We Love You Wisconsin!!

Boy does time fly! I've been asking myself for the last few weeks whether or not I wanted to update the ol' blog from the moment we left Paris, or just start all over again from today. In the end, I decided it would be best to start on the day that Sara and I got married, as it is the most pivotal day of my life. Also, I've got some pretty cool trips and pictures from those days burning a hole in my cyber-pocket.

But before we begin our mega flashback, I better update everyone on what's going on at the moment. Its pretty much like this: We moved to Milwaukee so I could take a job as an actuary. Who'd a seen that coming? We've been out here for a year and two months now, and are only a few bratwursts short of full naturalization. Check out the cool picture of downtown Milwaukee, I find our city to be super cool...or should I say super freezing? Everything was as normal as could be, and then our precious little Zoe came along last summer, and normal changed to amazing. She has got to be the second most beautiful creation on Earth. The most beautiful, of course, is Sara and the third most beautiful is probably a plateful of Chicago-style pizza.

La renaissance du kasonaparis

After one year, three months and ten days in darkness, I officially declare the renaissance of my blog! Now that we live so far away from home, and have so many pictures and stories we want to share with our friends all around the world, Sara and I have decided this will certainly be the most efficient means. Not only that, but I absolutely love talking about myself. Mostly though, we want to turn this into a travelog ("travelblog" if you will) of our jaunting from here to there and back again. Thus, I will maintain my moniker of "kasonaparis", more as a dream than a locale. Will there someday be a blog titled "Kason revient a Paris"? We can only hope. Until then, happy trails to us!

Kason Quitte Paris

And there you have it. My three and a half months in Paris. Time went by fast, didn't it? Well sometimes I really wondered. I spent my last weekend eating sushi with Bruno and saying good bye to my friends. On Sunday I braved the rain and walked from The Cathedral of Notre Dame to the Eiffel Tower. The Eiffel Tower looked really neat surrounded in clouds and covered with water. that's exactly how it was the first time I ever saw it. I wonder when I will see it next. I had a wonderful time in Paris, and wouldn't hesitate to do it all again, so long as Sara could be with me for the entire time. What a neat city. I'll check in with everybody when I get home tomorrow night. Until then au revoir!

My Good-bye Party

On Friday I was very surprised that my co-workers had arranged for me a good-bye party!! I had no clue that they had done this for me. I was sitting there doing the work thing at my computer and they told me turn around and there on the table was some cake and presents! Presents for me! I was way excited. Bruno and Alexandra had arranged for people to donate money to the fund and had used the money to hook me up big time before I left. Isn't that cool?! They gave me some really cool stuff too; a neat picture of the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty, a mug with the metro map on it, a DVD of a Classic French Movie, a CD done by a popular French artist ("M"), a 2007 Paris calendar on which they had all left messages for me, and an MP3 player that fits directly into the USB port of the computer. It's some really great stuff. I can't believe I had the opportunity to work with such an outstanding group of people while here in Paris. These guys have done so much to make a guy like me feel welcome. They are excellent people. I've gotten to know Bruno really well, and it has been very hard for me to have to say good bye to him. Sorry he's not in any of these pictures, he was the one behind the camera. I don't know, life's full of going from one stage to the next and meeting some good people, but sometimes its harder to say goodbye than others. Yes, I'm super excited to get home and see my wife, more than I could ever say, but I have got to admit, I got a lot closer to my co-workers than I ever thought I would. I owe them a lot. If any of you guys are reading this, thanks again, you made it a wonderful 3 and a half months, keep in touch!!! I guess I ought to say who's who in the pictures. Yann is wearing the blue collar shirt, Patrick is in the grey and blue stripes, Thibault is in pink and Alexandra is in black. These guys are amazing.

The Paris Mosque

My last unkown Paris sight to look at was the Paris Mosque. As you likely know, a mosque is where the members of the Muslim faith go to worship. This explains the big moon and star on the roof there. I'll be honest with you, the mosque wasn't anywhere near as cool as I thought it might be given the hype it often recieves in the tour booklets. Perhaps my mind has been closed by the grandeur of so many of the other churches in the area. It was quite a walk to get there too since I walked there from Nick Flamel's house by the Pompidou Centre, and the mosque is in the South East of Paris next door to the Jardin de Plantes and the Paris Zoo. There was some pretty neat architecture on the outside, very different from the standard Paris church. The spire is 33 meters high, and the church itself was finished in 1926. I went inside to see the gardens and fountains that they have in there, but the fountains weren't running, and they had the gardens roped off. Maybe I just chose a bad day to visit the place. I do like the front door though, its like a piece of the Middle East in the middle of Paris. And who doesn't want to have some of the Middle East? Maybe if I knew more about the muslim faith I would like the mosque more. I do know that the muslims in Paris wear some really cool and colorful clothes. I like them a lot.

The Oldest House in Paris

One of my favorite places I've seen in Paris since Sara left is this house which is the oldest house still in use in the city. Look how cool it looks, like it is just about to topple right over. The house was built in 1407 and has gone through a few changes. This means that next year the house will be celebrating its 600th birthday. Currently it is used as a restraunt that likely has outrageous prices due to its clientele being mostly tourists. That's all fine and great on its own, but once I heard the name of the man who originally owned it, and did a bit more research on him, I started to wonder if there was a bit more to it than just some old mortar. The first inhabitants of this house were none other than Nicholas and Pernella Flamel. The moment I heard that name, the Harry Potter fan in my recognized it as the inventor of the Sorcerer's Stone. Call me a nerd if you want, I can take it with pride. Oddly enought, J. K. Rowling isn't far off in her biography of the Flamels. Historic evidence shows that Nicholas was a nobody, just another loony guy at the time trying to find a way to turn any metal into gold, alchemy. Then he got a hold of some book with ancient Greek, Hebrew and Kabbalistic text in it. He traveled for miles into the Iberic penninsula in search of an interpretation of the book, and while away met some master fellow who claimed to have been taught by the Three Kings from the nativity. Just after Nicholas left his teacher, the master died. No one believed Nicholas when he came back, but it wasn't very much later that the poor Mr. Flamel started donating all sorts of money to causes and living a very comfortable life. He and his wife built fourteen hospitals and three churches, and no one seems to know how they got the money. It has been said that Flamel actually made a material called the Philosopher's stone which enables the holder to turn lead into gold and grants immortality. There is no record of the death of Nicholas and Pernella Flamel. Hmmm... Perhaps the reason the master died after Flamel left is that he no longer had his Philosopher's stone given him by the Three Kings. Hmmm... According to our leading Paris historian, Dan Brown, Nicholas Flamel was the eighth Grand Master of the Priory of Sion. Interesting stuff says I.

Two More Parisian Arches

Having seen the Place de la Republique I continued on in my quest to find the undiscovered during my second to last weekend in Paris. I went up a bit more North to find another one of Paris' arches, this one called the Arc de Triomph de la Porte Saint Martin. This is a lovely arch, but certainly doesn't quite live up to the hype of having such a long name with so many "de"s in it. This arch, and its big sister (Le Arc de Triomph de la Porte Saint Denis) about three blocks to the west were built clear back in the 1640s by good ol' Louis XIV in commemoration of his military victories, thus making them the oldest of Paris' arches. You'll recall that Louis XIV is known as the Sun King and was the master mind of Versailles. He was full of himself enough to have the following inscribed on the arches: "To Louis the Great, for having vanquished the German, Spanish, and Dutch armies: the Dean of the Guild and the Aldermen of Paris." Who hasn't he beat up on? What the heck is an Alderman? There used to be a metro station at this intersection but it was closed during WWII, and now houses Paris' homeless in the winter time. Don't rush to this arch the moment you step off the plane, but if you have an extra three months or so of tourism, its certainly worth a look. According to the internet, the Porte de Saint Denis is better looking, but I didn't know that at the time so didn't take the hike over to take a picture of it. You'll have to make due with this internet special. Apparently Saint Denis' door was the inspiration for the Arc de Triomph and the Manhattan Bridge Arch in New York.

Place de la Republique

After you've been in Paris for a super long time you start to wonder what amazing things there are left to see. For the last three weeks I've been spending my Saturday mornings looking at the map and trying to locate all the neat stuff that I don't want to miss and then setting out to find them. The statue pictured is found at the Place de la Republique, sort of in the North East of Paris. I haven't been up that way much, so I figured I'd go and scope it out. There it was, just as advertised. This is in commemoration of the French Revolution. It was pretty big (the revolution and the statue). I was fixin' to go right up next to it to get a better picture but the road was all full of construction and traffic and I didn't want to get hit by a car or a steam roller and die. Its a cool monument though, you really can't tell how big it is in this picture. I'm not sure what that nice lady is holding up in her hand there, but it was large. Some kind of a leaf or something. Wikipedia doesn't have an article about this so I probably ought to look it up elsewhere, but I'm not gonna.

Un Lion à Paris

Now that the pictures are at the point where Sara is no longer in Paris, it'll be a lot of landmarks and a lot less Kason. Stop cheering. The first weekend that I had alone I made the long metro trip to the southern part of the city, even more south than Montparnasse, to get a picture of the lion that was featured in the book that Sara and I bought at the Louvre. You remember that book I mentioned in the blog a while back, Un Lion à Paris? Anyhow, at the end of the book the lonely lion finds a pedestal in the southern part of Paris and sits on it to remain for a long time safe and sound. I decided I'd go look of him, and there he was at the Place Denfert-Rochereau in the middle of the street. The statue is actually a copy of a much larger original statue located in Belfort, France. The sculptor of the original is none other than notre ami Frédéric Bartholdi, the designer of The Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. The statue in Belfort is 22 meters long (pictured in black and white below) and sits just underneath the castle in the town. Bartholdi carved the lion in blocks and then had each block moved to Belfort individually and reassembled there in the correct order. The Belfort version is dedicated to the defense of the area around Belfort from 40000 invading Prussians in 1870. General Denfert-Rochereau fought back the army with only 17000 men over the space of 103 days. The copy in Paris is dedicated to the defense of the nation over the same years. Pretty cool story says I. The Paris version of the lion isn't anywhere near as big as the one in Belfort, but is still a neat find in the streets of Paris.

Le papillon (Starts with LP, hmmm..)

Just as we were leaving the park, this butterfly started to get really friendly with Sara. I think it liked the way she smelled or something. I can't blame it. The thing kept landing on her head. Then it would fly away for a while and come back and sit on her head. Isn't that weird? As we all know, Sara isn't too excited about having big bugs crawling on her, even if it is a pretty little butterfly, so she wasn't very happy when I told her to hold still while I took a picture. I really like this picture, and I think I am going to make copies of it and put thm on the walls of our house. It's sort of like a little walk through dream land. La la la. This is the last picture that I took while Sara was here. She left the next morning. How sad. Sorry, from now on the pictures on the blog just aren't going to be as pretty as they used to be. Nor as plentiful.

LP

The park is surrounded by a great big black and gold fense. At all the gates there is are the big letters LP, which could stand for any number of things. My bet is that it is meant to stand for Levallois-Perret, but then again, it could stand for the name of the park, Le Planchette. Or, maybe I'm trying to think to hard, and it simply stands for Le Parc. At any rate, it is a great place. Like I've mentioned about the parks here before, this one has a chunk of it set aside and fenced off for the kids to play in, while the adults enjoy a leisurely stroll about the area and look at the sculptures and stuff. The day we were there taking pictures one of the kids had managed to escape and was playing with his remote control boat in the pond at the center of the park. I really hope that we can have a kid someday and that it has a remote control boat so that I can play with it (the boat). I really liked how the kid would use the boat to sneak up on unsuspecting water pigeons and then try to run 'em over. It was great fun. The park's not very far from my apartment, just beyond the Levallois hotel de ville, and on my way to work. I walk through it every morning. I'm gonna miss this little place.

Le Parc Le Planchette

The first thing I did after I unpacked my bags on my first day in Paris was go for a walk around Levallois, the suburb I live in. While doing so I came across this beautiful park. I was pretty excited to show it to Sara when she came out nine weeks later. I did, and she loved it. While Sara was out here I went to work on the weekdays and she spent one day in the museums and the next day in this park reading and drawing and otherwise relaxing in the shade. She really liked this park. The city takes very good care of it, keeping the flowers pretty and the dogs out. My favorite part of the park is this twisty hedge thing hidden away on the far end of the park. If you ask Sara what her favorite part of her trip was, I'll bet she'll say that she liked the parks the best. We took a lot of pictures here, I'll probably post a few more. You'll have to come check out the rest some other time.