misAdventures of Workmonkey 3.0

Paris, France -- In case you didn't read my last entry, let me reassert that I LOVE Paris. I love it even more than last time I wrote. This is the kind of city I would create if I was in the business of creating cities. This city personifies beauty in everything it does and says. And, I need to say, that the women here are the most incredible creations I have ever set eyes upon. There is a certain style, femininity, spunk and look that these women have that inspire me to sell all of my possessions, learn French, and move here. Take the perfect girl, multiply her by ten, and you have an average French girl. I think you have to fill out a beauty application and submit a picture just to move here. And the ratio of women to men here is inspirational .... It isn't the 300 men to every woman you find in the depths of Silicon Valley. It is reverse, so competition is less. And the way they talk .... I melt like M&Ms on the dashboard of a car sitting in a parking lot during a Louisiana summer. Sorry, whatever American girls might be reading this, but this is a different class (I am not saying it is the kind of class I can compete in). Another interesting aspect is how thin everyone is here, both men and women ... I don't know why yet, as I see them eating a McDonalds just like us .... It will be sad to leave.
Thus far, one of the more intriguing things Reyes and I have seen is called the Catacombs. This is a series of tunnels and quarries underneath a number of blocks in Paris that were used to store the skeletal remains of millions of the French dug up from the overflowing graves during the early 1800s. It is a darkly lit series of tunnels lined with millions and millions of bones and skulls--all neatly stacked ontop of each other about five feet high and ten feet deep. Amazing. They don't distance you from the bones either ... you can go right up and touch them. Play catch with a skull if you had the guts. On the way out, they search your bag to ensure you aren't bringing home a free souvenir. It is stunning to see how many bones, and consequently dead people, there are in this one little tunnel in one city in one country in one part of the world. Puts in perspective how much life there has been throughout history--and how I will end up as a pile of bones just like the rest of them one day. Not really a depressing thought. You are joining a good crowd, and lots of people are in the same place.
The Arc de Triumphe and Eiffel Tower was kind of lame as expected (the Pier 39 of Paris) .... The Louvre is big and kind of overwhelming, I saw the Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo just so I could tell you all that I did. Some of the other stuff was more interesting. You can only do so much museum work in one day before every painting starts to look the same. One thought I did have is how almost all this art was work commissioned by Aristocracy, and thus most of the paintings were made by old white men of older white men in court .... lots of religious paintings commissioned by the Church ... not a wide spectrum of diversity represented by these works of art .... who represented the peasants and slaves?
Tomorrow, off to Belgium (Brussels and Antwerp) on the way to Amsterdam ....
Until then,
a man in love with every Parisian woman