Paris

Though Paris is wonderful it is very expensive like London and New York. Renting any hotel room there is very eye opening. And since the price of a Euro is very high when buying them with dollars right now (today you will pay $1.47 for every Euro which is the European dollar) you will need someone to find a (reasonable hotel for you to stay in). We found the Hotel De Suede on Rue Vaneau adequate to our needs while in Paris which was within easy walking distance to the Seine River, the Louvre, Rue de Saint Germain etc. Near the Louvre are CityRama and other bus tour places that will take you on tours of the city, to the Arc Du Triomph and to the Eifel Tower and on River Cruises down the Seine River. Don't try to rent a car there unless you are staying in the suburbs because parking is beyond impossible on the little streets you likely will stay on hundreds and sometimes thousands of years old if you are deep in Paris. There is the Metro(subway) or buses or what we relied upon, Cabs and buses completely while in Paris. Also, through City Rama you can book the Moulin Rouge which is an experience unlike any other even in Las Vegas. But you must be prepared for nudity of you go there.(from the hips up). A cab driver told me that one has to be a perfect singer or dancer and have a perfect body at exactly the right height much like being a Ballet dancer in order to participate in the Moulin Rouge. We enjoyed this show a lot and were impressed by it!

I found that the humidity in Paris even though it was October to be hard for me to deal with. Nowhere was this worse than in the higher floors in the Louvre which made me feel like I was suffocating and going to faint both from the lack of oxygen and the heat generated by so many people walking around all the works of art from all over the world. Finally, because I thought I was going to pass out I found a way out(which was actually quite difficult) up through the pyramid and left my family to finish the Louvre alone. I couldn't help thinking as I walked by the Greek, Roman and French sculptures of how many people suffered to bring about all these amazing works of art and of how many failures of art never made it there in the last several thousand years and of all the suffering to protect all these works of art through world war II and since. Just this thought made me feel faint from my historical knowledge of it all.

So, for me it was not a pleasant experience at all. It just brought up many past lifetimes of emotion and was not a pleasant experience because I began reliving my past lives and felt overwhelmed and wanted nothing more than to return to my hotel room which I did as soon as possible.

So, I think my favorite experiences there were Versailles, and riding up the Eiffel
Tower, riding down the Seine River in a riverboat with about 10 around 15 year old Russian girls being very boisterous in Russian on the Aft of the ship near us as the moon rose over the Seine with a boatload of about 150 people on the ship. Paris was alive and no matter how dead one might have felt from the recession Paris woke them up and made them alive again. Rebirth!