The train ride is only about 2.5 hours. We easily navigated the metro and got to the hotel about 9:45 or 10:00 PM. The hotel staff were extremely friendly and told us about a Christmas market by the Arc de Triumphe that was open until midnight. We put our luggage in our room and hopped on the metro to walk downtown. When we came up from the subway stop this is what we saw.....
We walked around the Christmas market and made our way down the famous Champs Elysees toward the Place de la Concorde and enjoyed some wonderful crepes before heading back to our hotel.
Sunday morning we got up and visited the Musee L'Orangerie which is a small gallery of impressionistic and post-impressionistic paintings. My favorite style of painting is from the impressionistic period, so this museum was amazing! This museum features a series of Monet's Waterlilies paintings that were specifically created for entire walls in this room. It was beautiful! They also had an impressive collection of Renoir (my favorite) and had his famous painting of the two young girls at the piano. We then walked across the Seine and visited the Musee D'Orsay which is an old train station turned into an art museum. This hotel also featured a massive collection of impressionistic art (86 Monet, 46 Pissaro, 81 Renoir and many others). We enjoyed this museum even more than the Louvre because of the collections it featured. It had a great collection (24 paintings) of Van Gogh which is Brandon's favorite artist.
After visiting these museums we walked along the river and headed toward the Latin Quarter and Notre Dame. It was a Sunday, but we were still able to walk through Notre Dame. However, we were unable to take a guided tour. We still got some great pictures and enjoyed seeing the beautiful architecture of this historical cathedral.
We had some lunch in the Latin Quarter and hopped on the metro toward the Eiffel Tower. After waiting in line for about 45 minutes we finally got our tickets to the 2nd story of the Eiffel Tower. We waited there for another 45 minutes or so to go all the way to the top. It was a little chilly, but beautiful! We returned later that night to catch a view of the tower at night as well.
I had some fun with photoshop :)
On Monday we started our day at the Louvre. It was great to see the Mona Lisa and the other famous works in the Louvre, but we enjoyed the building itself just as much as the art within the building. All of the rooms were beautiful! We walked through the Egyptian gallery which was wonderful. Our hotel staff informed us that Napoleon was very good at taking things and the Louve houses a huge selection of Egyptian artifacts. We really did not spend much time here as it was very crowded.
We found a little cafe to have lunch and got on the metro toward the Sacre Coeur. This basilica sits on the highest part of Paris and had wonderful views of the city.
After enjoying another Christmas market at the top of the hill we went back to the hotel for a little while and found a place to have dinner that night.
We really enjoyed our weekend in Paris and would love to go back someday to see more of what we missed this time around.
In other news, I got a new job teaching middle school band and I start tomorrow. I am really excited! We are headed to Berlin this weekend with Toni and Warren and we are supposed to get internet this Thursday (finally!!!!), so I'm sure we will have a new post from Berlin soon.
Auf Wiedersehen for now!
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