Paris, Day 2
Today, Saturday, dawned cloudy and cold. We slept in a bit, then took the Metro down to the Musée d’Orsay. Known for its Impressionist and post-Impressionist masterpieces, this beautiful museum is housed inside a former train station. It’s quite an impressive place, and has lots of great sculpture, paintings, and photographs on exhibition.
Unfortunately, we didn’t get up early enough to beat the crowds so we stood in line for about an hour and fifteen minutes before entering. Thankfully the weather was agreeable. The main floor is wide open, the ceiling is 5 stories above, all the way across the building—when the sun is out it streams through the transparent roof.
Most of the museum’s artwork is from the mid- to late-1800’s. We explored Romantic sculpture and paintings on the first floor, then saw a great photographic gallery that had portrait pictures taken by famous artists and writers. One photo that stuck in my head was by Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland. Other notables were Georgia O’Keefe (a subject of her famous husband, Alfred Stieglitz) and Emile Zola.
We took a quick break at the museum café. It was nice to sit down! Then we tackled the Impressionist/post-Impressionist galleries. We viewed paintings by Monet, Manet, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Corot, Van Gogh, Gaugin, Cézanne, and many others. It’s a great collection! The only negative was the huge crowds…it was really difficult to enjoy the art because someone was always in the way.
Upon exiting the museum, we decided to amble along the Seine River. It’s one of Paris’ most notable landmarks since it divides the city into two from west to east. There always seems to be a bateau mouche going by: barge-type boats loaded with tourists.
One Parisian tradition that I love are the book sellers on the banks of the Seine, locally known as bouquinistes. They have plied their trade here for ages it seems (over 100 years), selling antique books, hard-to-find magazines, postcards, posters, art and other souvenirs. I enjoyed peaking at their old French books—it is fun to think of coming here on a mission to find a particular book and then bargaining until both seller and buyer are confident of getting a great deal.
Another Paris trademark are the bridges that cross the Seine. Two of the most famous are pont des Arts and Pont Neuf (the oldest bridge in Paris, all the others were blown up by the Germans during WWII). After checking out the book sellers we crossed both these bridges, sat, people-watched, took lots of pictures and generally enjoyed a wonderful spring day in Paris.
For dinner we picnicked in Square des Batignolles near our hotel; this particular park aims to be an arboretum of sorts with signs next to trees telling their name and species. How ironic for Erin! It is also home to a wide array of birds; geese, ducks, the ubiquitous pigeons and a pair of beautiful, but territorial, black swans. Here we also saw our first outdoor ping-pong tables! A mother and son were playing on a cement table with a metal net; the size of the table looked to be standard, but it was completely weatherproof and sturdy! Cool concept…
It started to rain half-way through our picnic, but we moved to a bench under some large trees and waited out the storm. Tomorrow is the first Sunday of the month, which means…free entrance to the Louvre. Yay! Hopefully we will be able to get out of bed early and beat the crowd.
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