Paris, April 2000

	Arc de Triomphe

	Eiffel Tower If you go, climb the stairs. It's cheaper, you spend less time in line, and there are more engineer-geek opportunities to gawk at the steelwork.
	My pictures from the top are all uniformly horrible, but here's one just so that I can prove I was there.
		Notre Dame

	Museums The pyramidal entrance gallery to the Louvre. (You can do almost anything with a camera, including taking flash photography, inside, but I would've felt so guilty if I did that I didn't.)
	The Musee 'd Orsay, a converted railway station on the banks of the Seine, was my favorite art museum in Paris. The museum covers the period from 1848 to World War I, which means a lot of Impressionists and like-minded art. It's pretty large, but it felt small and accessible compared to the gargantuaness of the Louvre earlier in the day.

Versailles

The royal bedchamber.

The throne room.

The famous Hall of Mirrors.

Hameau de la Reine

I found one of the more interesting items (missed by many, I'm sure, because it's a fair walk from the palace through the gardens to get to it) to be this little English village — complete with thatched roofs, swans in the lake, and all — apparently built at the direction of Marie Antoinette because, well, she was Queen, and she wanted an English village.

Disneyland Paris

Okay, so I'm a philistine for going to Disneyland when I'm in France, but it turned out that that Monday was a public holiday, so most all of the museums and other likely tourist destinations (that weren't regularly closed on Mondays) were closed. And hey, I'm a native Anaheim boy, so I had to go to make comparisions to the original.

To save visitors the trouble of travelling overseas to see the worst of America first-hand, Disney concentrated it all — sports bars, Planet Hollywood, bright pink restaurants with generic names like "STEAKHOUSE" — in one small area called Disney Village.

If you enjoyed this, you might want to see other things I've done in Europe, or visit my home page.

Kevin Hogan <khogan@Adobe.COM>
This page last revised June 23, 2000