Posted on 12/19/2004 2:45:57 PM PST by ddtorque
Do both. There's an overnight train from Paris to Rome.
Overnight trains are huge fun IMHO.
I've been to both. Paris in 1995 and both in 1996. Both are worth a visit but I would give a slight edge to Rome. The assessment angkor gave of Paris is pretty accurate I would say. Paris has no equal of the Vatican which is a must see. One suggestion if you do go to the Vatican is to go early in the morning around 7 am when it opens up before the tourists decend. Seeing the sun shine through the entrance is wonderful and you get a much better sense of the church without the crowds. Going up to the roof and the dome is also great. The Vatican museum is also another days worth of touristing and that is how you see the Sistine chapel. Traffic in both places is crazy. However both cities can be very romantic in their own ways. Both being tourist magnets you get lowlifes in both places. Be wary and cautious in both places.
Do you know the cost of the Paris-Rome train?
Thanks for the good input.
Hmmm, the ACLU attacks at every Christmas (and, of course, on every other day of the year.) The friend of my enemy is my enemy...
LOL!
Bat Ye'or can tell you about France. For Italy, read Oriana Fallaci "The Rage and the Pride."
Don't go to Paris and give the traitors your money...
Rome is magic! Rome is sultry, and humbling, and delicious, and maddening, and much more. It is walking in the footsteps of greatness, it's drinking from a renaissance fountain that's fed by a 2000 year old aqueduct, it's confronting the naked spirtuality of hundreds of millions of faithful, and wondering about
the opulence of a religion that preaches to the poor; Rome is tacky and filled with tourists; Rome is authentic, and full of delightful alleys to explore; Rome is the aroma of fine cooking.
Rome is Eternal.
http://www.alleuroperail.com/artesia-night-paris-rome.htm
First class is pricey but you get your own cabin.
Second class is usually the Pullman arrangement, your seats convert to two beds, one down, one up.
Both are fun IMO.
Just finished it. Florence didn't sound too appealing.
Thanks. You should be on their tourism board!
Thanks. I bookmarked it. I assume the prices are Euros?
Don't deprive yourself of Paris due to politics. If you want to go, go. It is worth a look.
So spend 3 days in Paris, hit the highlights like the Louvre and Montmarte/Sacre Cour, and eat out every chance you get. Go to the Pere Lachaise Cemetry where Jim Morrison is buried, but it also has the most incredible burial crypts you'll ever see anywhere.
Take the second class train to Rome, you won't regret it if you've never done an overnight run.
Then do Rome.
Actually that would be roughly my personal itin if I were to go with wifey, since Earthdweller has made Rome sound so appealing.
US dollars.
Recommended.
Amazon carries it.
The man who got inside al-Qa'eda
(Filed: 25/08/2003)
George Walden reviews Inside al Qaeda by Mohamed Sifaoui
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2003/08/31/bosif24.xml
Mohamed Sifaoui is an Algerian Muslim journalist who became incensed by the war of terror waged by Islamic fundamentalists against the Algerian people. Not a few of his friends, relatives and colleagues perished at their hands, and before leaving for Paris he himself was nearly killed in an attack on his newspaper.
The combination of cowardice and indulgence shown to the terrorists by bien pensant opinion in France heightened his disgust. To expose the truth he decided to pose as a terrorist sympathiser, and his book is a diary of the three months he spent infiltrating a Parisian cell of al-Qa'eda under an assumed name.
The portraits he provides are not of the suicide bombers or gunmen, but of the recruiters, brain-washers and organisers behind them, yet the book conveys a convincing picture of the terrorist milieu. And a dismal picture it is. The members of the network emerge as a bunch of inadequates and infantile fanatics, although they are not the less fearsome for that.
Inevitably one thinks of the low life who staff the IRA, but it is a false comparison. The people Sifaoui writes about are on an even more debased cultural and psychological level. By their very nature, their grievances against the world can never be removed, and they are capable of pretty well anything.
Like French versions of the shoebomber Richard Reid, they are often converts to fundamentalism with a history of criminality, who converse in brain-dead religious slogans, their minds terminally rotted by ghetto thinking. "They're the ones who push people to commit attacks by suspecting all Muslims are like that", one of them fumes about the immigration officials who checked him on a trip to London. The fact that they let him in, although his passport was forged, adds piquancy to his indignation.
Sifaoui's chief contact in the cell was Karim Bourti, an Algerian Islamic activist stationed in Paris whom the French briefly imprisoned for associating with terrorists, before letting him out. Naturally he continued living in France, and went on with his work. A mixture of DIY imam, recruiter, fund-raiser, safe-house keeper and public apologist for the cause, he comes across as a truly repellent character, at once vicious, sickeningly pious, and hugely self-important. "Collecting money without working, stuffing himself from morning to night, while encouraging kids to go and get killed thousands of miles from home" is Sifaoui's description.
The gullibility of French opinion on terrorism, by no means exclusive to the Left, exasperates Sifaoui, and one can see why. A fundamentalist who offers religious training to prepare young men for "martyrdom" presents himself as a pacifist when he is interviewed by the DST (the French MI5), who let him go and assure him that he is "a good Muslim". Public funds and premises provided for Muslim "charity work" are diverted to terrorist ends, and false papers are provided on request by Muslim sympathisers in the local mairie, or in other official positions.
There is a grim irony in the fact that, though Sifaoui is maddened by French anxiety to excuse terrorism, it is Britain that he sees as the real "sanctuary for hard-core Islamism". "Don't forget that all the brains are here in London", a British fundamentalist tells him. Somehow it is strange to think of the sinister clown Abu Hamza being revered in Islamist circles in Paris.
Sifaoui's book has sold 60,000 copies in France. It is to be hoped that its readers include President Chirac and his Foreign Minister, Dominique de Villepin, and that the book will have had an educative effect on French thinking, though I wouldn't bet on it. The French book L'Effoyable Imposture (The Dreadful Fraud), which claimed that the 11 September attack was the work of the Jews and the CIA, sold over 100,000.
Sifaoui reminds us that the terrorist attack on the Paris Metro in 1995 was seen by many in France as a plot by the Algerian military government to discredit Islamic exiles. (The "brothers" - the terrorists - resented this attempt to exculpate them, since it detracted from their glory in the operation.) Given the French neurosis about America, one can well imagine where the finger would point should fundamentalists succeed in a new outrage in France. Unless the French authorities take a tougher line with the aiders and abetters of terrorism than they appear to do in this book, sadly - as in Britain - such an atrocity seems only a matter of time.
Thanks. Maybe I will do both ... or Stockholm! :)
Lord forgive me. I didn't know the depts of my hatred for them ran so deep.
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