We are just wrapping up the last day of our trip. We just finished packing, and even with the stuff we’ve bought along the way we have room left in our bags.
Despite Randi coming down with a cold yesterday, and myself this morning, we have had a great time in Paris. Yesterday we visited, in order, the Orsay, Le Invalid (armory museum and crazy topography maps), Napoleon’s tomb, and the Rodin museum. We finished the day with a picnic on the Seine and a nighttime bike ride around Paris. Actually, we spent the whole day using a new bike rental system that is cheap, convenient, and while a bit scary at times, hands down the best way to experience the city.
Today we visited the Louvre, which, along with the Rodin was our favorite art museum of the trip. It is a gigantic building and packed with amazing paintings. We wish we could stay another day and go back tomorrow, in part because our colds were kicking our butts so we left for an early lunch of delicious Ramen soup.
After lunch and a short rest in our room we were off to L’Orangerie, a museum which reminded me of an interesting story. Monet was commissioned to paint an allegory, but when he received word that his wife had fallen ill he left before it was complete and it had to be wallpapered instead (thanks Woody Allen). This joke is actually quite on point for this museum, as it’s main attraction is Monet,s Water Lillies, which is actually a number of large paintings that fill up two rooms. They are treated with much pomp and circumstance, but we found them completely devoid of any merit as anything more than a pleasant wallpaper. Much of the Orsay, as well, fails to cause an impact after many of the other museums we’ve seen.
After admiring the craft-less scribbles of people who have been thrust upon the public as artists by a self-ordained intellectual elite, we were off to Sainte-Chappelle, a beautiful little jewel box of a church that, like everything else worth looking at on this continent, was covered in scaffolding. This really isn’t a good time to visit if you want to see beautiful historic buildings, although if you are a scaffold enthusiast buy your plane tickets immediately as I am sure that it will all be taken down as soon as they receive word that we are leaving.
We then climbed to the top of Notre-Dame, which was very cool (and scaffold free), ate a grec (giant gyro with fries on top, best thing ever), and watched a bunch of Parisians play a version of lawn bowling called petanque in the most charming, and tourist free, square in Paris.
I am too tired to place all the photos, so I’ll just leave them all at the end. We’ll see you soon back in the states!
p.s. WordPress crashes every time I try to add photos, but stay tuned
