The City of Lurve

The first real fiasco of the trip was Copenhagen Airport, when flying out to Paris at an ungodly hour of the morning. Nick and I arrived to a - I'm not kidding - four hundred metre long queue leading to our checkin desk. And this in silky-smooth Scandinavia!

So we pushed in at the very front of the queue, as you do. (Thanks Pa for the years of lessons.) It turned out that the baggage handling system was broken and, coincidentally, it started working seconds after we pushed in. Most enjoyable. Of course, this did mean that we sat on the tarmac for almost two hours - waiting for the baggage and people who hadn't pushed in. But it was far less stressful than waiting in a boiling terminal with twenty-kilo packs, queueing blindly.

Paris!

We were staying at Nick's aunt's apartment, which she had vacated for her yearly vacation, as Parisiens do in June-July-August. Collecting the key presented some difficulty, because we were to meet the Gardienne, but she was closed for siesta until 4pm. So we sat in a park in Javel (15th arrondissment) and waited, played some cards, attempted to buy things from people. When we glanced idly up and saw the Eiffel Tower, appearing from behind a building then we were in Paris.

My French vaguely sufficed for tickets from CDG to the city, and to obtain la clé from Mme. Ferrandinho, the Portugese gardienne. And then we were in an apartment in Paris and could finally rest! After sleeping about three hours the night before, we both collapsed unconscious for about four hours, getting up at 10pm with the vague threat of illogical jetlag.

We were near the Seine, south of la Tour Eiffel, easy access to Javel Metro. Pretty damn good location. Nick's aunt was to come for one night on the Wednesday so we contented ourselves with laziness for a large part of the time until then. French MTV (they still play Gnarls Barkley just as much), French sport TV (everyone talking about the World Cup), wandering around Paris. We did see Notre Dame in this time, quite impressive, another big church to add to the collection.

Dinner with Nick's aunt on Wednesday at a nice steak restaurant in St Etienne, Relais Entrecôte. All they ask you is "How do you want your steak?" - none of these namby-pamby other meats or even other cuts. There's a decent lettuce salad to start and then great steak with magnificent sauce and good pommes frites. (The only good chips we had in Paris.) Then home to watch France v Portugal, with a lot of happy French noise after the win.

We decided to actually see some things. The train to Versailles was very near so that was the next day. This interested me because Louis XIV is one of the most storied monarchs in history, and Versailles was effectively his baby.

It's an enormous building dwarfed by the surrounding gardens and grounds. Apparently they've been damaged by the great storm of Boxing Day, '99, and they do look the worse for wear in places. But they're expansive and peopled with pretty fair statues. Despite the enormous numbers of people, it was easily possible to find no-one in sight when wandering through the winding paths. It was, however, a shame that all the fountains were off, and though we asked for our money back, we didn't get it.

Marie Antoinette's house has recently been opened, a cottage (compared to the main palace) filled with impressive works of art. The grounds are smaller but more manicured than the main acres. This was a good warmup to the the main building.

Which is ridiculous. There's a decent audio tour, which we did, but even without that you'd get the majestic scale of the place. Everything's ornate, there's a glorious chapel, a pretty cool theatre, hall of mirrors. And everything's filled with art, even the ceilings and floors need to be looked at. Most of all, I got the impression that there was so much we hadn't seen, though much of it must be in a state of disrepair. The Dauphin's chambers, which we also saw, were much more sparse and had been restored only to a skeleton level.

Next on the list, Eiffel. Yeah, we climbed it, none of this two-hour elevator queue crap. Though it did mean we couldn't get right to the summit, as that queue was ridiculous. But it's an impressive construction and offers astounding views of the city. Only slightly damped by the flash storm which came through for ten minutes while we were up there - then disappeared.

La Musée du Quai Branly is Chirac's baby, and will apparently be La Musée Chirac when he kicks le bucket. It's been open for only a few months, full of "tribal art" (I hope that's close to the correct term, Vic) which emanated from tribal cultures around the world. Everything from Asian to African to American to Australian. There was some excellent Aboriginal work there, and the ceiling of the gift shop was a work which had been commissioned specially for that space. Quite a good museum but lacking polish at this point - it's a bit of a mish-mash, many of the signs have no English and the crowds aren't dealt with especially well. But some of the work is amazing for its level of technical excellence and symbolism.

Le Centre Georges-Pompidou, on the other hand, is polished to the nth degree. I don't quite get the architecture but the Modern Art Museum is very impressive. We saw the collection and some exhibitions. One was of David Smith, a sculptor in the mid-to-late twentieth century, who worked with metal and welding. I quite liked his work, which was technically brilliant. Also, one about LA as an artistic centre, which was vast and very accessible. Almost too vast, though, taking up quite a few hours of the day, especially because there was quite a lot of video work. Another exhibition was of Jean-Luc Godard which was almost impenetrable but quite fun despite that.

A couple of other exhibitions were relatively old-school modern painters which I didn't get as much, and whose names aren't coming to me right now. And a lot of the collection was made up of classics by Picasso and all those other painting kiddies. The other exhibition which we almost completely failed to see was huge, made up of video art, and we just didn't have the time or inclination to start that. The Pompidou really takes at least two days.

And on our last day, we went up to charming Montmartre and saw Sacre Coeur. Nice place for a church, and we got to go up to the roof, which presents amazing views of the city. Not to mention the inside of the church and crypt, which can only impress with the glory they embody.

Then - Barcelona.