Thursday, September 16, 2010

Catchup: Paris Day 4 Part 1

Okay so we managed to wake up and try some french pastries the next day! We were in love with the pain du chocolat for breakfast. We sat outside a patisserie and ate our food in the sunshine. It was fantastic! We watched a mob of birds attack some leftovers and it got pretty intense:

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here I am eating...

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A lot of people were walking by taking photos of the bird feeding insanity. It got old though.

We continued our walk after this down a main street and started checking out some museums. We had walked by this at night:

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I think we had worked it so that some museums were going to be free on this day, except special exhibitions of course. We made it to this one (I forget the name) but there was this MASSIVE line up outside so we weren't sure if we could get in... There was this thing about Yves Saint Laurent that was creating the line. Embarrassingly, my sister and I couldn't remember exactly what he was famous for!

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We were across the street taking photos on this other huge fancy building, but hey this one was worth pictures as well! There were huge columns all over the place:

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We went up to the door to see if we could just go in the normal part of the museum minus the expensive Yves thing. We were allowed to go in for free/cheap I think but through a side entrance. Not this one:

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The building itself was quite pretty, plus you could look up and see bits of the exhibition! It was a little confusing to walk around at first, especially with parts that were closed off - like this one:

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Erin and I both really liked this painting:

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more stairs. Like I said, the building itself was quite impressive:

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The courtyard:

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Erin and I also really liked this picture for some reason. We stood there for ages just looking at it. We went into the gift shop afterward to look at books that would tell us who Yves Saint Laurent was... turns out he was a fashion designer!

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Good to know. Well, we looked at everything kinda quickly and went to leave...

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Erin was still feeling sick but she still managed to smile for me!

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We went on this bridge here, and it looked like the sort of thing that would be famous, so we took pictures beside it!

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We walked to Napoleon's tomb, but they wanted a ridiculous sum to get into the place and we didn't really care about looking at the thing... we were more interested in Victor Hugo's tomb which was in a different place.

The building was quite massive though so we still managed to walk around and make the journey over worthwhile...

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here is the outside of the tomb thing. Yes we were cheeky and took a picture of the outside after we balked at going in:

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We ended up on some street with messed up houses - one of the first ones so far! I was pleased to see it, if only for balance.

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After the one messed up street, we ended up on a nice one:

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It was on the way to the Pantheon. This is where Victor Hugo was buried, among others. We walked up this hill to get there, so by the top we stopped to take photos and such!

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Thanks to Erin's French skills, we managed to get both of us in as students! There was the Foucalt pendulum in the center:

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I tried to get a longer exposure.. you can kinda see the ball moving, but it does look mostly like a ghost.

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The ceiling was super intricate:

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Everything was intensely large:

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There was an underground crypt, so I attempted the low light shots of famous tombs:

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The man himself!!
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There were information walls up around the place to explain who some of the people were in case you didn't know already... We found a picture of the city as well and decided to become... SISTERzILLA!

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I was pleasantly surprised to find Marie and Piere Curie here... took me back to high school science classes and my chemistry teacher, Mr. Disney, talking about these guys. It felt very odd to see their graves so many years later. People can totally have presence after they're dead.

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We came back upstairs and looked around a final time at the building itself:

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Now we had been to most of the things we had wanted to see. It was our last day in Paris, so we went walking through the Latin district (my memory is faded but I think that's what it was. I remember what it looked like perfectly well but not what it was called!). We had another crepe, and decided to get one french beer at least while we were in France. I only knew of one, but all the other beer listed at these bars I knew.. and they were not French!

I know they are more into the wine, but really... one beer? Oh well... we walked around a few times looking for something somewhat reasonable in price. It was hard since this was a touristy area, and they were advertising the beer at 9 euro for the normal price!!!!! Luckily it was happy hour, so we were talked into going into a Mardi Gras themed bar so a half price beer. They were playing an animated movie - I think it was Kung Fu Panda actually - which distracted us for a while... They FOX wanted a drink, so we gave him the last bit:

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There were some cool places in this area, I liked it. There were also Doner shops which reminded me of home (Berlin). Since we had to get up early the next day and I don't have any pictures, I assume we didn't do a ton of stuff this night.... maybe if we did Erin can mention this to me because my memory is most likely worse than hers!