Those of you who checked out my photos from the D-Day beaches in Normandy the other day might recall my mentioning a place called the Pointe du Hoc, and how I didn't take any pictures there because it was pouring rain. Well, Marjorie's dad sent me his pictures from the whole weekend, including some from the Pointe du Hoc, and there's this great, ridiculous one of me, Marjorie, and Jenny in a huge hole left by an Allied bomb in 1944. We're all wearing identical windbreakers; they were promotional items from M's dad's company, which he brought to protect us all against Normandy's notoriously rainy Autumn weather.

Haha, I wish you could feel the wind and rain we were studiously ignoring in order to have fun out there. I'd brought my good umbrella but the second I opened the thing it immediately turned inside out and broke! At least in the bomb hole there was a little less wind. Immediately after this was taken, Marjorie an I climbed out of the hole as fast as we could, stranding Jenny; the sides were a lot steeper than they look here, not to mention slippery with mud. I think she's still there.

In other news, I have a bunch of fun new stuff up on Cool Stuff in Paris:

Recent articles:

• An unfinished statue of the Virgin Mary, buried for eight centuries
• Saint Denis, the decapitated guy you'll see all over Paris
• L'Hôtel de Ville — a great place for an execution!

Recent blog posts:

• And the award for Parisian bar most likely to keep all their neon letters in good working order goes to...
• Hidden in plain sight: fake windows painted onto a building in Beaubourg
• Monsters in the Jardin des Tuileries
• Beautiful Russian nesting dolls at Peterhof

I've also created a LiveJournal syndication of the Cool Stuff in Paris blog if you'd like to add it. It's here: coolstuffparis. It's not ideal in that it seems to only update every 24 hours or so, rather than in real time, but it's still a good way to keep up with my Cool Stuff blog if you don't feel like following it on Blogspot or adding it to your rss reader.

How're you?

For Halloween weekend, Marjorie's dad happened to be visiting Paris from La Réunion, so he and Marjorie and her two sisters and I rented a car and drove up to Normandy to see a bunch of historic sites from the D-Day invasion. We saw Omaha Beach and the American Cemetery there, slept in a hotel where President Eisenhower himself stayed after WW2, played in some real Nazi bunkers, saw a couple D-Day museums, and enjoyed a tremendous amount of good Normandy food (and drink!): seafood, crepes, cheese, wine, calvados, et cetera. Here are some pictures from the weekend...


A nice Spanish fellow offered to take our picture. That's me, Pascal, Marjorie, Jenny, and Deb.

( Tons of pictures; Omaha Beach, museums, bunkers, etc... )

I took a walk around the neighborhood yesterday to take a bunch of pictures for a new Paris-related website project I'm working on. I also took a few pictures of weird stuff that has nothing at all to do with the project...


Welcome to beautiful Paris!
I found this KFC bucket right in front of the Fontaine des Innocents. I nudged it with my shoe a little (I guess you could say I kicked the bucket, ho ho) to try to get it to turn to a side with French text on it, but it turns out there wasn't any!

( Public art, dead rats, etc... )

Marjorie's mom is visiting Paris for a couple weeks, and last Thursday, Marjorie and her mom and sister Deb and I rented a car and drove up to Mont Saint-Michel!


Mont Saint-Michel is basically a tiny island (some of the time; it's complicated) just off the Northern coast of France. Historically, there was a natural land bridge that connected it to mainland France during low tide, and this became completely covered by the sea during high tide, so you could only travel to and from the island at certain times. Nowadays they've constructed a permanent land bridge with a road on it, so you can come and go as you please. I first learned about Mont Saint-Michel way back in my highschool French textbook, and it seemed incredibly strange and fantastical then, and I kind of can't believe I actually ended up going there on a whim seventeen years later.

( Lots more pictures... )

Okay, here's the last set of photos from our vacation in America! We spent the last week or so in New Jersey, and most of that was at the beach in Wildwood; Marjorie and I rented a shorehouse there along with Ben and Corri and baby Lily. A lot of these pictures come from Marjorie's camera, because I guess I'm so used to looking at New Jersey stuff (having grown up there) I didn't remember to photograph a lot of it!


We visited Lucy the Elephant! I'd actually never done this before! More pictures of Lucy (including her insides!) are coming up after the LJ cut...

( Wildwood, Lucy, some NJ history, et cetera... )

Okay, I got sidetracked for a few days there, but I'm excited to continue with my vacation pics now! After our afternoon in the swamp, we had a couple more days in New Orleans, and visited some more cemeteries, hung out on Bourbon Street, etc...


This is from the intro of my new show on the Food network where, every week, I teach you how to get drunk. (Actually, this was taken at an amazing cocktail bar called Cure, which is Kevin's favorite bar, and is certainly in my top ten as well now.)


( I miss New Orleans a lot already... )

Okay, so I already posted Kevin's great picture of us with the alligator, but I'm finally getting around to my own pictures from our outing to the swamp...


This is actually from the end of our trek out into the swamp; you walk along a long, narrow walkway and eventually cross a big bridge and end up at this dead end. Here we are taking a well-earned rest from all that walking in the crazy heat and humidity. From left to right, that's Kevin, me, Casey, Marjorie, and Patrick.

( More swamp... )

The morning after the barbecue, we hopped on a plane for New Orleans, to visit my friends Kevin (misterscarecrow) and Casey, and Patrick (zombiepatrick) and Melanie, and also to meet up with our friend Leonard (ludickid), who drove all the way from San Antonio to see us! Well, to see New Orleans and us. They first day we were on our own until the evening, and I'd been to New Orleans a few times already, so I had fun showing Marjorie around the French Quarter...


Here's Marjorie in Jackson Square. You can see the statue of Andrew Jackson on horseback in the background; I think two hooves off the ground means genocidal maniac?

( Lots of New Orleans... )

Okay, now that Kevin's alligator picture is out of the way, I'm going through my vacation photos in order here. Marjorie and I were in the States for about 15 days. We flew into Philly, stayed in Collingswood, NJ with our friends Steve (fluidbeauty) and Tricia, and then bounced around to New Orleans, the Jersey shore, etc. The day after we arrived, there was a big barbecue at Ben (schtune) and Corri's (corrigami) house, so that Ben could invite all of his international students over for a real-ass American barbecue. Marjorie is fascinated with super-American things (and I guess I am too), so this was a perfect thing to dive into right after arriving in the States. Can you believe that when you go to a barbecue in France, there are no hamburgers or hot dogs? It's downright un-American! So I was proud to show Marjorie the real thing.


The barbecue was in Collingswood, and even I'm a little shocked at how insanely American the town looks. This was on our walk over to Ben and Corri's place.

( More Americana than you can shake a freedom fry at... )

My good friend Kevin L. O'Mara is a photographer in New Orleans, and I'm currently the featured image on his website, KLOPhoto.com (designed by me, incidentally).


Kevin and I have a long-running inside joke regarding the word citrus, which I'd explain here if I remembered anything about how it started or why it's funny to us. It just is. This picture was taken in one of a handful of cemeteries we visited in New Orleans earlier this month, and Kevin noticed some limes or what have you that had fallen from the trees in the cemetery and got the idea for this picture. I surely do like it.

Here are my other photos from my sister's visit! I only took a dozen or so photos during the rest of Amanda's stay, because we spent most of our time in Paris, which I've already wandered and photographed pretty extensively, and she was snapping lots of pics with her own camera. They're a pretty crazy mixed bag...


Paris Plages! This is a pretty silly thing, and I love it. Every summer, the city of Paris creates a fake beach along the banks of the Seine, complete with real palm trees, real sand, beach umbrellas, beach chairs, ice cream stands, bands playing, bocce ball courts, etc. This stretches for one or two kilometers of the river, with different sights and activities set up in different sections.

( The rest! )

My sister, Amanda, came to Paris and stayed with me and Marjorie for a week! We spent most of our time bumming around the city, but we also took a daytrip to the medieval town of Provins, with Marjorie and her sister Deb. I'd been to Provins once last year when the weather was much cooler, and this time it was a lot more fun to be there on a beautiful day and just enjoy wandering and exploring everywhere.


Amanda and me!

( Lots more! )

It's unusually cold and rainy in Paris today, so I'll post some pictures from a really beautiful day last week. A little background: I live in the Marais, in central Paris, on the North side of the river; just North of the Centre Pompidou to be exact. When I go running, I usually run straight down to the river, cross over to l'Île de la Cité (the larger of two small islands in the middle of the Seine, with Notre Dame on it), run all the way around the perimeter of the island, then cross back over and head home. That makes about three or three and a half miles total.

I usually cross the river on the same bridge both going and coming, a bridge I just now learned is called the Pont d'Arcole, just South of l'Hôtel de Ville, aka city hall. There's nothing particularly beautiful about the bridge, as bridges go, but I always notice that it puts me right in the middle of a lot of really beautiful views. So the other day when I was out and about with my camera (and not out for a run) I decided to put myself in the middle of the bridge and take four photos facing North, South, East, and West.


This is the North(-ish) view from the Pont d'Arcole. That big building is l'Hôtel de Ville, and you can see a tiny bit of the Centre Pompidou (modern art museum) on the left between the trees; those little red boxes are the external elevators. I live just beyond this museum on a tiny residential street.

( The rest of the pics are here, along with some bonus stuff! )

Like I mentioned last week, M and I spent the long holiday weekend in Normandy in a quiet little town called Verneuil-sur-Avre. M's sister Jenny came with us, and our friend Courtney came down for a night.



( A bunch of pictures! )

I finally visited the Musée des Arts et Métiers after living practically nextdoor to it for over six months now. I'd been dying to go for a long time, mostly because lord_whimsy once told me it was his favorite museum in Paris. The place is amazing, and while I didn't take a whole lot of pictures, I absolutely had to try to get a halfway decent shot of Clément Ader's incredible bat plane.


There was no way for me to get far enough away from it to get the whole thing in the shot or get a decent composition. Still, I think you can see how beautiful the thing is even from this cramped shot (not to mention the building itself!). I'd heard about this plane so many times before I saw it with my own eyes, I'd sort of forced myself to imagine something much more practical-looking and less fantastical, but I was very pleasantly surprised by how ridiculous and dramatic the design of the thing actually is.

( Two more shots of the bat plane )

This is my last set of photos from my ten days on La Réunion! These are various odds and ends that didn't fit into the other sets.


I hid under this beach umbrella all day and still got sunburned! I was sitting facing the ocean all afternoon, with the sun to my right, and the sunlight reflected off of the sand and burned the side of my face. Two days later I was in Philadelphia with the right half of my face still red, with a wide white space where the earpiece of my sunglasses had been.

( More! Beach, scuba diving, et cetera )

A few days after visiting Salazie, we spent a day and a half in Cilaos, another of the cirques, to do some hiking and sightseeing. We drove all afternoon through winding mountain roads to arrive at our hotel, a nice, quaint place up at the edge of the cirque. By the time we'd settled in and had dinner in the town, it was time to get some sleep for the big day ahead...


This was our view from our hotel room in the morning! We went hiking on that mountain just after breakfast.

( More! )

We went horseback riding in the mountains one morning. I'm actually posting the last photo first, because it's the best...


At about the midway point of our three-hour ride, we arrived at this gorgeous valley where we could see five or six small waterfalls up above as the mountains disappeared into the clouds. That's D on the far right.

( More! )

M's mom, D, and I went paragliding! That's me and my monitor, Lionel, below. Unfortunately it was a cloudy morning so the pictures aren't that great. An interesting thing about all of these new adventure-type experiences I had on La Réunion was that I never quite knew what I was doing or about to do at any given time, since everything was constantly being explained to me in French, usually by multiple people all speaking quickly at me at the same time, so I could never quite keep up; I just kept nodding my head and pretending not to be nervous. Parargliding in French is called le parapente, and I had no idea what that was when M's parents told me I was going to do it. I first pictured something like being pulled behind a boat, but then I heard something about a mountain, and something about jumping off — holy shit! I thought that meant I'd have to jump off of a cliff, bungee-style, and open a parachute on the way down, or something insane like that. It turns out you just jog down a steep incline on top of the mountain with the chute already open, and the wind lifts you up very gently, and you sail down to the beach.


Man, that fisheye lens ain't doin' us no favors. Anyway, when I went skydiving a long time ago, there was a lot to learn before the jump, even though it was a tandem jump and the instructor guy did all the real work. With paragliding, they just shoved us into a van, drove us up the mountain, strapped us in, and told us to run for it. It was really easy, and not nearly as scary as I'd expected; once you're in the air, there's nothing scary at all, but not knowing what to expect during the running and taking off part was a little bit scary in itself.

( More! )