City of Lights

Ah Paris! Where do I start? What can I say? It’s exactly what all the tour guides and travel brochures promise, and then some. It’s romantic, fashionable, expensive and a culinary Mecca. Cafes abound on every street corner, where Parisians enjoy their Cafe au Laits as they critique the trendy parade passing by. Here are some pictures from my time in the City of Lights.

Above, I stand in the center of France – all distances in France are measured from this point in the plaza across from the Cathedrale de Notre Dame de Paris.

Gargoyles mock the folly of our human ways from the Gothic extravagance of the Notre Dame.

To the North atop a small hill stands the Basilique of Sacre Coeur, surrounded by the bohemian residents (dead and alive) of Montmarte.

In place of the demolished prison of Bastille stands the Colonne de Juliett, commemorating revolutionary souls. Vive la Revolution!

The North side of the Musee de Louvre as seen from inside of the aesthetically debatable glass pyramid that serves as an entrance.

Inside the Louvre, the armless Venus de Milo is considered the embodiment of female grace and beauty.

Mona Lisa smiles unimpressively behind panes of hermetically sealed glass, dwarfed by frescos adorning other walls of the room.

Flanked by fountains (not in picture) a 3300 year old obelisk, from the Temple of Ramses in Thebes, serves as a marker for one end of the famous Avenue des Champs Elysees.

At the other end of the Champs Elysees, Japanese newly-weds pose beneath the Arc de Triomphe which contains the remains of an unknown solider from WWI.

Across the river, not far from the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower glitters at night as if besieged by fireflies.

The stillness of a Parisian night is captured in reflections on the river Siene, in the distance is the Arc de Triomphe.

Elsewhere, inside the now secular Pantheon, Focault’s pendulum tirelessly demonstrates the heretical idea of a rotating Earth.

Under the Pantheon, crypts hold the remains of notable French men and women like Voltaire, Victor Hugo and Marie Curie.

In stark contrast to the well tended crypts of the Pantheon, the underground Catacombes contain the neatly stacked skeletons of millions of unknown Parisians.