Day 2

I won't make you jealous with the delicious breakfast we had at the boulangerie, I'll just skip right to our outing and save that for a Food in France post.

Google is an amazing thing - especially when you have internet access on your phone. We didn't want to pay for the guided tour of Notre Dame today (which was actually free to us because we bought a museum pass but were too dumb to read everything that was included) so we sat down and googled it and discovered all kinds of amazing facts. Really, for the number of times in my life I have done a report on Notre Dame, I should have already known a lot of it. But the most interesting thing to me was that during the French Revolution, most of the church was destroyed! We heard the same thing at Versailles yesterday. The revolutionaries were just upset with everything so they destroyed and looted it. It tells you just how desparate they were, that they had no recourse to change their situation other than to destroy everything. Lucky for us that we have a democractic system. Now if we would just use it before we get as desparate as the French did!

I digress. They destroyed everything at the church except the rose windows. There just are not words to describe how intricate and detailed and beautiful they are, all three of them different. When you walk into the church, even though it seems to mostly be a tourist attraction, there is still a reverence, a respect that does not exist at the other attractions. It is still a building that was built to worship God and you can tell.
This is the north window, you can't see the detail and the sheer size from the picture. The rose window that's on the front of the church is obscured by the organ pipes inside, so I couldn't get a good picture of it. But it is the most beautiful.

After Notre Dame, we went to Musee D'Orsay, which does not allow photography, and saw the originals of several famous paintings by Renior, Van Gough, Gougin, Monet, Manet, etc. The pictures are of course amazing but what is really amazing to me is the history that you're standing in front of and the fact that they are all in one place. There were seriously huge fire extinguishers everywhere!

This is Dan's dream house. It is in the garden at the Rodin Museum and is quintessential French country. (They were setting up for some kind of party, thus the white tent structures). We ate our picnic lunch here of brie, baguette and apples. After resting our feet, we looked at the sculptures around the garden.

The Thinker is not as big as I thought it would be and there were A LOT of naked statues.

From the Rodin Garden, you could see the top of this building, which is not a church but Napoleon's tomb. I don't like Napoleon, hadn't even given a thought to where he was buried. I assumed it was some unmarked grave on Elba. But no, I underestimated him. He of course is buried in this mammoth gold building. You walk into the building and in the center, under the dome, is a circular railing. When you look up at the dome, the inside is just like the ceilings in the castles, with a mural of Napoleon being received in Heaven and framed in gold. When you look down, there is a MASSIVE marble coffin, it could seriously fit 10 Napoleon's in it. Napoleon designed this whole place and made sure that even in death, people would bow to him by having to look down over the railing. Pompous.

Luckily, the gardens outside were beautiful to see. Actually, come to think of it, there are gardens everywhere with people just sitting in them reading, kids playing. I really think the French enjoy their leisure time more than we do.

Next we went to L'Orangerie which is a museum designed specifically to hold Monet's Water Lillies. Wouldn't you know my camera battery died right after I took this picture. There are two large, oval rooms with canvases on each wall. Two long, two short. You sit on a bench in the middle and silently enjoy them. They are beautiful, probably my favorite pictures. Possibly because my favorite color is the bluish purple in the one above.

The L'Orangerie is located on the corner of a park that is sort of like Central Park, though not as big. You can see the Eiffel Tower from where you sit at the water fountain in the park. The kids can play on the play grounds. There are four little outdoor cafes you can eat at, or drink your coffee, or smoke your cigarettes. We chose to eat crepes. I discovered that if you order a chocolate crepe, they don't spread Nutella on it, they actually put melted chocolate on it! I'm not talking Hershey's syrup, I'm talking actual good candy bar chocolate! It was yummy. Then we headed to the Louvre, which is on the other end of the garden.

First, it is massive and gorgeous all at the same time. I can see why putting the glass pryamids out front would have been a source of huge conflict. They are so opposite the rest of the surroundings. But they are iconic at this point.

There were thousands of people there but it was so huge it didn't really bother you - until you got to the Mona Lisa. Seriously, the rest of the gigantic museum has hardly anyone in it, just a millions tourists loooking at ONE picture! Sure, it's nice. Smaller than you thought, partly because it's being displayed on a huge wall all by itself. There is a even a guard right by it, though I don't think he had any nunchuck skills to defend the painting if need be.

After we saw that, we looked at mummies, sarcophogi, stone tablets - Dan loves old things. The older the better. It is amazing that some of this stuff lasted long enough to get put in a museum. But I was on the hunt.

Side note: I don't even know how many times I watched Top Gun before it occurred to me that Maverick and Goose were not flying those planes. Not like I didn't know subconsciously, it's just that the movie was that good that I didn't think about it.

Fast forward to the Louvre. I love the Da Vinci code. And I am sorry to say that after visiting the Louvre, I realized that Da Vinci code the movie was not filmed there:( Duh. But it was so Top Gun for me after that. I wondered what else had been fabricated for that movie. So I went in search of the final resting place of Mary Magdalene and just when I felt I had searched the whole museum and my feet hurt so bad I had to give up...

This place actually exists! I'm sure Mary Magdalene is not here because neither is the Rose Line disk from the movie. But it was cool. This is actually in the underground entrance to the Louvre - the entrance that has a Starbuck's and an Apple store right by it because it's part of an underground mall. All I can say is at least they didn't ruin the sanctity of the above ground beauty by sticking a mall there!

We got on the metro and headed back to our hotel. Right around the corner from our hotel was this little crepe shop where we stopped and ate dinner at. Remember my camera battery is dead at this point so I couldn't take pictures of the amazing food we ate but I will try to do it justice with words. First, they have a TGIFridays type deal where you order an appetizer, entree, dessert and drink for one price. Deal. So I ordered: pinapple juice, a salad, a crepe, and mousse. Just kidding. It wasn't that simple. The pineapple juice was but the the salad was thus - a very large bowl that looked like it only contained cubes of swiss, blue cheese, tomatoes, and walnuts. Underneath all that there actually was lettuce and a tasty vinagrette dressing over everything. I am a huge fan of blue cheese and this was so bleu. Even the swiss was something to marvel at. I ate and ate but could not finish that salad, especially with the little basket of bread sitting there, too. After the salad we sit there for no kidding 20 minutes, because that's how it's done. You are there to enjoy yourself, your meal. The waiters are not going to hurry you out so they can make more money. Next comes the crepe. Mine had spinach, cream, gruyere and an egg. It was called the Popeye. Really. But they had mixed the cheese in with the crepe batter so that when it cooked, the whole crepe tasted like toasted cheese. Then they put the spinach and cream on top, fold the corned in toward the center and crack an egg on top. Most of the egg cooks but I didn't like the runny yolk. The rest was heaven. Much later we had dessert - Dan had creme caramel (like a broulee) and I had of course mousse au chocolat. It was so rich it tasted like the inside of a candy bar, very dark and luscious. It was a perfect end to the day.