Au revoir, Paris!

It’s been a whirlwind tour, but still, it seems too early so say goodbye to the City of Lights. Today was officially Museum Day, so the game plan was bags to the new hotel (a Hilton no less), the Louvre, the Musee d’Orsay, the Orangerie, and maybe Versailles if time allowed. The hotel trip was long and uneventful, which is to say boring, so we’ll move on. I’d been to the Louvre and Musee d’Orsay on my last trip, but I was excited to see these places and the art through my Mom’s eyes. She loves Impressionist paintings, and one of the first things mentioned when planning the trip was that she wanted to see a Monet.
We stopped off at the Louvre first, which doesn’t have Monets (at least that I know of) but does have the Mona Lisa (or La Jaconde), as well as a 6 foot thick wall of people in front of said painting.

My favorite part might be getting to walk through the Medieval Louvre. So according to Rick Steves, the Louvre used to be a palace with the king’s royal collection being absorbed and donated to the museum over the past 800 years. So you get to walk through what was the foundation of the palace (I think. I missed the plaque on this). It looks almost Egyptian in it’s steadfastness-as though hundreds of years of elemental, human, and foreign destruction couldn’t break down the walls, but on the other hand, it’s texture reminds me of a sandcastle. In any case grandeur doesn’t do justice to this area. There were some texts from centuries before Christ that were not only intact, but well preserved enough to read. To think that something that existed over 3000 years ago still exists is rather incredible.

The Orangerie is known for it’s 2 rooms of Monet’s Water Lillies. The paintings are life size and the 4 canvases surround the room, so, when sitting in the middle of the room, you feel immersed in what he saw.  It’s hard to grasp scale and size on postcards and museum books, so it’s almost daunting to see these photos in real life. Underneath the Lillies rooms are the life’s collections of two Parisian men. I couldn’t tell you exactly how many paintings were from one collection, but it had to be over a hundred. And there were Cezannes, and Rodins, Monets, Picassos, and countless more, all that used to hang in one man’s house. There’s even a mock-up of a room in his house and how he had the paintings arranged, and it was wall to wall of famous paintings you see in books. I can't imagine living in a home like that.

The Musee d’Orsay was the most changed from what I remember. There were Impressionists and Post-Impressionists (Van Gogh), but then there was this room of photographs. It had 30 or so, but the fun part was the subjects and the photographers. People from George Bernard Shaw to the children of artists were the subjects, while people you’d never expect to be behind a photo lens (Degas, for example) where snapping photos of close relatives. It was a really intimate way of seeing these artistic idols and how they saw the world outside of their normal medium. Like you got to step away from the hype and facade of someone and see a truer picture of their world. Rather fabulous.

We walked through the Colonnade to get to each Museum, and it was a picturesque Sunday afternoon. Everyone was lounging in green chairs while people watching as locals and tourists walked through. On our way back to the hotel, we chose the St. Michel metro stop, by the Notre Dame. The bridge right before has a tradition of couples and families hanging padlocks on it as a way of sealing their love for each other. It's eye-catching how the walls of the bridge glitter in the sunlight, and as you get closer you realize each one is personalized. I really liked the one in the photo below. Someone took time to decorate it with pretty flowers, and I found myself wondering if the two people were still together or if they even knew each other anymore.  It seemed as fitting as place as any to say our goodbyes to the city and was a poetic end to our vacation together.