It has begun.

It stormed the other night. One of the first of the season.

Jagged forks of lightning illuminated the clouds, twisting serpentine through the sky, before relinquishing hundreds of millions of joules and trillions of watts into the ground. For a brief moment, heaven and earth were bridged by a single tenuous thread of raw energy.

I didn’t like it. I almost never do. While my friends claim the peals of thunder rumbling their bones and the incessant drumming of rain on a rooftop lulls them to sleep, I find myself agitated and nervous, jumping at each blinding flash of heavenly fury, tensing my shoulders and back awaiting the inevitable whip-crack retort of air heated to 54,000 degrees Fahrenheit in a millionth of a second. Contrary to popular belief, however, I don’t fear thunderstorms; I have a grudging respect for them. How could I not? Is it possible for a person to watch a 60,000 foot-high anvil-shaped storm front rolling unchecked across the prairie, its crown wreathed in the golden light of the setting sun while purple darkness lies sandwiched between it and earth and not feel drawn to it? To see lightning silently crackling over its skin and not feel the power behind the billowing, pillow-like surface? To feel its coming, the hot, heavy and humid air pressing down on you and not feel powerless? To watch it grow, looming larger and larger before its presence fills the sky and you have to retreat to shelter before hail, rain and wind wear you down—for as sure as a storm can re-carve a landscape to suit it, surely it must be able to re-carve a human to its own image?

It’s no wonder thunderstorms feature so prominently in myth and lore.

Now, some would say that I live in the wrong place. That’s only partly true. My love of the Midwest summer rarely extends to the weather. I’ve only experienced three states of it: windy, great gusts blow unimpeded across hundreds of miles of flat prairie, picking up grit and dirt to whip against unprotected skin; hot, heavy and oppressive heat that drains the energy from your limbs, until sweat coats your frame, staining your shirt; and the rarely occurring perfect summer day, when sunbeams lay gently on your skin while a gentle breeze carries the smell of summer—fresh cut grass, flower gardens and dark, rich soil—while whisking away any lingering discomfort of a long, bleak and cold winter.

While I am leery of storms, I accept their inevitability. They are the heralds of longer days filled with beer and grilling. Beer and camping trips. Beer and kickball leagues. Beer and the Outdoors—a place that until now has been unwelcoming and harsh, a place that we have passed through briefly, dreading the act stepping out of the confines of a warm house or car. I look forward to days of staring wistfully out windows, wishing that I was out there doing something, anything. I look forward to summer weddings, this year even being able to include my own.

In fact, I look forward to being outside so much that I think I will now.

Versailles

Standing just outside of the gilded gates and looking over the vast courtyard of Versailles, the royal château, it’s easy to understand why the populace decided to cast it as the symbol of overindulgence of the royal family. And my God, that’s without seeing the inside!

Inside of Versailles, whatever isn’t covered in gold leaf, is either marble, velvet or tropical wood. Even the curtain hooks were shaped like tiny golden faces. The ceilings were painted with various murals, usually religious, with the royal patrons’ faces making an appearance next to Christ or God.

However, that wasn’t the only art present in the halls of Versailles. Amongst the alcoves filled with sculptures, hallways lined with busts of French figures and the private royal chambers dotted with 3-foot-wide globes and massive writing desks, were modern art presentations.

A glass box packed with vacuum cleaners, an inflatable pool toy shaped like a lobster hanging from the ceiling. Strangely sexual representations of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. A giant mylar balloon placed at the end of the Hall of Mirrors. Why this so-called art was allowed is beyond me.

But even the inside, for better or for worse, held little candle to the gardens behind the palace.

When I think of gardens, I imagine a small plot of tilled land with flowers, vegetables maybe even a bulb or two and imagined the Versailles gardens to be more of the same, only larger and with more flowers. What I saw was enough acreage of manicured trees, bushes and flower beds to fill the SDSU campus. As Blaire and I stood at the top tier, the far side was lost in the mist of a chilly January day.

At this point during the trip, surrounded by the former wealth of kings and queens, we grew weary of picture taking, especially me. I grew lackadaisical in my approach until I would order Blaire to stand somewhere and wave at the camera—you’ll find plenty in our photo albums. And even our attempts to get us both in frame with a beautiful backdrop ended after a few feeble attempts and a shrug of the shoulders.

In conclusion, just look at the pictures and ask one of us about it. We’ll talk.

L’Arc de Triomphe et La Musée de l’Orangerie

L’Arc de Triomphe, perhaps the second-most recognizable monolith in the skyline of Paris, lies at the western end of Champs d’Élysées, a name synonymous with haute couture.

Blaire and I walked along the broad avenue, looking for gifts for friends and family to discover that haute couture is out of our price range the way the stars are out of our reach. Our books spoke of end of season sales of 50 or even 60 percent off, but even $300 off a pair of $600 pair of pants—that looked suspiciously like the $10 pair I owned, but without tears and gaudy application of rhinestones—were far from the clearance sales that we are accustomed to.

We hiked down the mile of shops to the vast roundabout of cars forever circling around the ethereal beauty of the Arch glowing as bugs buzz around a bright bulb during the twilight. A kindly woman took our photo and we strolled back along the overpriced shops and boutiques and headed back to our “home” neighborhood.

La Musée de l’Orangerie is a small museum—which is to say, small for Paris; the building would easily gobble up a city block or two back in our neck of the woods—showcasing Monet’s famous water lily paintings. Eight panoramic paintings wrap the walls in two circular rooms and delighted us with their fuzzy, beautiful wonder.

The rest of the museum was a bit disappointing for Blaire and I. We believed it to contain a near-complete collection of his work, but instead was a collection of various Impressionism painters. Impressive though they were, they were no Monets.

The Catacombs of Paris, Or What Lurks Beneath The City Of Lights

Hundreds of feet below the streets of Paris, thousands of former Parisians linger and give sightseers a visceral history of their former city—their bones line the rooms and passageways.

Centuries of Christian burials had left Parisian cemeteries overflowing with bodies and by the mid-17th century, conditions around the much-sought-after Saints-Innocence cemetery were unlivable. The government stepped in, exhumed the remains and transported them across the city to the city’s abandoned passageways at the befitting but now defunct Barrièrre d’Enfer (Barrier of Hell) city gate. Moving under the cover of darkness, carts of bones accompanied bishops sanctifying the path to their final resting place.

The catacombs now sits smack dab in Paris, with a delicious crêpe stand out the entrance and a sassy, if somewhat overbearing, woman running the counter.

Descending down a winding stairwell, we emerged into three square rooms depicting the history of the catacombs. Bypassing the pictures and explanations, we headed for what we thought would be the far more interesting tombs, but to reach them we first had to trudge through a long dank tunnel cut through the bedrock. The floor was slick with water trickling from the low roof and a single dim bulb illuminated our path every 30 feet. The ever present darkness pressed down around us between bulbs and we felt unnerved, especially since the tunnel never seemed to end.

We thought things couldn’t get worse. We were wrong.

Passing through an archway warning us, “arrête, c’est ici l’empire de la Morte” (stop, this is the empire of Death) and we soon found out why.

The walls were made of human bones, femurs stacked one atop the other and “decorated” with skulls, carvings and signs lamenting mortality.

“Death, Our Lady. Where is she?

Past, future, she is everywhere.

Always in the present she lives.”

The ceiling was oppressive, bearing down on our heads, we often had to stoop our way around pools of water collecting on the floor from the constant drippings from the ceiling. Periodically, the walls gave way to relief carvings done by the miners, a single deep well, dubbed the “Dead Water,” and gated passageways protecting us from the inky darkness that lurked behind their bars.

Tales abound of visitors who see ghostly forms and experience otherworldly happenings. Our own brush with the occult occurred toward the end of our trek through the dim halls of the dead. Sto

pping to take a picture of the vaulted arches stretching overhead the final leg of th

e tour, we discovered a ghostly haze overlaying our smiling faces. Subsequent photos and a quick inspection found a very earthly source; the change in temperature between entrance and exit had caused the lens to fog up. A quick swipe of the glove and we swept away the supernatural presence of the dead and erupted into a bright and sunny Parisian street a block away from where we began.

The Louvre

Housing 35 thousand pieces of art from nearly every civilization and covering 645 thousand square feet of exhibition space, the Louvre is a big imposing bastard of a museum.

After an initial attempt to visit the world-renowned site the day before, Blaire and I arrived at the Louvre early, as per the advice of our travel books, and found a vastly different scene than the day before. Where once was a wide, sweeping pavilion with fountains, benches and enough room to house a soccer field, was now filled with lines of people hundreds of meters long, snaking between the quiet fountains and twisting back upon themselves.

The easiest time to snap a picture at the Louvre? When you're too dumb to realize it's closed.

However, after waiting a surprisingly short time in line, we passed through multipurpose glass pyramid, which served as both doorway and skylight to the cavernous, two-story lobby below. Stopping by we grabbed an english-language map and went upon our way.

Our first goal was the Mona Lisa, or la Joconde, so we inserted ourselves into the current of people streaming steps worn smooth from passage of millions upon millions of feet—the Louvre sees about 8.5 million people a year or around 12 thousand a day. We soon found ourselves at the foot of Victoire de Samothrace, the nearly 11-foot tall sculpture of Nike, Greek Goddess of Victory. Her mighty wings outstretched and with an unseen wind curling her robes against her, she welcomes visitors to the mighty collection of Roman and Greek artwork, which we pushed ourselves towards, having tired of the never-ending push of people behind us.

Threading our way through an epoch of art, starting with Greek, Roman and Estrucan, we hopped off in Medieval pagan-diety woodcarvings and jumped back to Egyptian and Mesopotamian artifacts before leaping forward again to finish with four centuries worth of Italian paintings.

Not pictured: Da Vinci's easily broken "code."

Still searching for the most famous painting in the world, we turned a corner and found ourselves at the outer edge of jumbled mass of people surging forward to look at her; the Mona Lisa. For all the myths surrounding her, she disappointed Blaire and I. The famous smiling lady, shielded behind bulletproof glass in an environmentally sealed case following several vandalism attempts and one theft, is 30 inches high and 20 inches wide, is guarded by four stout, serious security guards who keep people at least 10 feet back, which makes the sfumato-style painting look like a blurry photograph.

After making our way past several nude statues of gods and goddesses (with Blaire pointing at each male statue and giggling; she feels that certain “aspects” are either sadly lacking or wishful thinking), a full room of “Art in Bronze,” and spending several hours traipsing through the various wings and exhibits, we called it a night but promised to return.

And return we did, four nights later and spent another four or five hours viewing the pieces we missed the first time, including Venus de Milo and a giant Egyptian head we took photos off because everyone seemed impressed to see it and we didn’t want to feel left out.

The grand total? Near ten hours of visit time, thousands of paintings, sculptures and artifacts seen and Blaire and I never visited the third floor. An entire floor! A third of the world’s most renowned art, us yards away from it, and we never saw it.

But, we figure it can also count as an excuse to go back, right?

la Musée d’Orsay

After leaving Notre Dame, fulfilling our spiritual needs, we visited la Musée d’Orsay, an art museum, to fulfill our cultural ones.

Being one of the few museums open on New Year’s Day, not to mention being famous for its contents, location and history—the museum is a former train station,  World War II mailing center and motion picture filming sight on the River Seine and houses Impressionistic, Post-Impressionistic and French art dating from 1848 – 1914—the line was long. Waiting to enter, we spotted a young couple leaving the museum and making a beeline toward our spot in line. The young (German?) couple approached us and asked us in impeccable, barely accented English to buy their tickets for five euros each.

This was weird. Blaire and I, standing in a line of 100-plus-person line, without bringing attention to ourselves, had been approached and solicited. The couple claimed the stamped tickets would guarantee a quick re-entry.

So far in our trip, we had spoken to hardly anyone and randomly approached by no one (the French are known for respecting personal space, a reason many American tourists find them so aloof and therefor rude) so our suspicions were understandably arisen. But we figured these two people, near our own ages and friendly, seems legit and if things turned out to be a scam and we were not allowed entrance in the express lane? Well, we would still be outside a museum, waiting to get in. However, the tickets being true, we quickly entered and never again saw our helpful German friends (perhaps they were angelic constructs, a corporeal form of the Patron Saints Of Not Letting Tourists Wait In Line or something. Alas, we shall never know).

And here we thought provocative clothing on musicians was a recent development.

Looking around, we say famous paintings (pointed out by an excitable nine-year-old that seemed to know more about Art History than many adults and also seemed to hover around me, taking some kind of sick glee in rubbing my nose in my own steaming pile of ignorance of the matter), busts of (we assume) famous French people [in two pages], statues of musicians with interesting wardrobe choices [in three pages], and various plates, cups and silverware housed in what Blaire dubbed “a big goddamn china hutch.”

From its second floor, we surveyed the giant clock left over from its train station days, its obvious train platform layout, and then ate at the gilded restaurant where we were introduced to the delightfully French dish of beef tartar, an uncooked mass of seasoned, room-temperature hamburger served topped with a raw egg (all of which was wolfed down voraciously by an middle-aged French woman, who also attempted to lovingly fed it to her adorable grandchild after seeing the girls horrified looks at the dull red monstrosity crouched on  the plate of sa grandmère.

Unfortunately, or desire to see paintings of distorted benches, flowers and people faded, and we headed out, back into the wondrous world of Paris.

Notre Dame

More than 16 years of schooling. Nearly seven years of French language studies. A combined 45 years of life experiences and hard earned common sense. All of these factors in our favor and it still took an English-language announcement on the entrance to inform us that the Louvre, world famous museum extraordinaire, was closed.

We both knew—through extensive readings of travel books, watching travel shows and the like—that the Louvre pulls in about 37 thousand people a day but we still naively believed we had beat the crowd.

So, we turned our sights on a nearby attraction you may have heard of: Notre Dame.

Not Pictured: Hunchbacks

Located on “l’Isle de le Cité,” Notre Dame is the most impressive piece of architecture I have ever seen. The famous cathedral is 69 meters tall (about 225 feet) and nearly 1000 years old. Walking towards the entrance and ignoring the crush of people queuing up to enter, the eye is first drawn to the three western entrances housing 15-foot tall doors and flanked by ornate carvings of the 28 Kings of Israel, angels, saints, demons and worshippers. These carvings cover nearly every inch of the doorways, as if the sculptor was certain of committing mortal sinner if chisel did not carve stone.

Looming above the impressive doorways are the bell towers—narrower at the top to give the illusion of extra height— 92 meters (302 feet) tall and ringed by chimeras (technically speaking, Notre Dame, though famous for its gargoyles, has none; gargoyles are sculptures that function as waterspouts, otherwise, they are known as chimeras).

Entering the church is no mean feat. With no orderly fashion in place, the second-most effective way of insuring a spot in line is to force yourself into the thicket of human bodies and limbs nearest to the barricades at the church doors, while trying to prevent others doing the same. This tug of war lasts until you have successfully forced yourself forward past the barricade and reached the single file line leading into the hallowed cathedral.

The most successful way of entering the church, as shown to us ignorant savages pushing, shoving and grunting our way to salvation, was taken by a middle aged woman and she, in turn, forced it on her son. She bypassed the entire ordeal by moving the garishly colored barricade, slipping into the single file line directly, and ignoring the venomous stares of a hundred other tourists made angry because they didn’t think of it first (myself included).

But as angry as we felt, nothing compared to the look of shame on her young teenage son’s face.

At that age, shame comes in two forms; shame of self, an inability to look attractive to an object of desire, the awkward bumbling caused by arms and legs growing faster than the mind can learn to deal with them; and shame of others, cringing at a friends attempts at seduction, or the realization that parents are not always the pinnacle of perfection you once believed them to be. And for a teenager, even the shame caused the the hottest, wettest fart in the quietest classroom will forever pale in comparison to the shame caused by a parent’s unwillingness to conform to (the teenager’s view of) society’s norms.

Seeing his mother given the stink eye by no less than 200 tourists, the boy attempted to physically distance himself from her. At the edge of the crowd before the 10-foot no-man’s land in front of the barricades and the mob of people curling around to enter, he stood as still as a statue. The mother, halfway through the cathedral doorway, waved him to hurry up, oblivious to the struggle that played out in his features and his posture. He waited as long as he dared before he closed his eyes and took a single step forward, a modern-day Indiana Jones performing his leap of faith. His eyes glued to his shoes, he robotically placed each foot in front of the other, pausing between each step, no doubt wondering “If I were to turn and run away, how far could I go before the shame stopped?,” before disappearing into the darkness of the church.

Blaire and I hoped the boy found the salvation he was looking for and even gave a half-hearted search when we finally reached the cathedral ourselves, but we were quickly by the church itself. Notre Dame cathedral hums with reverence.  Hundreds of people slowly make their way around the church, but hardly any of them speak. Instead, all one hears in the shuffling of hundreds of pairs of feet and the click of shutters as people photograph the 15-foot tall stain-glass windows, the eight-foot tall crucifix, or the gilded altar. Ceilings lost in shadow, air slightly murky with smoke and even chanting coming from the wings, it’s easy to feel the presence of an Almighty Creator dwelling within the stone walls and floors.

This presence makes people quiet. People don’t speak in Notre Dame; they whisper, they murmur, they improvise hand signals and dream of learning sign language. For once, no one tries to raise their voice to be heard. Halfway through our circuit of the stations and resting in the church pews, Blaire and I witnessed a remarkable event. The huddled mutterings of the visitors grew to a muted whisper and the priest came on the PA to shush them.

Never before have we ever heard so many people go so quiet so fast.

Victor Hugo is often given the distinction of creating a fervor and love for the cathedral with his 1831 novel “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” I believe this to be disingenuous. Hugo didn’t create the respect and admiration for the building, he merely reminded the people of it.

The Proposal

I chose to propose to Blaire under the Eiffel Tower for two main reasons:

1. To appease the hopelessly romantic thoughts I have from time to time by seizing the best opportunity that would ever present itself.

2. To live the cliché that many dream of and propose under an international symbol of romance: a 317 meter tall, 7 thousand ton wrought-iron tower.

I took a risk. Asking a woman to marry me on the second of a nine-day trip? What if she said “no?” To spend seven more days in an unfamiliar city, sharing a cramped, cell-like room and having only the girl-who-said-no as a companion was inviting an experience that would be the “vacation from hell.”

Thankfully, as attested by the nearby tourists and street vendors, startled as they were by our faces—Blaire’s full of tears and mine, pale and covered with a film of nervous sweat—and the inexplicable croaking noise coming from my sweet beloved (the ability to articulate words momentarily deserted her), she said yes.

For the remainder of our night, we took in the sights of New Year’s Eve Paris. We watched in awe as the electric blue light bathing the Eiffel Tower was out shone by the starry twinkling of the hourly light show. We looked at the ring. We moseyed toward the Seine River, weaving our way between the food stalls lining the streets, creating gauntlets of confectionary delights, snack foods and crappy light-up Eiffel Tower commemorative figurines. We looked at the ring some more. And even though the night was young, we retired, bowing to the pressure of a nine-hour time change, french police gearing up for what seemed to be a small war and the thousand-strong crowd growing larger and drunker by the minute.

Thus we spent out New Year’s Eve in Paris: engaged (happily), eating cheese and crackers (voraciously), drinking wine (carefully, our room had no corkscrew; we hacked the cork out with a knife and clothes hanger), and watching a french-dubbed version of High School Musical on the tiny television in our tinier room.

Best New Year’s ever.

Upcoming!

Because of my inherit disdain for timetables and honest work, I have been severely lacking in updates.
(Apologies to the five people I force to come here.)
Coming soon: Frequent updates about my now-year-old trip to Paris! Enjoy a belated update of how my life was more exciting than yours, one year past!

You’ll need a schedule to follow this train of thought.

I devour books. Four or five at a time, they pile up on my desk, my nightstand, the coffee table. Paperbacks and science fiction anthologies remain half-pulled from the ever-present bookshelves in my home, a reminder to catch up on my reading. In short, I am an avid reader.

Keeping plots, characters and settings separate has never been a problem. Keeping my place is. So, invariably, when face with a break in my reading, I usually grab anything close by for use as a bookmark. While I’m usually fairly astute at reclaiming my place soon after, books do fall through the cracks. And with a wall devoted to book space, the cracks can be significant. And every so often, when the mood strike to clean and organize my life — and by extension, my bookshelf — it’s often like going back in time.

Receipts, sticky notes, I indiscriminately shove anything thin enough into the binding. Hello Kitty temporary tattoos. Plural. Where did come from? My mind, usually occupied with balancing the thread of 10+ character growth arcs with general science facts and vast infodumps explaining why a large hollowed out asteroid could, in fact, have come from the future (like I said, I like science fiction), forget the seemingly erroneous fact of why I had a multitude of Hello Kitty tattoos in the first place.

Not all discoveries are mysteries, however. Some are actually time capsules, bringing back a flood of simpler times and happy memories. Take, for instance, my re-discovery of my Xena: Warrior Princess bookmark (complete with inspirational quote from the lady herself: “Don’t run. Sometimes you have to stand and fight.” Easy for you to say, Ms. Lawless. Your powerful, toned body — so lovingly showcased by your pleated leather skirt with matching bodice with bronze accents — is a far cry from the pasty, soft-around-the-edges body type of the people who commonly watch your program.). My mother had given my the bookmark back when I was a slightly more doughy, fresh-eyed child of 14. She gifted the bookmark, not because I particularly enjoyed the program, but because she so pathologically clung to its story, cheesy dialog and self-referential humor. My mother was previously a ardent supporter of buying people gifts that overlap with your own interests (A trait, I am proud to say, I inherited myself. My poor friends and fiancee still express puzzlement over their gifts of dark beers, comic books and video game-theme novelty items.)

The bookmark reminded me of the weekends I visited her and we sat, eating microwave popcorn and drinking soda (two things in extremely short supply at my father’s house), watching the endless hours of “Xena: Warrior Princess” and “The Adventure of Hercules” playing on television. It even reminded me briefly of the Halloween she and her friend dressed up as Xena and her heterosexual life partner/traveling companion Gabrielle. I was old enough to sense the embarrassment that comes naturally to a child when a parent expresses any sort of life or interest outside the child’s life, but was still young enough to voice my discontent at not being asked to join in the festivities.

But more than just memories, the bookmarks also serve as a validation of who I am. Apparently, my lust for the written word and my inability to use legitimate bookmarks runs in my family. About twice a year, my uncle from Seattle visits and each time he brings with a box of books for my father and I to sort through. Without fail, nearly ever book I pull out and break open, a makeshift bookmark falls out. (Apparently, Uncle Tim’s love for books is followed closely by a love for coffee.) Even my own father succumbs to this Andrews’ family genetic mild-version packrat mentality. When I was last home, I was poking around my father’s collection of  Twain, history texts and mountain men memoirs to discover ticket stubs,torn envelopes and even an old mid-70s postcard from his friend traveling the western seaboard. (The postcard took me by surprise by painting my father as a beer-drinking, bar-hopping, ladies man. His friend actually lamented the fact that ever since he’d hit the road, finding a “fun” person to hit the town with was next-to-impossible.)

Curiously, I felt strange reading the postcard. Like I had somehow been spying on him. I wanted to talk to him about it, find out who this “Mike” friend was. But it felt like by doing that, I would cross some unseen boundary. How would I feel if someone read my mail? Especially my texts to friends (the postcard of today, as far as I am concerned)? With little to no context, I would come off terribly. Some belligerent know-it-all fuck. And really, I don’t want to know my father as a young 20-something. I much prefer the middle-aged, slightly technophobic, sure-of-himself, lecture-me-for-an-hour-if-express-interest-in-his-hobbies father I have. The question of “would my father and I be friends if we were to know each other at comparative times in our lives?” I had answered a long time ago; maybe, but he’d more than likely punch me out for being a smart ass.

And to think, all from my inability to read a single book all the way through before beginning another.