Vacation (part 1)

I am finally back from vacation. We got back on Friday (June 12, 2006). It was a nice vacation full of adventures and challenges.
We flew to Paris first and my husband family friend picked us from airport, and took us to the hotel. He advised us not to sleep and just get out of the hotel as soon as possible so we could adjust with time faster. It was about 10: 00 am that we got in to the hotel. We listened to him and just walked to Eiffel Tower which was very close to our hotel, it was a long line but we got lucky to see a very nice Iranian couple who amused us during the line and entertained our son too!! It was a nice day and from the top of the tower we could see all Paris!
The following day we visited Louver Museum, Notre dam Church and Cartier Latin you can imagine that it was a long day to visit all these places, but we wanted to use of our time as much as we could. Louver was absolutely fantastic, we spent about 4 hours there, Iran section was marvelous and I got really emotional when I saw the those Perse Polis statues in perfect shape there, we hardly have them as perfect in Iran, the ones in Iran are mostly broken and not in original shape. There were so many antic dishes and stuff from Iran, the stones with ancient writings and paintings. I am glad that they take a good care of our stuff in Louver! Egypt had so many great things there too. The Paintings and statute section were absolutely fabulous, they all took breath out of me and at the same time we should have taken care of our son too, he was getting bored and we used all the tricks to keep him quite, although he got really crazy at the end.
My husband got crazy by taking pictures.
Notre Dam church was very beautiful and great. I remembered the part of the book about Napoleon that described his crown ceremony in the Notre dam. After Notre Dam we went to Cartier Latin, It was beautiful there too!
On our third day in Paris we went to Champ’s Lessee and I did some shopping, although it was expensive but it was worth it, we visited Mon Marte (which is a place that artists get to gether and you see them painting all over the place, it had lots of romantic and nice restaurants and has a great view to the city) in the afternoon and we loved it there, unfortunately we could not have dinner in one of those romantic restaurants because my son was too tired! The 4th day we visited the grand palace, petite palace and Napoleon grave and museum.
I have read some books about Napoleon, his life and destiny was always so interesting to me, so when I was in “tombre de napoleon” place I was remembering the things that I had read about his life. It is so interesting to know or read about the places before you visit them.
Any way we had four full days in Paris, nice and challenging in regards with my son but we tried to make the best of it. It is a very beautiful city but I should write the negative things about it also, the first negative thing that got my attention about the city was that I expected Paris to be more clean, I can tell that it was kind of a dirty city, you could see trash on the ground every where, the metro system is really good and convenient over there but they did not have good facility for handicaps and kids with stroller some stations did not have escalators so we should have carried my son in stroller when we were going back and forth on stairs. The other negative thing was poor customer service, when we would go to a restaurant or café it would take a while for waiter to come and serve and they were not very nice and caring, at least my experience was not very good in regards of service. Most of people told us that French people don’t like speak in English and they are not helpful when you talk in English with them, I knew French before but I lost my practice since I moved to US so I practiced a little bit before the trip, I would start speaking in French and mix it with English whenever I needed and they were good at helping about address and direction. So my experience with Parisians was not bad at all in regards of helping with address and directions!
The thing is we went from US to Europe and here especially in California we get spoiled with the very clean cities and fantastic customer service, may be for people that travel from other parts of the world to Paris, it does not look that dirty or the customer service looks OK to them but for us was kind of poor! one more thing that I should add and probably every one already knows is that Paris is a very expensive city!! in some areas we paid 6 Euro for one coffee!! Now you do the math!!
Any way in overall I really liked Paris and I already miss it.
I will try to put more pictures here as soon as I have all my pictures sorted out.



I write about my rest of trip in future posts soon!