Paris with Chris: Days One and Two

Our two-story hotel room.

Our main objective in Paris was to meet up with Chris, a friend of ours whom Lisa met in college at UNC. He came to France to visit us for about ten days and since he was flying into Paris and since we we would have to go through Paris to get home to Rennes, we decided to spend a few days there before coming home. Chris' flight got into Paris early that Wednesday morning and our train from Cologne arrived a bit before noon so we met him in the courtyard of the hotel, in the 16eme arrondisement.

Chris and Lisa at the Eiffel Tower.

After dropping off our bags, we bought some take-out sandwiches for lunch and ate in Trocadero Park, down the street from the hotel and overlooking the Eiffel Tower across the Seine. When we finished, we walked down to and around the tower so Chris could see it. There were many more people there than when Lisa and I went in December. It really brought home the difference between the low season and the high season in Paris - and we're not even very far into the high season yet!

Underneath the Arc de Triomphe.

We then walked back up past the hotel to the Arc de Triomphe, the triumphal arch originally built by Napoleon to commemorate his various victories. It's in the center of a huge traffic circle - twelve streets feed into it! - meaning that you have to take an underground passageway to get to the arch itself. In addition to having massive sculptures on the sides and lists of Napoleon's victories and generals, it also holds the French tomb of the unknown soldier and plaques in honor of the war dead of France's post-Napoleonic wars. It's a very impressive monument.

Eiffel tower at night from the 16eme.

Arc de Triomphe at night.

It was now mid-afternoon and we encouraged Chris to go back to the hotel to nap (he had just flown across the Atlantic on little sleep less than twelve hours before, so he needed it!) so Lisa and I went to a museum in the neighborhood, the Maritime Museum (interacting with a very friendly and helpful security guard on the way in!), to buy the Paris Museum Pass. It gets you in "free" (really prepaid at a discount) at a number of the major museums and it often means you get to skip the ticket line. It's definitely worth the investment, although the ones we bought were only good for two days, meaning we really had to pack in the museums to make it worth the money! We then found a cafe to sit and have a glass of wine (me) and tea (Lisa) before heading back to the hotel around 7 to meet up with Chris and go out to dinner at a Franco-Portuguese bistro Lisa and I had found not far from the hotel, which was pretty good. After dinner, Chris wanted to see the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe lit up at night. Obviously, Lisa and I had seen the Eiffel Tower at night back in December (when we spent about six hours in Paris the night before flying home for Christmas), but seeing it from the Trocadero Park was a different and perhaps more dramatic angle.

Ceiling frescoes at Versailles.

Day Two in Paris started with pastries to-go at a bakery near the hotel and buying sandwiches for a picnic lunch then taking the Metro and a regional train to Versailles, home to Louis XIV's opulent 17th-century palace. It wasn't a far walk from the train station to the palace itself and while the Museum Pass meant we could skip the ticket line, we couldn't skip the security line, which took about 45 minutes to get through. Fortunately, it was a sunny day so we didn't get rained on while waiting in the courtyard! We spent about two-and-a-half hours in the palace, seeing every room we possibly could, including a special exhibit on Napoleonic battle paintings (not that interesting, at least to me). It was also the most crowded place we've yet been and it didn't help that there tons of tour groups who would just stop and camp out in the small rooms while their guides talked to them. The palace itself was opulent and grandiose, with fancy furniture and lots of ceiling frescoes. It reminded me a lot of the Vatican Palace; the Hall of Mirrors especially reminded me the Map Room in the Vatican (although I'm not entirely sure why).

Marie Antoinette's bedroom.

Hall of mirrors.

French school children.

While we were at Versailles, we saw a group of French school children with an official tour guide from the museum. Lisa (who is writing this paragraph) was very impressed by how well the teacher communicated with and engaged the youngsters. They were very respectful throughout their visit, and despite the fact that they took up large quantities of floor space in every room we visited, were not obtrusive or rude. We wish all museum tour guides could be so dynamic!

Gardens and water at Versailles.

Once we finished inside, we walked into the gardens out back to eat our picnic lunch. We didn't go very far into the gardens because we were on such a tight time schedule, but they looked very pretty and quite expansive. I'm sure they'd be even prettier later in the spring when more things are in bloom.

Crypt of Notre Dame.

Following lunch, we took the train back into Paris and went to Notre-Dame. We started in the archaeological crypt (covered by the Museum Pass!) below the cathedral, which I found immensely interesting. It has remains of the fourth-century AD Gallo-Roman walls around the island in the Seine that the cathedral (and much of the ancient city) was built on. They also had an exhibit on the transformation of Paris from a Roman city to a medieval city over the course of the fourth to sixth centuries AD. As someone whose fascinated by that period, I loved it! We then went up to the church itself to walk around, although I found it a bit less interesting since I'd seen most of it in December. Still, after all the Gothic cathedrals we've seen since that first visit, I was better able to appreciate the differences between Notre-Dame and the others, like the fact that their are rose windows at the ends of the transepts and there's a double aisle (which no other cathedral we've been to has).

Notre Dame with many
tourists!

Rose window from the inside.

Some photographable flowers for you to view while
you read about the water lilies.

After that, we took the Metro to the L'Orangerie Museum, arriving at 5:15, just a half hour before closing time. It's an amazing place, designed to hold Monet's massive water lily paintings. They were done at the end of his life in the 1920s and in his will, he donated them to the citizens of Paris in a specially designed museum to be a place of calm and healing in post-World War I Paris. There are two rooms, each with four huge canvases of water lily ponds at different times of day. Unfortunately, no pictures are allowed inside, but here's a picture on Wikipedia of one of the paintings. I thought they were amazing paintings, with a great interplay of color and light. It was very moving and calming. We then went down to the basement to breeze through the rest of the (rather small) collection of Impressionist paintings before being kicked out at closing time.

Full rainbow in Paris!

Outside, a brief squall that had blown up had just stopped, allowing us to see a full rainbow over Paris! We walked across the river to show Chris the Musée d'Orsay, passing the French National Assembly building (which Chris was very interested in) and stopping to get a quick quiche dinner at a little snack bar kind of place. The Musée d'Orsay is the main 19th-century and Impressionist museum in Paris and it's built into an old train station. Much like the medieval museum in Cologne (and the Montemartini Museum in Rome, for that matter, built into an old power plant), it's a very creative re-use of space.

Another picture from Versailles. You
can see us since we couldn't show you
anything at the museum!

Again, no pictures are allowed inside, so here's a Wikipedia picture of the interior. The museum is open to 9:45 pm on Thursdays, so we had quite a bit of time there. The Museum Pass allowed us to skip the security line at the general entrance and go through a much shorter security line at the priority entrance. We learned at the Orangerie that the three of us all have different museum paces, so Chris explored the museum on his own and saw just about everything in it before getting dessert while Lisa and I saw pretty much everything we wanted to see: the main Impressionist rooms (with their fantastic collections of Monets, Caillebottes, and Renoirs), the Van Gogh and Seurat rooms, and some of the pre-Impressionist rooms on the first floor. We also saw a special exhibit of Degas's nudes, which was very crowded and hard to see. On the fifth floor, we got a great view through the old station clock north across the river towards Montmartre as the moon was rising. It's really a fantastic museum. Once the museum closed, we met up with Chris outside and took the Metro back to the hotel for bed.