Paris Pictures

I'm trying a different format for the Paris pictures. I'll embed a few of my favorites directly in the blog. The rest you can get by the slide show I'm including.



Here's a view from Andrew & Ann's apartment. I think this turned out to be my favorite picture from the whole trip. This is what I was attempting to take when Andrew photo bombed me (first pic of the slideshow).

Here's the Louvre at night.  Andrew took us on a tour of the city the first night, so we got to see a lot of the sights lit up at night.

Eiffel at night...

This picture is pretty similar to the first one above, but it's shot at a focal length that's closer to what you'd see with your eyes, so the perspective is more correct.  The Eiffel was really this big from Ann & Andrew's balcony.

Eiffel during the day.

Another favorite.

We went and saw the Arc de Triumph. 

Here's the view towards the Louvre from the top of the Arc.

After the Arc we walked down the Champs Elysees.  This picture tickles me.  There's a very french guy sitting at a Cafe, next to the McDonalds "McCafe".  I like to imagine that he's very disgusted with the situation.

So there's a pretty sweet story about our entrance into the Louvre, ask me or Lindsay about it if I haven't told you already.  The take home lesson from the story though is that a whole lot of tourists will stand in a line just because it's there.  You should question lines before you stand in them.  Anyway, lots of incredible stuff inside.  Everyone (us included) beelined to the Mona Lisa.  The room was packed.

A very small section of the line we side stepped to get in...

There's some more pictures of the Lovure inside the slideshow, if you're interested.  After we left the Louvre we went for a walk in the Tuillerres, it started raining on us.  Luckily we had brought umbrellas.

There were tons of McDonalds in Paris, and they all looked like this inside...packed.  American culture:1, French culture: 0

That's it!  Check out the slideshow for more.  If your monitor resolution is having trouble with the width of these I'd view the slideshow and try it fullscreen.

London Pictures

So I've finally sorted through the London pictures.  I took a lot, and I've picked out about 40 to post here.  I decided to try posting the pictures to blogger rather than facebook, as facebook mongles pictures, and I've been meaning to update this thing for a while.  Anyway, here we go...


Airplane ride

Lindsay in Paddington Station
Kensington Palace/Gardens


Random old churches in the London Bridge area.
I paid 30 pence to use a public restroom. It was worth every...pence...I guess. Some poor schmuck was trying to get in but couldn't make exact change. My thought is that if you're going to bar public urination, you should provide free public restrooms.
Here's Lindsay in the National Portrait gallery. If you look closely you can see the beginnings of a stink eye formulating on the face of the soon-to-inform-me-that-photography-is-not-allowed-in-the-National-Portrait-gallery employee at the desk.
Changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. Place was crazy packed. This solemn event was performed to the Austin Powers theme song. No lie.
Lindsay loves the red telephone booths, so we had to pose her at pretty much everyone we came across.
Westminster Chapel
A few more of Buckingham Palace
British taxis are adorable. Britain's taxi's resemble real taxi's in the same quaint way that Britain's spoken English resembles real English.
I think this is some kind of supreme court building.
Westminster Abbey. This is an awful attempt at an HDR image, that I shot handheld. I know it's awful. Anyway.
More Westminster Abbey. This place was arguably the coolest building of the whole trip. The inside was incredible, and did not permit photography.
Big Ben!
London Eye
Ben
Here's a bunch of school kids mobbing the gate at Downing street.
Another phone booth!
Saint Paul's Cathedral
Lindsay having tea our last morning
Done. Wow. Picasa offers a wonderfully streamlined interface for sending an image out of Picasaweb into Blogger. A single image. It was incredibly painful though to embed the full gallery into this post. I must be doing something wrong, but if I don't figure out what it is the Paris installment will have to be done in a different format.