Carpe Paris!

Sun. Apr. 10: Yogurt and coffee in our room and a pastry from a patisserie along the way and we were ready to seize the day. We started once again at Notre Dame to do the last bit of our Historic Paris podcast. There was a Mass just beginning so we explored with a musical and Latin accompaniment. There was a long line to climb the towers when we left the church so we’ll try that tomorrow. There was a “Les Cars Rouges” bus sitting beside the Place so we began our hop on/hop off tour right then. It was sunny but a bit cool and breezy sitting on top as we went past Museé d’Orsay, Opéra, Champs Elysée-Etoile, Grand Palais and the Trocadéro before going to the Tour Eiffel. All along the way streets beside the river were closed off and full of the 40,000 people from all oer the world running the Paris Marathon, which starts and ends along the Champs Elysée and the Arc de Triumph. We got off at the Tower to see what we wanted to do about going up the tower. The lines were very long and, although that’s probably almost always true, we decided to follow Rick Steves’ advice to go up late in the afternoon and watch the lights of Paris come on as evening falls. We would leave that for Monday. After sitting in the grass for a while in the sunshine we set off to find the Museé du Quai Branly, a new (2006) museum of Indigenous People’s Art museum from cultures all over the world. It is very dramatically presented and lighted, which adds to the mysteriousness and power of the displays. One begins by climbing a long, wide, spiral ramp which has tumbling words projected like waterfalls down the sides and then onto the ramp like a river stream that you are walking upstream. It is very effective at moving the visitor away from the streets of Paris and into another world. The museum was a very unexpected pleasure! We hoped to find some food by then but had arrived at the dead time between lunch and dinner. We finally found a Creperie open where we shared a ham crepe and a tomato salad. Fortified for the rest of the afternoon, we decided to take on the Louvre. We were shocked to find it crowded but not to the point of having lines to wait in. We used another Rick Steves Podcast to make our way around. In about two hours we had seen the “Big Attractions” of the Denon wing and then ventured off on our own to see the Germanic, Holland, Flanders and Netherlands painters in the Richelieu wing. By then we were pretty much overcome with art and felt like we had absorbed about as much as we could for one afternoon. We ended up walking to the pedestrian only bridge to get pictures of the Pont Neuf and the point of the Ile de la Cité. Even though we were pretty exhausted by then, we strode on towards the hotel but stopped under the gargoyles of St. Germaine des Pres to have dinner at an outdoor table. I had the more expensive daily meal so I could have an appetizer of escargot in memory of my dad. He would have approved!! We were seated outdoors next to two other tables of Americans, including a couple who had come to Paris just to run in the Marathon! They were from Minnesota and the other couple was from Syracuse so we all traded snow and basketball stories. It was all very fun but we left first and made our way back to the hotel. After a short rest we took another evening stroll around the neighborhood before falling exhausted into bed.