The Best Day Ever

Today was about as perfect a day as one could hope for. I was feeling able to walk around a lot... I visited the famous Paris-Sorbonne University, the best garden I've found ever, a random art show, the antiques district, and (finally) the Eiffel tower. I took over a thousand pictures with my camera and its battery actually died right at the end of the night :P (hard to do with a DSLR)

It's hard to do all this justice, and I'll probably come back and add more description later. Meanwhile, enjoy.

Morning

I woke up and figured out my SIM card, now I have 1GB of data which (supposedly) works everywhere in the EU. Lebara is just now rolling out the system and I gather I'm their beta tester. We'll see.

Then I went looking for lunch and I found it at this little Greek place that always has a super long line. It's take-out, very cheap, and you get crepes in the shape of giant ice cream cones. Very nice. Off to the Sorbonne. I checked out all the independent bookstores (there are many) and talked my way in through the guards to get to the official bookstore. You'll see me wearing a Sorbonne sweatshirt later on. The university is pretty beautiful.

Afternoon

This guy got a song stuck in my head all day

That's just outside Le Jardin de Luxembourg, which is the most beautiful garden I've ever seen. It'll be hard to convince me otherwise. You just have to be there.

I must have taken fifty pictures of those sailboats, trying to get good shots. It was at about this point that my camera battery went to 2/3 bars. Uh oh. I'd forgotten to charge it the night before, so it had already taken about 1000 pictures at this point on a single charge... but no matter!

I spent some time setting up that flower shot, getting the focal length right and standing precariously on a chair to line everything up. It's cool, I survived.

Late afternoon

I completely randomly and accidentally wandered into an arts show, in a beautiful location.

I asked for permission on this one and tried to get everything in the frame... the painter is in the far right... he wouldn't stand still :( But it's a pretty interesting workbench.

This young lady sold me a dinosaur sketch

after I asked about her process -- etching with acid onto copper plates to form dinosaur printing presses -- and we compared notes on how best to draw dinosaurs, which I do have some experience with, thank you very much.

It's probably almost dinner time now

but I'm not eating because I'm in the antiques area of Saint-Germaine. I guess you could do this if you are tired of reading a book

or buy copies of famous letters from history

or a pair of dragon bookends for 650 euros (not shown for fear of damaging it by looking at it). Or, hello, a rhino hidden under a table,

Back outside I'm not the only one who doesn't know where to go next

but I really love the lighting on these trees so I keep taking pictures of them

And other things too. For example, this is a window

this is both a mirror and a window

and, ready for it, this is red. Plus white I guess.

I think I'm getting too sleepy to do this properly. Sorry. I'll stop being silly.

Evening

The Seine is still overflowing

I went to the royal gardens, which aren't as nice as Luxembourg, I'll have you know

but there are BIRDS and so I took another fifty pictures of them

food fight!

stretching those wings... (very fast in reality of course)

and this was pure luck really.

Down to 1/3 battery on the camera. Oh dear. Better start limiting myself to one picture a minute or something.

Late evening

I decided to go to the Eiffel tower just as the sun was setting, to try and get the best lighting for photos. It succeeded spectacularly. Just as I was getting to the base of the tower, the sun was breaking through the clouds -- isn't this pretty epic? --

and when I got to the top I was basically saying oh my god oh my god and taking pictures as fast as possible because lighting like this doesn't last. I think it lasted about 15 minutes, the only semi-sunny portion of the day, but the best part was less than five.

Let's be honest, it doesn't get much better than this. This one is more boring but still pretty cool:

It's hard to describe the labyrinthine complexity of this structure, but this is the closest I can come:

After that excitement was over I went down to the ground and found the perfect spot for the "fireworks" (which happens on the hour for five minutes beginning at 9pm). I think I was the only one who planned to take a picture of this, haha, and I had three minutes to spare before it started...

But I didn't realize that the video on my phone has different focal length than its stills (so my cropping was off). And the camera was taking pictures so fast that you'd only see a few lights at a time. Finally I got it to 1/6 of a second shutter speed, which is fast enough that it's not really blurry but long enough that you can see a lot of lights...

OK, just a few shots to end with, and after this my battery died:

P.S. my phone camera actually has a wider mm lens so you can see more when you're right underneath, but I don't think the colours are as nice.

So that was The Best Day Ever in pictures. I hope you enjoyed it. I also hope you didn't just skim to the bottom. :( Bonus points if you noticed the Sorbonne sweatshirt, haha.