Museum Madness

It’s Kara and I’m talking about yesterday, July 28^th. It was a day on the go because on July 27^th Mom and Dad got a two-day museum pass. To make the cost of the museum pass worth while you had to see at least two museums each day. Simply put, today was the last day to cram as much sight-seeing and very-old-object-examining in as possible. The reason that Mom and Dad each got a pass and us kids didn’t was not because we didn’t want to see the museums or because they were tired of us but because kids under 18 are free in most museums. It’s nice knowing that we aren’t costing money and it’s also nice to be a kid again even if it’s only a technical title.

We got up, got ready, and headed out the door at a pretty good time of morning in order to accomplish as much as possible in our tourists’ quest. A ride on the metro and some walking got us to our first stop of the day: The Orangerie museum. This museum was actually built for the Water Lilies collection by Monet, his last great work of art. Once in we went straight to the first room covered in giant stretches of oil paint ponds. They are truly amazing! There are two oval rooms with four walls (separated by doors). Each wall is fitted with a huge painting. They are six feet tall and so long they’re hard to fit in a picture. They are painted with bright colors and are very interesting to study close as well as enjoy from farther away. Our Rick Steve’s book provided us with lots of extra info that gave some background and better understanding of the thought process behind each of them, which made the paintings all together more fun to see. I wasn’t aware that the museum had a whole collection of art other than the Water Lilies as well, which we then proceeded to view.

Next was the Cluny museum. Thankfully it is a museum displaying objects other than paintings or we may have been losing interest after the art museums of the day before plus the Orangerie. This museum and its contents have medieval and ancient history behind them. It is made up of three buildings, one being a home, another a chapel and the last being ancient Roman thermal baths! The audio guides were only one Euro, so we each rented one. They took Mom’s ID as a ransom to make sure we returned all of the guides at the end of our tour. We got to see some pretty interesting things. Old church benches and the decapitated stone heads of the Kings of Judah. I was excited to see these because I’d heard a lot about them when we went to Notre Dame. If no one has wrote this on the blog before me, the heads were originally on bodies of biblical kings. You can still see these bodies right on the front of Notre Dame, but they have (relatively) new heads these days because the Kings of Judah were also taken to represent the French Kings and during the Revolution while the people were hacking off the heads of their real flesh-and-blood monarchs, they decided to go for the statues too. The heads were buried and only recently discovered in someone’s garden. (I can hardly imagine the heart-stopping shock going out to dig a hole for some tomatoes and finding a huge stone head staring back at you!) We saw the Roman bathes as well. Dad keeps making fun of Mom for going crazy over really old things like this, but it’s easy to see why. The day before we got to see some old Roman ruins under ground. I couldn’t get over the little doorways and steps. Someone actually walked there. Someone that lived in a completely different world, yet walked in the very spot that you stand. And here we saw a whole room intact. We even saw one of the baths in pearly-white condition.

We wandered through the building sopping up the insightful information pouring out of our headphones. I had a piece of paper that held a chart of what numbers to enter into our audio guides and we had successfully made it through numbers 1 through 14 on the front page. Heather and I thought we were doing pretty good until I realized the paper folded out to reveal numbers 15-52. I just stared stunned for a minute. How in the world were we going to get all of these done? Heather on the other hand was not as quiet about it. This was not going to work for her. Me neither! We decided it was time for some skipping. We walked thought the museum looking at everything but only listening to the interesting-looking ones. A whole rooms was closed temporarily which also helped cut some time. One of the rooms we had to stop at though, was the unicorn tapestries. These are very famous, in case you didn’t know. They’re very large. Six of them portraying a girl, the same princess, going through the five senses. Taste, sounds, sight, touch, and smell. A whole tapestry for each. They’re very detailed, very old, and quite impressive. The thing is, there are six tapestries and five senses. No one knows for certain what the sixth tapestry represents. It shows the girl placing a necklace in a chest. Knowledge, heart, and even a sixth sense plus a couple more options have been presented as interpretations of the scene. Perhaps mystery is part of the fun and part of the fame. (Where would the Mona Lisa be without her mysterious smile?) And perhaps it’s an even stronger tie with the people of the past. Even if the days of real horse-powered transportation and manual labor seem simpler, the people thought just as deeply. Who knows what the thought process was? Maybe it is one of our interpretations, maybe it’s something completely different, or maybe they just wanted to keep us guessing!

We eventually did finish up the Cluny museum and we were hungry for lunch! We had packed a picnic lunch of sandwiches, cookies, and apples. Now we just had to figure out where we were going to eat the food which started to look better and better as time went on and the clock fell farther and farther away from normal lunch time. After Mom studied the map for some time we set ourselves in the direction of the Luxembourg Gardens and started walking. It really wasn’t too far a walk, happily proving wrong Mom’s warning that it would be a long distance. The park was beautiful and REALLY big. There was grass and trees and paths (And plenty of pigeons.) We ate on a bench (Glorious food! Yum Yum Yum!) then continued to explore the park. It had everything! A nice large fountain, tennis courts, lovely flowers, bathrooms (for 40 cents) and even a wading pool! We pulled up some chairs under a tree by the fountain. Miniature boats sailing in the water of the expansive fountain caught our eye. Kids ran around the fountain with big sticks. You give the boat a good push with the stick, it sails in the wind and you wait until it reaches another side so you can catch it and push it again. Heather was the most interested and went right up to the rental place to find out about prices. It was only two Euros to rent a boat for half an hour, about $2.60 in our money. It was a good price but we figured that we better leave now if we were going to climb the towers of Notre Dame (our next plan). Mom wanted to rest any way so she gave us a couple Euros and we got a boat for half an hour! They’re very small for boats of course, but they’re large enough to be a good weight. We hoisted the boat up and after several pictures with our sail boat, placed it in the water. Heather got to push it first and it sailed majestically through the fountain and promptly crashed into a small house near the middle built for the ducks. Thankfully those things do not tip over! It freed itself and we chased it across the fountain. We took turns pushing it and had a fun fairly non-thinking half an hour. You really only have to worry about which way the boat was going and we actually got to run around. We’ve been doing a ton of walking but not much running just for fun. It was also AWESOME because it was sunny! It was the first day it’s been fully shining sun since we got to Paris! This was also the first bit of lounging we’ve done in Paris. Really we’ve just been trudging around the side walks. Seeing awesomely cool things, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not quite as glamorous as the word “Paris” leads one to believe. This park felt like the glamour. Finally! =)

An hour after turning our boat in (we stayed there for much longer than planned) we walked out of the park. We turned our mind and our feet toward Notre Dame. Mom and Dad have gone up the towers before and weren’t going to do it again but Morgan, Heather, and I planned to arm ourselves with cameras and a bottle of water and climb each step of the nearly 400 stairs to the top. This climb cost money but it was covered by the museum pass plus us kids would probably be free anyway. We arrived at the side door where you have to enter the tower and we were met with disappointment. The tower closes at 6:30 but they let the last person go up at 6:00. It was now 6:20. Maybe we lounged in the park too long. At least we have time on our side. There’s always another day.

If we couldn’t climb Notre Dame today we just had to climb something else with a lot of stairs, so we continued in a different direction to the Arc de Triomphe. It was pretty impressive as well. It’s a very tall building but our first thoughts were turned not to the building itself (though we did take advantage of the photo op) but actually getting to the grand structure. Between us and it stretched a round-a-bout that we guessed was nearly eight lanes wide. It gets better. I say we guessed it was about eight lanes because there were no paint lines or any form of lanes at all! Cars drove as they please weaving through the traffic. All kinds of vehicles whizzed by and more rushed in from several entrances around the circle. We weren’t allowed to cross the street and of course there were no cross walks. We had to cross underground. After wandering around for a bit trying to figure out exactly how to go about this we found the entrance to the underground passage right to the Arc. We went down and got our tickets. The museum passes covered Mom and Dad but we had to wait in line for our free tickets. While waiting in line we over heard a conversation that I thought was quite funny. There were two 17 year old boys. They’re under 18 so they’re still free but kids aren’t allowed to go up without an adult, which they weren’t aware of. (I wouldn’t think about something like that either.) One of the boys talked a guy into getting their tickets for them to make it look like they were going up with him. It was pretty funny and their plan worked even thought the ticket lady knew they weren’t actually with their new “dad” since she had talked to them before. We got our tickets without a hitch and started up the stairs. It actually wasn’t a straight shot to the top. You would go up a few flights of stairs and then there was a floor of history and details about the Arc. We looked around at that and then continued up. We were at the top before we knew it. We all agreed it wasn’t half bad, and it has more than half the steps of Notre Dame, so Notre Dame shouldn’t be too bad! (Morgan has figured that going up and down Notre Dame will be like climbing from the basement to the fourth floor of Stadium High School four times. Oh fun.)

The top of the Arc was a lot of fun. We took pictures of the awesome view. You could see everything! We also took a lot of pictures of ourselves. We hung around up there for a while then went all the way back down to see the burning flame of the Unknown Soldier monument. It was nice.

Our day ended with going out to dinner. Our food was OK overall. Heather loved hers, though! She got a giant POT of mussels with cream sauce! Everyone but me tried one and said they were pretty good. They tried to get me to eat one but I am just not a seafood person and I don’t see that changing anywhere in the near (or distant) future. After dinner we retired to our little apartment, which is becoming more and more of our home though we miss our family, friends, and dogs back in Washington.

Sorry for the SUPER long blog but if you expected short from me you are sorely mistaken. Me writing long things is just how it works, you should know that about me so if you didn’t before now you do. =) Overall I’m having a great time in Paris. Like I said before, it’s not really glamorous (this day was definitely the most fancy we’ve had) but it’s interesting. There’s so much history and so much to see. We’ve seen places where famous kings, artists, and even ancient people have lived and worked. It’s such a great way to get close to and involved in history. I am just so glad we don’t have to literally walk in their shoes because even with modern-day footwear my feet are killing me! We absolutely love to get comments, so even if you just skim over the blog or look at the pictures, it would be awesome if you could drop a hello. I have just been informed that you can’t comment if you don’t have a blog account, so if you’re in the non-blog owners group (I don’t blame you) you could send your hellos and comments to our Mom’s e-mail at TPhipps909@aol.com and she’ll read them out loud. We will make her. =) Alright, well that’s all from me. Thanks for reading and have a great day.

Au Revoir,

Kara