I like Paris!

I've decided that I'm OK with Paris. I think I still like London more, as large cities go, but today's journey outside the central part of Paris showed me that it's not half bad, once you get out of the grandiose boulevard section. Today, on Ashley's suggestion, I headed to the Sacre Coeur which is a church on a hill in the northern part of the city (close to Moulin Rouge, actually, which according to Ashley is a small thing and a dissappointment, so I didn't bother trying to find it).You weren't allowed to take pictures inside, but it has a lovely mosiac on the ceiling over the alter that someone else broke the rules to take a picture of, see below.

The area around the church is a great mess of old, narrow streets that are currently filled with tourist cafes and portrait artists, also for tourists. It was still great to walk around, though, and surreptitiously listen to music coming from the piano bars. One guy had a pretty good stride jazz style going for a while.

After that, there was much metro-ing around the city to find out that a) the Picasso museum is closed on Tuesdays and b) the modern art museum is hard to find at the end of the day when you're sick of finding things (I'll try again tomorrow). I did find a Chinese-area-studies and Chinese-language bookstore, though, so I took a break in there for a while to be around things that I understood for a change! They had an English version of the Cambridge History of China in one volume, very nice...but I figured that it's definitely not something I wanted to be lugging around Europe for the rest of my trip. That, and it was a 91 euro that I didn't need to spend :)