Cologne/Kohln/Whatever

The city of Cologne/Kohln is famous for one thing.


Two things, actually. There's a really fantastic Starbucks in their train station and this cathedral.


The Cologne Cathedral is a great, hulking beast of a German Gothic Cathedral. As soon as you step out of the train station, there it is - staring you in face, daring you not to repent.


If the Cathedral were a person, it would be a sour faced headmaster with thwarted bureaucratic ambitions, dressed entirely in black, who would fondly look back on the days of caning and would tell Bavarian bedtime stories about little children being hacked into little bits for sucking their thumbs.


The Cathedral was used by Allied pilots to navigate their way to Berlin which is the only reason why it wasn't levelled to the ground like the rest of Germany.


There's also a chocolate museum (if you can figure out which North is North and not walk in the anti-North for an hour before figuring out that North is South and You Are Lost) which houses the most terminally depressed employees in the whole world (barring of course, the poor Third World chaps who have to spend their days in the jungle picking cocoa beans).

The people making chocolate are not happy people. They pour pure molten hatred into every chocolate bunny they make.


I cannot believe that we live in a society that does not frown on the practice of eating life-sized chocolate babies.


The chocolate tree which according to Jessie needed to be "bigger... more chocolate-y."

Also, more free sample-y.


And there was German kitsch!


And Easter eggs in pretzels liberally sprinkled with huge chunks of sugar - which was a lot more appetizing than it would seem. At least the pretzel part.

I left the pink egg to Jessie. It seemed the best strategy for not dye-ing/dying before Easter.


Mwah-ha-ha-ha.

Tours

The last time we saw our heroines, they were busily sampling French pastries in the French capital and getting lost trying to navigate by the Seine (Flows Northward. Who knew?).

From here, they moved to the mini-Paris of Tours where there are plenty of bakeries but they are all closed on Sunday. As is everything else.

Everything.

But Tours and the Loire Valley in which it is located, is famous for one thing besides becoming totally abandoned on a Sunday: Castles.


Okay, technically they're palaces but that's just housing semantics and how many people really know the difference between a castle and a palace?

So, we rented some bikes from a helpful Frenchman, strapped on the safety helmets (a detail for all the mom readers) and biked 21 majestic kilometres (I hope you're all suitably impressed) along the river Cher to Villandry.

That's a wee little Jessie in the foreground biking away from a struggling me who was trying to take a decent picture while steering a bike and ended up in the picturesque French ditch.


The biking trails here are littered with photogenic things sitting around photogenically waiting to be photographed.


Finally, we got to Villandry, my new home.


This is my new bedroom.


This is the view from my window.


These are my gardens. I am going to spend the rest of my life in a big, floppy straw hat in my herb garden drinking tea and having deep discussions about herbacious borders with my French count. Apparently, he's single.


Because it's the low season, we had the entire palace to ourselves and spent an afternoon wandering through the rooms and the art galleries (we ran through the art galleries. If I was being polite, I would say that the family had eclectic taste. If I was being truthful, I would say that they enjoying buying tat), getting vertigo on the servants' stairs, having romantic fantasies on the turret and tower and re-enacting scenes from the Secret Garden in the extensive grounds.


Extensive and well-groomed grounds.


They even have their own forest.


In short, Villandry is the bestest place ever and if you're really, really nice to me and buy me lots of gelato, I might even let you visit me someday (plenty of room in the servants' quarters).

Still alive! Just a note to let gentle readers know that I am in Italy and will update as soon as I stop eating gelato.

... Could be a while.

Opera National de Paris

... I have no words.

Well, I do have words. Most of them involve puns about gilt/guilt/Vichy France. Maybe a few derogatory swings at Andrew Lloyd Webber. Maybe something complimentary about the Chagall ceiling.

But mostly just open mouthed aghast-ness.

Paris, Vous Etes Okay

I love Paris.


For obvious reasons.


Every second shop here is a boulangerie selling pastries and stone oven traditionally baked bread and every two blocks has a bookstore (called a "librarie" just to confuse the Anglos) and a sushi restaurant next door. There's fresh fruit stalls and flowers in bloom and butchers with meat so fresh you don't have to guess what animal it was and cheese stores entirely devoted to cheese (And if you're like me and have a deep, irrational phobia of exotic cheeses, you have about three blocks smell warning to reroute) and everything is really, really French.


There are bad things about Paris. Like my €4.00 plate of cold fries and the €4.50 bottle of mineral water and my €4.50 cup of tea.

There's also the inability of any French cafe to sell a cup of coffee that is any bigger than a finger bowl. Did they miss out on the metric system or something?


Exhibit A: Sad Jessie with a thimble full of French coffee.


Exhibit B: A Happy Jessie with a person sized cup of Starbucks coffee.


But overall, Paris make you want to skip down the street, clutching a baguette, wearing a beret, singing "Sur le Pont D'Avingnon" and holding hands with a scruffy, vest sporting intellectual who recite Baudelaire and know a lot about red wines.


The advantage of being Surrender Monkeys in the last World War, is that Paris was relativelyunscathed by the bombing and shelling that gutted other major European cities like London or Berlin. The streets and buildings are almost the identical to how they were at the turn of the century.

Except for the "Sex! Sex! Sex!" shop on the corner.


Sights of Paris include the Notre-Dame Cathedral, which is an excellent place to find refuge from the harsh modern world if you find the warmth from the masses of tourists crammed inside pleasing and the incessant camera flashes' strobe light effect soothing.


The Cathedral is staffed entirely by grizzly old Frenchmen who enjoy trolling up and down the aisles terrorizing people who are primarily there for the Victor Hugo connection. I know this because while my traveling companion and I were resting in a pew in the back of the Cathedral, a grizzled old frog started waving his cane and shouting at us in French while ignoring the two teenagers attempting to recreate key scene from Last Tango in Paris on the pew in front of us.


Then there's Les Invalids which started as a glorified retirement home for war veterans and now doubles as freezing cold dome/wind tunnel/"Just you try and find the ticket office, silly tourist. You think it will be at the entrace? Sacre bleu! Not a chance. Hon hon hon."


There's an excellent World War I and World War II museum inside where you learn that all the French Resistance fighters were really snappy dressers and that Vichy France never existed. They also have an Enigma machine.

An. Enigma. Machine.

I literally had to be pried off the glass case by the bewildered security guard. I may have to takemy smelling salts with me to Bletchley Park about because I feel a fainting fit coming on just thinkingit.


Inside, les Invalids is full of the usual tacky French gilt.


But there's one display that makes wandering around a freezing cold dome, tripping over Spanish tourists all worth it.


NAPOLEON'S SARCOPHAGUS!!!

Slightly less cool because it looks like it's made out of chocolate and designed by someone on LSD but that okay because NAPOLEON!!!


NAPOLEON'S JACKET AND HAT!

HAT!


According to the surrounding murals, Napoleon did all of his best administrative work shirtless and surrounded by admiring ladies.


The church of Les Invalids tastefully decorated by the banners from all the people that Napoleon killed.


Oscar Wilde's grave at the Pere Lachaise Cemetary.


Oscar continues to receive a lot of love.


The great Colette. As I was backing up to take this picture, I heard two Australians talking behind me.

"Oh Colette. I've heard of her."

"Who was she?"

"I think she was a dancer."

And because I could no longer see through the tears of despair that were falling from my eyes, it's a little crooked. But I'm sure you'll understand why.


There was a distinct lack of mourning angelic statuary surrounding the final resting place of the "Divine" Sarah Bernhardt so I decided to fill in.


Chopin's grave looking awfully frou-frou. Even for a Romantic.


Tomb of the Top Medieval Lovers of All Time: Abelard and Heloise.

tradition Peter Abelard was hired as a tutor of philosophy for the young Heloise but soon some highly inappropriate student-teacher relations developed and ended with Heloise giving birth to a astrolabe (Astrolabius, her son). They married secretly but not secretly enough; her unclediscovered their relationship and had it arranged that Abelard unwillingly joined the proudof eunuch-hood.

As detailed in his autobiography: "Oh My Life Has Sucked So Much More Than Yours," Abelard went on to become a monk and sent Heloise off to a nunnery where she wrote some love letters and was really bitter and then died.

That story always warms the cockles of my heart.


While walking the extensive graveyard grounds, I got to thinking about my own monument and how there are certain things that you should just not have on your permanent material reminder.

Like steering wheels.


Or anvils.


Or creepy, gormless looking naked boys.


Or the coffin on top of the tomb instead of inside it.


But let us move on to places not entirely habituated by dead people, les Folies Bergers! A music hall with 130 proud years of people slowly taking their clothes off to music and where Josephine Baker introduced the world to edible underwear.


Moulin Rouge - where you can wait all night and Ewan McGregor still won't appear out of nowhere and start serenading you.


The Basilica of Sacre-Coeur which we did not go into because I'd had enough of freezing in domes for a day.


The Cafe de 2 Moulins from the movie Amelie.


This is more what it actually looks like in the movie. In real life, it is staffed by the most surly, unpleasant, rude waistresses in the whole of Paris.


French poodles!


Fountain of the Spitting Sphinxes (Okay, I made that up. I didn't get the official name. I'm sure it something considerable more tasteful and probably more French)


Wasabi Dinosaur!


The Eiffel Tower!


The view from the Second Storey of the Eiffel Tower. I climbed 700 stairs to get this view and it was worth every step (Well, maybe not steps 567 through 572).


Drinking a Munchkin sized cup of coffee on the Eiffel Tower.


Testing the security mesh of the Eiffel Tower.


The shadow of the tower over the great city.