February 29, 2012 - Paris day 2

            

Walking around Paris

Walking along the Seine

    My day started off beautifully with a breakfast at the hotel.  It was the breakfast to triumph over all other breakfasts (or at least all European breakfasts.  Nothing can compare to a hearty American breakfast of pancakes/waffles/French toast.  I’ve been dreaming about an American breakfast ever since I came here).  But the breakfast at the hotel was delicious.  I think I ate a month’s worth of carbs in that one meal.  I had a chocolate-filled croissant, mini-crepes (ahhhh soooo good!!  Filled with jam or nutella), mini bananas, cheese (kinda strong stuff, but still good), orange juice, hot chocolate (which is a lot thicker and way more chocolatey than American hot chocolate), bread that was half-brownie and half yellow-cake, and some chocolatey cereal wonder.  I still dream about that breakfast.

Ahhhh....beautiful

                After a fantastic breakfast we headed over to Notre Dame and explored the cathedral.  It wasn’t as grand as some of the cathedrals I’ve seen thus far in my travels, but the outside was beautiful with all its reliefs.  We wanted to climb Notre Dame to see the gargoyles, but it didn’t open till 1. 

Notre Dame

Inside Notre Dame

Rose Window inside Notre Dame

                We headed over to La Conciergerie where Marie Antoinette was held prisoner.  The beginning of La Conciergerie had a modern art exhibit filled with displays and works with animals.  It actually started off pretty cool, with a house made out of black feathers, a mobile of an owl in flight, a weirdo whale chilling on a man’s back, and the coolest giraffe head that was completely knitted.  Then it got creepy.  Super creepy.  It had a spiral net reaching from the ceiling to the ground filled with live flies, a video of about 40 vultures chowing down on animal carcasses at a table, a unicorn pelt nailed to a wall, snakes hanging from tree branches, and other creeptastic things. 

Unicorn pelt thing...kinda cool, right?...

   

Knitted giraffe!

This one was kinda cool...and weird...

An interactive black feather house

Tracing an owl in flight

 We booked it out of the creepy animal area and into the next creepy area – the dungeon cells where prisoners were kept.  The cells had interesting displays intended to recreate what the cells would have really looked like back when they were in use – complete with some of the creepiest wax figures I’ve ever seen.  And to go along with the creepers in the cells were disturbing descriptions of how they would kill prisoners.  I won’t disgust you with the details, but just be glad you weren’t a member of the upper class during the French Revolution.

A really creepy recreation of Marie in her cell

                After that we hit up the Sainte-Chapelle where we saw some of the most stunning stain-glass windows in the world.  It’s actually the most extensive collection of 13^th century stain-glass in the world.  It was a fantastic rectangular chapel covered with stain-glass from floor to ceiling on each wall. 

Rose Window in Sainte-Chapelle

Sainte-Chapelle

Next up was the Pantheon, where Victor Hugo (author of Les Miserables), Voltaire, Rousseau, and Alexander Dumas (who wrote The Three Musketeers).  It had a huge dome in the center of the building and the artwork on the walls was amazing.  I love all the colors and the wall art – they were muted golds and whites (so not so overpowering as some of the bolder places we’d seen).  It’s from the neoclassical era, which I LOVE (and had kind of a baroque flair to it).  The neoclassical era played on a modern twist of ancient Rome and Greece, but softening it.  The Pantheon had stretches of paintings along the walls of scenes from the bible or from mythology and had huge beautiful statues throughout the building. 

                We went down into the crypt, where the famous people are buried.  They’re kept in little hallways of tombs, some more decorative than others.  Victor Hugo’s was very plain and simple, but some famous officers had ornate decorations, flags, and paintings set up in their little hallways.  Buried in style.

Outside the Pantheon

Voldemort's girlfriend in the Pantheon

Inside the crypt

Round ceiling in the Pantheon

Wall paintings in the Pantheon

Victor Hugo's tomb

More Pantheon

                Of COURSE we had to get crepes while in Paris, so we stopped off at a little crepe store and I got a crepe filled with nutella (my best friend in Europe.  Honestly, all places in Europe are obsessed with Nutella).  We chatted it up a bit with the store owner and found out that – wait for it – his brother lives in Bountiful!  He told us he loves Utah and has visited his brother there a couple times!  Such a coincidence!

Piano man in the middle of the city

                Then we made our way across the street to the Luxembourg Gardens – the most famous and extensive gardens in Paris.  I wanted especially to see a duplicate of the Statue of Liberty that resides in the gardens, but after asking around we learned that she has been taken down for restorations.  Sad day.  We ended up just walking around, taking pictures, and being herded by a group of creepy French guys.  They saw us taking pictures and proceeded to follow us around the park, splitting up to herd us into an area where one of them proceeded to try to get us to come home with him.  Luckily my friend, Becca, is a quick thinker and told him we had a train to catch in 3 hours and regrettably wouldn’t be able to join them.  Such a loss on our part.  Not.

Luxembourg Palace

Palace around the gardens

Our fine French friend who interrupted our picture-taking

I awkwardly jumped off and ran off soon after this encounter and left Becca to fend for herself.

We finally got our picture after creeper had left

                We also briefly saw a very animated band in a gazebo at the park.  I loved their uppity songs complete with matching dance actions.  The clarinet player was by far my favorite – he’d throw his clarinet up in the air in circles and catch it and continue playing like a baton twirler.  What a fancy man.

The band at the gardens

La Madeline

                After the Luxembourg Gardens we went back to Notre Dame, hoping to climb up to the very top to see the gargoyles, but it was closed.  So we gathered our losses and decided to go check out La Madeline (a nice little church with beautiful architecture) and the Moulin Rouge.  The den of iniquity and sin.  We had been told that it was right outside a metro stop – that you literally got out of the station and it would be right there.  So we took the metro stop to the right area and saw that it was at the end of the street.  No big deal, right?  Well, the street we ended up walking down was…interesting.  Let’s just say that we got lots of “how much?” looks from the guys we passed, and the stores were right along there with the Moulin Rouge theme (if you get my drift).  But hey, I got my picture proof of being in front of the Moulin Rouge and never have to go back there again.

Oh my, so scandalous...

                Next up was THE LOUVRE.  The big one.  The omega.  The museum to end all other museums.  Unfortunately, we had basically walked for 10 hours straight and were completely exhausted.  My feet have never hurt that much in my life before (and remember, I was still recovering from my hiking trip in Ireland the previous weekend.  I’ve become a serious walker during my travels abroad, so you’d think I’d be evolving by now into some mighty creature who is able to walk a lot).  We were all weary and weak, and the Louvre is freaking HUGE. I’ve heard my whole life from people that the Louvre is huge and you couldn’t visit all of it even if you tried and I laughed at their weak museum ways.  I pridefully believed that I could show them all and easily see all the works in one magnificent swoop.  Oh, how I was humbled that night.  I was brought low in my weakened state and basically crawled around to the major pieces in the Louvre (which, practically all the finest pieces of art are in the Louvre, so that’s still saying a lot).  There is no way I could even see and appreciate all the art in even one wing of the Louvre in one day.  The place is chocked full of famous iconic piece after piece of artwork.  We were assigned to see just a couple of the major pieces of artwork for our class (which were scattered floors and wings apart from each other of course).  So we saw The Lacemaker, Liberty Leading the People (shout out to Coldplay’s album art for “Viva la Vida”!), Jacques-Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii, the Venus de Milo, The Coronation of Napoleon by Jacques-Louis David, The Code of the Hammurabi, and oh so many more (if you don’t know the names of these, just look them up and you’ll recognize them).  It becomes extremely overwhelming seeing iconic after iconic pieces of work that you’ve studied in every history and humanities class.  

I got to see the Mona Lisa, which I had been warned is painfully small.  Luckily I came with low expectations and was expecting to see a postcard-sized painting.  The Mona Lisa is small compared to the paintings in the hallway leading up to it (they were the size of the entire wall), but it’s a normal-sized painting.  Honestly looking at the Mona Lisa I couldn’t figure out why it’s arguably the most famous painting in the world.  It’s great and all, but it’s not as impressive as some of the other masterpieces I saw.  After walking miles throughout the Louvre we made our way to the final piece of artwork to check out – Winged Victory.  Other visitors may have thought the sight of this illustrious statue brought me to my knees as I dragged myself up the stairs towards the great winged woman, but really I was so weak that I found myself making the last steps of my trip to the Louvre on my knees.  We all felt terrible that we were so exhausted that we couldn’t fully appreciate the magnitude of the Louvre, but I guess that’s just how it goes when you only have three days to see everything in Paris.

                We got out of the Louvre around 10 PM and basically everywhere was closed to eat.  We were starving, about to die from exhaustion, and ready to kill the next street salesman who tried to sell us one of the hundred miniatures of the Eiffel Tower.  So, doing our best to live up to the proper American stereotype, we dragged ourselves to McDonalds.  I’ve eaten at McDonald’s more in Europe than I have in the past ten years of my life.  True story.