Last Day in Paris

So we wound up the sightseeing portion of our trip with a spin through three more of Paris' landmarks today.

We started at the Musee d'Orsay, where we looked at Impressionist and Realist masterpieces from mostly 1700 on.  We saw tons of Monet, Manet, Renior, Degas, Van Gogh, and even a Dali (that dude was on some serious acid).  I won't bore you with pictures of the paintings (for reasons which I clarified during the Louvre visit), but the museum itself is an architectural masterpiece, a converted train station.

We were disappointed to learn that Whistler's Mother was not on display (the only American artist with work on display was Mary Cassatt), but I did snap off this photo of a sculpture from the 1800's that proved that even 19th century veterinarians were dumb enough to not send home an e-collar with every patient...

From there we moved on to the Eiffel Tower.  We were hoping for the weather to clear, but when we got there it was still cloudy.  The tower has three viewing decks, and it turned out the 3rd one (at the top) is closed until February anyway.  We opted for the cheap route and decided to climb the stairs... 311 to the 1st deck, another 360 to the second.  Jeana showing her stamina after about 50 steps...

But we made it up to the second deck with our lungs and legs intact, and were rewarded with a nice view of the Paris skyline.  The gold dome in the second image is Les Invalides, where Napoleon is buried and his stuffed horse is displayed.  We didn't go there.

As you can see from the below image from the second deck, we barely even made it near the top... but you have to take an elevator from the second to the third deck:

We were also entertained at the bottom by Gendarmes on bikes chasing away African unlicensed souvenir vendors.  And were accosted twice by an Indian woman speaking perfect English asking us to translate something on a piece of paper for money.

Last touristy stop on the trip was Montmartre and Sacre Couer.  This is the olds artsy section of Paris that was home to immigrants during the 1800's... the Moulin Rouge is here.  We had lunch with sandwiches and pizza from a boulangerie, then rode a short tram up the hill to the beautiful church.  Sacre Coeur was built in the early 1900's as a dedication to the French who died in the Franco-Prussian wars of the 1870s.  And, it's the only church where you can't take pictures inside.  But that didn't stop them from having a gift shop inside and charging 7 euros to climb the stairs to the dome (we skipped that after the 700 steps un the Eiffel Tower in the morning).

We wound up taking the Metro back to Place de Republique, where there was a soccer shop that allowed us to round out our trip with some hard-to-find soccer jerseys for the boys (Paris St. Germain for Zach and Rennes for Peyton, because Carlos Bocanegra of the US Men's team plays for Rennes), a France scarf (obviously used by French fans to strangle themselves when Zinidine Zidane head butts Italians and costs his team a chance to win the World Cup), and a cool Olympique Lyonnais hat with the lion symbol on it.  Our boys are coming out of this trip with soccer jerseys that I feel very confident that nobody else in Duluth will have.

It has been a fun trip, but we are looking forward to getting home and settling into normal life.  At least until the we and the boys head to Disney World in 3 weeks!  But seriously, Paris is an interesting city to visit... once.  This plce is way to metropolitan for me.  There's a lot of history, but it was all generated in a very short time frame, so I get tired of seeing and hearing the same stories over and over again.  I'm not THAT big of an art lover, and frankly, I'm not impressed by cities where the women obviously consume 60-80% of the world's cosmetics supply.  It will be great to have been here once, but by far Israel was the highlight of this trip.  I'm very glad we took the chance to see the Holy Land... in this day and age, you just don't know if it will always be a safe place to visit.