Day 3

Sunday morning I met my uncle at Hotel de Ville and we went to meet Shelly at her hotel. A pretty short walk past Notre Dame. My aunt was napping at the hotel because she could sleep the night before; she thought the waiter had mixed up the cafe order and given her caffeinated coffee. We talked about going to Honfleur and Shelly offered to buy me a ticket, so I had to go despite the long travel times and early wake up time involved. After discussing the matter my uncle and I went to the Cluny museum. This museum is free the first Sunday of the month, so we walked over and waited in a short line outside the museum, which looked like a cathedral. There were some small gargoyles of various states of decay hanging from the rooftops. This is where my age was asked by the cute teller, and where I treated my uncle to an audio tour.

Cluny Museum Gargoyle

Another Cluny Museum Gargoyle

The museum was pretty neat because all the pieces were from the middle ages, and varied from weapons, to tapestries, to statues. I learned from my uncle that at one time there were two ways to be successful, the church, and the army. The sheer number of religious pieces of art that were commissioned is staggering and gives some indication of the amount of power the church had. This could be totally untrue though, because this collection could be a very small sample of the total amount produced. Either way, there were a lot of religious works. We only had time to get through half of the museum before we had to head back to meet my aunt at half past noon.

Our walk for the day started at my aunt and uncle's apartment and never ended. First I convinced them that we should walk to the Bastille because of how close it is to the hostel, but the plan for the day was to walk, so this became a walk to a walk. We did stop in a very nice park on the way called, Place des Vosges. It was a park that seemed to inhabit a giant courtyard, since the buildings around it were all connected. There was a statue of Louis the XIII, who my aunt joked is one of those people who nobody knows the true face of. This line of conversation comes from a story she told me earlier about a statue of a famous person that a student had posed for, and is now called “the big lie.” We took a couple of pictures of the glorified courtyard and went to the Bastille, that is now marked by a pillar, and forms another big traffic circle.

The Bastille marker

Bastille Traffic Circle

Place des Vosges from Rue de Rivoli

Inside Place des Vosges

Louis XIII

Near the Bastille there is an old elevated railway that has been converted to a wonderful garden and walkway, and is now called Vaduc des Arts Promenade Plantee. We walked on this elevated park past buildings of a totally different character from the buildings in the center of Paris. These were brick and were described to me as looking British, but whatever they were, they had very strange looking smoke stacks. Now looking at the map it seems that we didn't walk very far along this promenade, even though it felt like forever. We hopped on a train at Gare de Lyon and went to the laundry museum.

Promenade Plantee

View of houses near Promenade Plantee

Apartments near Promenade Plantee

I couldn't remember how to pronounce the museum's name but it sounded something like laundry, ah it was the l'Orangerie. It is located at the end of Tuileries and has Monet's water lilies. They were really great, and much bigger than I imagined. The museum was quite small, but was very nice. At one point my uncle tried to get a picture of a guy sitting in a chair next to a painting, but it didn't come out as well as he wanted. Some Japanese girls became interested in my hair and kept trying to take pictures of it. They never did get the shot they wanted, probably because I didn't ever stand in one place long enough and they didn't want to blatantly take a picture. I was imagining telling them in Japanese that it was ok, but I didn't. Both when we entered and when we left, one of the guards complemented my hair a bunch, it was all very comical.

Jon taking pictures on the walk back to Notre Dame

We had some cafe and crème brulee, and I again drew many looks from passersby. I also bought a Czech phrase book and a teach yourself Czech book and CD, so that I can maybe understand some of the language when I'm there. We decided to walk back so that my uncle could get a good shot of Notre Dame in the evening light. It was a very long walk and made us all very tired. We decided to go to the neighborhood near the hostel. The restaurants and other things in this area are open on Sunday when everything else is closed. We had falafel and I got a delicious drink called Kir. Interestingly this area is also known for its gay population, or for having many gays visit. I got my computer and we went back to my aunt and uncle's apartment where I used the internet and posted the entry about my first day and uploaded photos.