Peace, Love, and Hot Dog Cakes

That picture is us at the Temple of Love in the Gardens at Versailles.
Did i sound like i was tired of France in the last one? I hope so, because I am. I liked paris because of it's art and the cool things that they have, but they are a crappy bunch of people to have all this cool stuff. Parisians (and maybe french...i dunno) are for the most part very rude, snotty, inconsiderate, and self-absorbed. They are actually lazy...and not laid back lazy. lazy as in they just dont want to do anything (especially for you, even though you the tourist are paying their salary).

Also, I'm tired of tourists. yes, i know I'm one. I know i've taken hundreds of pictures and paid good money to go to lots of museums, but there is a difference between that and being a tourist. I remember back in Sophomore year of college when taking great books we had to read Dante's inferno, Dante's imaginary trip through hell. We had an assignment to a) put 3 people in the pit of hell (in satans mouth or something...i think i picked Hitler, Stalin, and the meanest, most evil slave owner from the ol south whoever he would have been) and b) describe what our own personal hell would be like. Well, if I had gone to visit the eiffel tower before I wrote that assignment my tower would have been much like the later half of my evening tonight: Wait in a line full of tourists who are smoking, talking loudly, and talking in foreign tongues that irritate the ears. Next, most of these tourists butt in front of people in line and no one else says anything. Finally, after waiting in line over and hour you get to buy your overpriced ticket. After that, you wait in another line while people continue to skip places and butt in and let their friends in who weren't waiting in line but whom they bought tickets for. Then you start to go up, only to get to a level where you have to change elevators. But to change elevators you have to (you guessed it) wait in another line. People butt in front of you in this line too, and you have crazy german teenagers in front of you and loud asians behind you (albeit nice asians) After over 2 hours have passed while you wait on top of a windy perch, you cram into another elevator and go up to the top. The view is actually about the same as the view where you just waited for an hour, it's cold, its almost midnight (you got in line at 9), and they are closing. So you wait in another line to go down. You go down to the second level, where there is another hour long line to go down. So instead of waiting in line, you decide to take the steps down. The steps aren't bad until crazy Middle Easterners start running down the steps in some sort of race. They fly by you and jump down flights of stairs, shaking the stairs and freaking you out a bit. I mean this thing is over 100 years old...it could crash. Finally when you get to the bottom, every dirty man you could think of is pushing light up arc de triomphe's, flying birds (i can't explain it in words), and roses at you. Finally you just scream at some poor soul "NO!! I DONT WANT TO BUY A ROSE!" and then you laugh about it. But at least i can say i've been up the tower.

Yep, thats pretty much what happened. In other news, we saw some cool Monet paintings today along with the Rodin Museum (the thinker) and pirates of the Carribean which was quite fun. (we needed a break from paris). Tomorrow i think we're going to Normandy and then we come home on Tuesday (i'm actually kind of looking forward to being back in USA.

Here is a a picture of us on top of the Arc de Triomphe with eiffel's tower in the background.