Taking on the French: Montmarte

When Reanna was here we spent a day out at Montmarte, which is a really nice area, full of tourists, but if you get just a little bit away from the church there are all these cool little streets, and it really does feel like you are in a separate city from Paris. We started off with the Sacre Coeur or Sacred Heart church, which is the one on top of the hill and because Paris is so flat, you can see it from everywhere. This church was built after the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, which the French lost, to remember the dead. We went up the 237 stairs to the top of the dome and on a clear day you are meant to be able to see for 30 kms, but the day we went it was unfortunately pretty smoggy so the view wasn't nearly that good. The stairs on the way up smelled a lot like pee, I don't know why, and whether it was actually pee, I can't really understand why people would feel the need to pee on church stairs? The inside of the church is pretty impressive with a really awesome mosaic of Jesus above the altar. Unfortunately I couldn't take a photo of it, as you aren't really allowed to inside the church. I always feel a bit bad taking flash photos in churches, especially when there are people who seem to be praying.

After Sacre Coeur we went to the Dali museum which was full of Dali's sketches and weird sculptures, that was pretty cool to see the bizarro Dali stuff. I particularly liked the photos of Dali and his moustache in various poses along with his responses to various questions, which you will have to go see for yourself as I didn't take any photos of them, the only one of have was taken by Reanna.

After Dali we went to the sex museum, actually it was called the Musee de l'Erotisme, but really it was a sex museum. There was "art" from Africa and Asia which I'm sure you can all imagine, as well as silent, black and white, 1920's porn films running on TV's. It was all a bit weird, and here I really noticed France's different attitude to sex and stuff from our straight-laced English background. I think that if this museum was in Australia there would definitely be an over 18s age limit. Not here, whilst we were inside what I think were a Spanish couple came in with their two teenage sons, I felt a bit strange being in the same room as them, but they really didn't seem to care. These Europeans are obviously much more free than us English speakers.

On the same street as the museum, almost next door, is the Moulin Rouge which I have to go to whilst I'm here. It is really expensive and apparently the only other people in there are other tourists, but I reckon it would be fun. In the day time the windmill looked pretty fake and a bit tacky, but us tourists love that sort of stuff!