Paris: Days 3 & 4

Day 3
After wandering around an ethnic neighborhood for half an hour trying to find museum passes, we made it to the Museé d'Orsay. It's full of Impressionist art, and there were some really great works by Renoir, Rodin, and Seurat. I discovered two new artists that I really liked. I didn't make it all the way through the place - it was huge and I got saturated. Just as we were about to leave, they evacuated the place because someone had left a bag in one of the rooms, and they were afraid it was a bomb. We waited in a short line because we had passes, but if I had been one of the people waiting in the line which wound around the plaza and probably took 3 hours to get through, I would have been angry at having to leave. My favorite part of the museum was actually outside of it, on the plaza. There was a set of statues of women, six of them, I think. They looked so awesome. Each was from a different continent, and they looked powerful and capable. I wanted to be these women. Click the picture so you can see it full size, and fully appreciate how awesome these women looked.

After the Museé d'Orsay, we walked deep into the Latin Quarter. It was a lot better because it felt more local, and there were fewer tourists. We got great gelatto and wandered around for several hours before stopping by a Texas Bar! We thought it was so funny that they had a Texas Bar in the middle of Paris, so we went inside. It was early, so there was just an Irish bartender playing video games with one of the regulars while a few more looked on. Pretty boring, but it was neat to see.


Day 4
Today we went to the Louvre. What an amazing amazing place. The Mona Lisa, the Winged Victory, and Venus de Milo are all there, and were all packed with crowds of tourists. My favorite sculpture in the world - Cupid & Psyche, by Canova - is there, and it was so wonderful to see it in person. The musuem is in what used to be the French Royal Palace, and they preserved the apartments of their last ruler. They were really sumptuous and beautiful. Underground, there's also some of the remnants of the Medieval Palace which stood at the same site. Most of it was destroyed, but it was so awesome to sit in the room of a castle from several centuries ago. It was cool and dark, I sat there and wrote awhile. Not too many of the tourists ventured down to the room I was in. I could get the feeling of how it must have been to live in rooms like this. The Louvre also contains the stone which Hammurabi's Code is inscribed in. I saw several Michelangelo statues and tons of my favorite Italian painters. I also saw a lot of great French sculpture that I was unfamiliar with, but really enjoy.

That evening, we had reservations for dinner in a restaurant on the first floor of the Eiffel Tower. As we got off the metro, the Tower was sparkling with strobe lights that go off for 10 minutes at the top of every hour. It was really beautiful. The view was spectacular, especially on the side with the river - I must have taken two dozen pictures.

Dinner was excellent, as well. Pretty expensive for me, but it was good. Lee's dad told him to order a big appetizer for all of us, so we were brought a huge tray of seafood - oysters, snails, crab, and shrimp. It was excellent. Then, at the end of the meal, our waiter brought us a bottle of chardonnay. We weren't sure if he felt sorry for the poor kids who couldn't afford to order alcohol, or if they'd opened it and someone changed their mind, or if he just liked us, but we were thankful nonetheless. We didn't get to finish it - we had to leave in a hurry to catch the last lift down.