bonjour! and merci for checking in on us. now, before i go into the delicious details about our voyage (and before i use up all my french vocab), let me bring you up to speed with a couple updates:

first, my wife and lovely assistant (who are the same person) and i have noticed quite a few new visitors to theblumes.co lately — from around the world! that’s great news!! we’re thrilled you dropped by, and we love to hear from you. so, if you’re a regular reader or a newbie, please drop us a comment at the bottom of this post.

don’t speak much english? no problem! we’d love to get your comments in spanish, italian, portuguese, japanese, or tagalog. for this blog, we’ll even make an exception for french. reading it we can manage. but, if you’re telling yourself (in french) “o, i du ope zhay will weespond to moi in zhe byootiful fwench lawnguage,” i’m sorry. the answer, as the french say, is non.

secondly, blume photography is now booking weddings for 2009! know anyone who’s getting married? be sure to send ’em our way. we can’t wait to meet the next couple whose love story we get to watch unfold through our lenses.

and our current pricing is sure to stimulate every couple’s economy, no matter how small. your referral could be the best gift they get!

and finally, happy groundhog day! i hear that phil (the funny-lookin’, furry one) predicted another six weeks of winter. so, here’s hopin’ for a little snow in georgia! (okay, eileen tells me there may be some remaining confusion. i’m talking about the funny-lookin’, furry phil that is a groundhog! not me.)

and now the moment you’ve been waiting for… bienvenue en france.

france — and paris in particular — has become one of my favorite urban travel destinations. although i’ve only visited the city of lights in winter, i have been pleasantly surprised by how warm my experiences have been. (also, friends have told me the city smells like sewage in summer; so i guess the odor-neutralizing effect of cold air is another perk of december travel.)

in truth, i have found french people to be very kind and helpful, shattering all the snobbish stereotypes. then there is the city of lights itself — regal and elegant beyond description. where else will you find a chandelier in a subway station? nowhere have i seen so many perfectly preserved, outlandishly extravagant mansions lining a street, one after another. the sheer size of the architecture dwarfs you.

and then there is my favorite part… the food! no one does food like the french. (wait, i’ll be right back. i have to wipe the drool off my shirt.)

…okay, and we’re back.

as i was saying, if france has a reputation for style, it comes by it honestly. but the best part of this particular french getaway was the chance eileen and i had to rendezvous with some good friends.

david (a.k.a. “master master david”) is a doctoral student in georgia tech’s engineering program in metz. so, soon-to-be “master master doctor david” and his wife, susan, invited us to spend some time with them. they gave us a great workout, climbing the 10-or-so flights of stairs to their attic apartment several times a day. but it was well worth it — just to enjoy a brief vacation from our vacation, to feel at home and not “at hotel.”

metz is a small town (population about 124,000), but with quite a history. once a roman city, metz’ geographic position makes it strategic, but very difficult to capture. out of countless attacks, few have successfully overtaken it. perhaps the best known conquerors: attila the hun and george patton.

metz is also home to the second tallest cathedral in europe, from floor to ceiling — the cathedral of saint etienne.

another saint in france is its cheeeeeeese! we fasted most the day to prepare for this feast of cheese fondu. amazing!

the christmas market in metz was equally scrumptious. sadly, eileen does not like chocolate. oh, well. more for me. (yes, those are sheets of dark chocolate, piled at least a foot high… stretching for meters.)

also part of the lovely christmas decor — i’m not making this up — were quaint little window displays in which, nestled gently in artificial snow and surrounded by angels, were boxes of do-it-yourself botox complete with syringe replacements. eek! makes all the provocative christmas lingerie seem pretty tame.

once in paris, eileen and i crashed in a very affordable hostel near notre dame. my sister advised us about the lodging after she stayed there last summer, documenting cathedrals for an internship.

we were surprised when we asked for directions to notre dame and got blank stares in return. “which one?” the puzzled locals would ask. “the only one with a freakin’ hunchback in the belfry!” i wanted to shout back. (after hours of traveling, i was a little unhinged.) thankfully, i kept the sentiment to myself. as it turns out, there are about a million “our ladies” in paris (and i don’t just mean at the moulin rouge).

notre dame is not the biggest cathedral in paris, nor the most splendid. in fact, if it weren’t for victor hugo’s classic, it probably would have been demolished a couple times by now. but something about its ribbed vaults and gothic artifice makes it, to me, the most haunting — and my favorite.

the greatest thing about europe is how cheap all the attractions are. only in a city where every other building is older than our entire nation can a ticket to the world’s best museum cost less than an order of french fries.

besides housing virtually every important work of art or artifact you’ve heard of (i almost choked when i walked into an inconspicuous corner and bumped into the rosetta stone!), the museum itself is a priceless gem. originally the palace of french royalty, its floors and ceilings are as grand as the paintings on its walls. it seemed to me i could wander its corridors for days without seeing half its rooms.

in this sculpture, man symbolically vanquishes evil… with a soda can. (history’s first coca-cola ad.)

at least a couple french women are trying to be more modest. or are they just comparing busts (in the sculptural sense of the word, of course)?

my favorite exhibit at the louvre, hands down, is its vast collection of egyptian artifacts. not until my first visit to the museum, when i saw firsthand how great that ancient civilization must have been, did i begin to understand how temporary — and likely short-lived — our civilization will be.

my advice: if you’re lookin’ for something a little more meaningful than culture and a little more real than nation, consider a different kind of kingdom.

try to find the figure walking on level one of the eiffel tower; then find a figure down on ground level, and you might get some sense of scale. my first time to paris, i actually went ice skating on a rink that occupied one side of the tower’s first level.

from up here, you get a sweeping view of the city of lights. in the distance, you can see notre dame… which we ended up walking all the way back to after missing our bus. oh, well. c’est la vie.