Days 9-10 Ooh La La

Days 9-10

Ooh-La-La

I don’t think I’ve mentioned the old church that we look out at from our hotel room window.  The church is St. Severin, and it has a big pipe organ we’ve heard.

Also, for you new readers, if you click on the photo one time, it expands and fills your screen - but do so only if you want to see a full screen version.  After viewing, just click on the 'x' to close the full screen version.

We are getting good weather in Paris! It hasn’t rained once since we’ve been here, and the past few days have been warm and sunny!  I haven’t used ‘ooh la la’ since taking French in my sophomore year in high school, but it kind of fits now.  Things that were closed due to flooding will be opening soon but not today.  Hundreds of thousands of pieces of art work are headed back to museums adjacent to the Seine.

With the museums closed, we took the subway and a suburban train to Versailles, the palace of the Kings Louis XIV - XVI (14th - 16th), a period of about 100 years, most of it before our American Revolutionary War and about a dozen years after it.

The Palace is so enormous - almost a million square feet of floor space.  The line to get into the Palace was too long for our taste, so we headed to the ‘garden’ which has a separate entrance and is one of the largest and finest gardens we have ever seen.  The only disappointment was the lack of edible vegetables.

The garden has a whole host of things to entertain and relax a visitor including lakes, ponds, fountains, statues, a variety of sculpted plants, trails, etc.

Everything in the picture, and much more, is part of the estate.  This was the party palace for all the nobility of France.

Back when it was being built, the estimated cost was half of the yearly generated wealth of France.  Fed up with being poor, and most of its citizens starving, those on the downside of the income gap rose up and revolted.  Louis the 16th and his wife Marie Antoinette both literally lost their heads at the guillotine.  The wonderful palace was then abandoned for decades.

We did try later in the afternoon, around 4:00, to get into the Palace, but the line was still at least an hour wait, so we returned to Paris without seeing it. 

Our hotel concierge offered ideas for dinner places, and we tried another place.  I’ll show only one of the items: steak, roasted potatoes, and mushrooms which was very tasty and was presented like something out of Cook’s Illustrated.

On Day 10, we finally had a chance to visit the artwork inside the Louvre and Orsay.  I think you all know that the Mona Lisa is kept in Paris at the Louvre.  It sure drew the attention of a lot of people, some of whom pushed to get to the front of the viewing area.  

They say when you move around in a room, the eyes of the painted subject look like they are moving.  While I’m sure it is a fine painting, it made me think of Maxwell Smart, Agent 86, on the Get Smart TV show in the 1960’s.  In classic Mel Brooks fashion, the eye movement was obvious and complete.  I wish I had a gif file showing the eyes move.

Forty feet away from the Mona Lisa, and facing the opposite direction, is a painting 50 times bigger, and Shari could costar in the photo/painting with no pushy crowd.

The Louvre is the largest Art Museum in the World and probably the most visited.  But our taste in paintings leans towards impressionist art. All of this art was moved years ago from the Louvre to the Orsay Museum.  For those of you who know this art, we saw Monet, van Gogh, Manet, Cezanne, Gauguin, and Renoir to name a few.  The Orsay was salvaged from an old train station that was to be torn down, and the French fused a museum with a train station quite nicely.

In case you are unfamiliar with Impressionist art, I’ve turned one of the photos (Days 7-8) I’ve taken into something close to what we like.

We visited two art museums in one day but still decided we needed to catch one more feature of Paris.   One of the special places Rick Steves advises to see is the St. Chapelle Chapel.  It’s been around for almost 1000 years, so we expected something very gothic.  Lots of cathedrals and churches have stained glass windows, but we’ve never seen anything like this.

We’d been noticing the garbage was not getting picked up.  It turns out that in our end of the city, the sanitation workers are on strike.  The street cleaners are working but not the garbage technicians.  We are in day 5 of this strike. 

We cannot conclude these days at the small and relatively insignificant garbage strike.  Back at the Orsay, there is more than art to enjoy.  Here is the woman who has impressed me the most in the last 46 years.