One of the best travel days I’ve ever had in my life was 5 years ago when I went to a Japanese hot spring town in Japan. It was a few hours north of Tokyo in the mountains where volcanic hot spring water comes out of the ground and hotels (ryokans) have existed since 700 AD catering to traders and samurai who traveled there seeking rest and rejuvenation. My only regret of that trip was that I didn’t speak Japanese, and one of the few phrases I knew was “Wakarimasen” which means “I don’t know”. (Blog link)
I’m currently on my 3rd and most committed attempt at learning Japanese. I registered this fall for an online Japanese 101 course through the University of Minnesota and this is week 4. I hesitated registering for fear of failing again and knowing we had this trip and other normal busy stuff that could get in the way but the hope of returning to Japan for another trip is too much of a motivator not to at least try. We were actually delayed from taking off on our flight to Paris so I jumped onto my class from my phone to try to catch the first 20 min so I would have less to miss out on.
Having an 8 hour plane ride was nice to get ahead of my homework and the complimentary beverage service didn’t hurt either.
So while we’re doing our trip, I’m also studying when we have downtime. I also don’t want to be the stereotypical rude American tourist and not speak at least a few polite words in French, we are visiting their home after all. I definitely am struggling though because I’ve grown up speaking Spanish at home with family and I’ve realized that when someone is speaking to me in French, I basically black out and respond in Spanish because my brain can’t process. We got galettes on our first day, the person behind the counter was asking me a question, I kept saying “si”, Joanna elbows me and says “knock it off, he’s speaking French”. Another time I was reviewing Japanese phrases on my phone at a restaurant and wanted to waive the waitress over. Instead of saying “‘s’il vous plait”, I started saying “sumimasen” which is the Japanese equivalent. Learning a language is hard, learning a language that’s not at all remotely the same to the country you’re visiting where you don’t speak that language either is even harder!
Considering how international of a city Paris is, just today I’ve heard people speak Cantonese, Mandarin, Spanish, Japanese, along with many others I didn’t recognize which is very cool.
Ok back to trip stuff. We totally slept in because I stayed up until 4:30am blogging. While getting ready for the day, my friend Polina who did a study abroad in Nice recommended that we check out the Sainte-Chapelle which was a church built in the 13th century with huge stained glass windows. We didn’t have any concrete plans and the church was about a 15 min walk from where we’re staying so off we went.
The outside of the church had a huge spiky spire at the top and gargoyles adorned the outside. You couldn’t really make out the stained glass though from where we were entering the area. Once we went inside the vibrant colors from the windows were jaw dropping because it was such a sunny day today.
This chapel is made up of 15 windows which are 108 by 35 ft, each dedicated to a specific book of the bible. One section was the book of Exodus where I could make out one of the scenes where Moses was parting the red sea. The center of the room, behind the alter, was the Passion of the Christ, one of the sections showed Jesus being whipped prior to being crucified. We spent about an hour and a half in the room trying to make out some of the other scenes depicted in the window but it was getting more and more crowded so we left to go check out this big tower thing I heard was ripped off of the Paris hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.
We stopped at a bakery to get a lunch and planned on getting a bottle of wine to have with in the park in front of the Eiffel Tower but security at the church unfortunately took my cork screw. Also we were too hungry to hold onto the sandwich and quiche we picked up and ate them on the walk.
The park is very nice, it’s probably the first time I’ve seen grass in the city since we got here. Man, there are a lot of tourists here though :p
Joanna threw out the idea of hiring a photographer as she’s seen advertised online and through instagrammers. I’m cheap so I hired myself to take them and I don’t think they came out too shabby either.
We wanted to get more escargot last night and scoped out different places to get it. After checking out a few youtube recommendations we found out that the top rated restaurant called L’Escargot was a 4 minute walk from the apartment. Unfortunately they were full but we were able to make a reservation for tonight. I wanted to check off as many French food boxes as I could in addition to the escargot. We got escargot with truffles, escargot with foie gras, more wine, frog legs, French onion soup but they just call it “onion soup”, pate, and duck confit.
Due to some miscommunication we accidentally ordered another dozen escargots which we happily ate. I would definitely say that the escargot were larger and more flavorful than the first night we had them, however the duck confit was a bit dry. Oh well, we will have more opportunities to try new things tomorrow!
