought us a bottle of champagne and then another couple at the piano bar sent us glasses of wine)

Our room in Ashford Castle... it also happened to be the room Brad Pitt picked to stay in when he stayed at Ashford. Andrew said it was the closest he would ever get to sleeping with Brad Pitt - gay or not gay?

The bathroom.

The next day we decided to go for a walk on the grounds before Mom and Jack came to pick us up.

George V dinning room, where we had supper.

Inside the Castle.

Thanks so much Mom and Jack for coming to Ireland for our wedding and for making it really, really special.

Andrew and I have now decided that the best way to get free stuff is to wear our wedding gear. So we are now backpacking with my wedding dress and Andrew's suit (ok, we aren't really traveling with them, but we thought about it!).

The B Team has now left us, which means Andrew and I are now returning to roughing it. Two nights ago we stayed in Ashford Castle, then last night we stayed in a beautiful hotel, Mom and Jack leave and tonight Andrew and I are going to sleep in the Shannon Airport on the floor or on a couch if we are lucky.

Andrew and I will be leaving tomorrow morning for Rouen, France for a couple days then to Bayeux and then to Paris.