Hjoerring, December 21, 2005

Current mood:	tired
Current music:	Delta Goodrem was playing in H&M. WT?

Katherine: Paris/Hjøerring:
So we´re in Hjøerring, and I KNOW what you´re thinking.
You´re thinking ´but Katherine, aren´t you there a day earlier than you expected?` And yes, as a matter of fact I am.
But there, I am getting ahead of myself. You want to know ALL ABOUT PARIS, don´t you? I´m afraid my order might be out, but I´ll give it a burl.
The day after Notre Dame, we MEANT to start early, but of course ended up starting later than we intended. After getting up and showering (both with roughly equal degrees of difficulty) we caught the train into the Louvre. And so OK, I know I said the Sforza palace was big, but the Louvre is REALLY REALLY BIG. We didn´t even scratch the surface, really. I mean, we saw all the Renaissance stuff, and it was so nice and family like seeing the Botticellis and Peruginos and Leonardos, including of course the Mona Lisa. And we saw a lot of the Spanish and German and Dutch and Flemish stuff, and the ancient Roman and Greek sculpture. But by the end we were SO tired that I just couldn´t stand walking around any longer. Saw some of the paintings from Isabella d´Este´s studiolo, so that was pretty exciting.
Tegan didn´t enjoy it at all, I don´t think, and to tell the truth, there was so much to see that I didn´t enjoy it as much as I expected either.
The afternoon improved matters, for me at any rate. We went to the Museum of the Middle Ages, and I realised what a disgusting mediaevalist I am, going into raptures over, well, everything in there actually. There was heaps of amazing stuff; swords, armour, sculptures, wooden altarpieces, clothes, but my VERY FAVOURITE THING EVER in there was the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries, which were just incredibly beautiful and you should definitely go see them if you ever go to Paris. Just amazing and complex and I bought a book and will tell you all about them when I get home, OK?
So yeah. That was nice. We tried to go to the Eiffel tower and we lined up and everything, but it was just too cold and we weren´t dressed for it, and we´ve both climbed it before, so we went back to the hostel instead.
The next day was our Death Day - so called because we started out in the graveyard, moved on to the Catacombs and finished up in the Pantheon.
The reason we visited the graveyard, whose name eludes me, is because several famous people are buried there. Here are the people whose graves or ashes we visited:
Abelard and Heloise (look it up, it´s a great story)
Sarah Bernhardt
Edith Piaf
Jim Morrison
Isadora Duncan AND AND AND AND
Oscar Wilde!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I was most excited about the first and last. There were lipstick prints all over Oscar Wilde´s grave, so there must be a tradition.
We went for morning tea to the coolest Creperie ever. They were really expensive, but SO good, and the people there spoke French to us and there were no tourists or anything, so it was well worth the exorbitant prices. Chocolate, pear and cream crepes, Oh My!
Next were the catacombs. The people in line behind us kept getting really close, so I bumped them quite rudely, but they passed us once we got to the bottom of the stairs so that was OK.
In case you weren´t aware, apart from above ground Paris, there is a whole other Paris below ground. Not just the catacombs, which are a mass grave site, but also cinemas and clubs and stuff. But being us, we just went to the mass grave.
It was quite confronting. I´m not sure what I expected, but it wasn´t unprotected piles of human bones, often arranged so that the skulls made shapes, like mitres and hearts. It was... odd. And sad. There were lots of plaques with poetry on them in French, but I could only translate a few. We went through pretty quietly, and it was an eye opening experience. In a good way, I think.
Two things that made me really angry were being told that people steal the bones all the time, and seeing graffitti on some of the skulls. I think that´s incredibly disrespectful. Bad enough that these people, who chances are were Christians who believed that they would be buried until kingdom come, have been exhumed and buried en masse, then shown to the public, but then to desecrate the dead and use their bones as trophies is just beyond the pale.
Anyway.
We headed over to the Pantheon, very tired. It´s very grand, but the interior is quite trashy. Thoreau´s pendulum was pretty cool, and Tegan and I agreed that Jordan would have liked it, and I thought Dad would like it too. We also visited some more tombs, including those of Victor Hugo, Voltaire, and Marie and Pierre Curie.
Nick and Jake rang to go out, but for various reasons, it didn´t end up happening.
We visited a travel agent to book trains, but after waiting half an hour were told they couldn´t book them. So we went to Gare du Nord, but we were too late and couldn´t book there either.
In the morning we went back and were told that the train Tegan wanted to book on was full, but that we could leave that night. This threw out our Paris plans entirely, but we really had no other choice, so we booked it, went home and packed, left our luggage at Gare du Nord (Tegan very impressively fitted both packs into a medium sized locked) and headed over to Champs Elysees, where we frantically searched for a cinema showing HP in English. We didn´t find one, but we did see the Arc de Triomph.
I was very tired and very grumpy at having to leave a day early and because my bag was too heavy so my hips were hurting, and it wasn´t a very good day.
Our train left at 8.30pm and we were in a seats carriage with a mother and her two children aged around three and seven, who she LEFT FOR THE ENTIRE NIGHT. Just up and left them in a carriage with two complete strangers. It was really stupid.
I slept a little on the floor.
We got into Hamburg early, had breakfast at a disgusting train station restaurant, then caught another train into Denmark, and eventually, after another change or two, arrived in Hjøerring around 4pm, where we were met at the train station by Tegan´s ex-host-mother and -sister, Bodil and Inger. They drove us back to their house, where I met Tegan´s host-father, Leif. They were all very nice and very understanding of our extreme tiredness and grottiness. We had showers (I washed my hair! The novelty! The joy!) and when I finished, Inger´s grandfather and brother, Martin, had arrived, and Sara and her mother Karin arrived soon after. We had dinner, which was WONDERFUL. ACTUAL VEGETABLES, and also these Danish meatball things and for desert this strawberry thing that tasted a bit like really good strawberry jam with milk and cream. So incredibly good.
Kept my eyes propped open for another hour and a half, then went to bed and was alseep as soon as my head hit the pillow.
There isn´t much to say about today. Woke up around a quarter past ten, had a very yummy breakfast got dressed, and then went to Tegan´s favourite store in the whole wrold, H&M, where I bought a pair of pants, as the pair I bought JUST before I left for 89.95 at Myers have several holes in them all ready, which I was very displeased about.
Tegan bought some socks and a jumper.
And then we came to the library, and here we are, and maybe tonight we will go and see Harry Potter.
BTW, to all Tamora Pierce fans, I checked in the children´s section, and they have ALL her books translated into Danish. So very cool.

Extra special hello to the people at Biala, who I only just discovered, through my mother, are reading this journal, but don´t know how to comment.
For future reference,
HOW TO COMMENT/REPLY TO ENTRIES:
In the bottom right hand corner of every entry, there is a little link saying ´Post Comment´. Click the link and scroll down. You will come to a text box. Type in what you want to say, select the circle above the box saying Ánonymous´(if you´re not an LJ user) then click ´send comment´or ´post comment´(I can´t remember and this one is in Danish).
Hope that helps!
Love you all.