Paris When It Sizzles

Here is my continuation of what happened while we were in Paris last weekend.

Saturday we woke up fairly early for how late we got in and got ready and left to catch the train back into Paris. The first thing we did when we got into Paris was go to the Louvre. We split up and those of us who had already gone to Louvre or didn't want to go walked over to the Centre Pompidou, the modern art museum in Paris. The building itself is really cool because it is designed inside out, with all the pipes and escalators and such on the outside of the building (check out my pictures if you want to see it). The museum was wonderful and was definitely up there with the Tate Modern in Britain in my opinion. They had a great Kandinsky, which is one of my favorites of his. There were about three whole rooms full of Picassos (which you would have loved Dad), which were amazing (and I found a new painting of his that I fell in love with, but I can't remember the title at the moment). Others that I loved were the Matisses, the Duchamps, the Man Rays, and the Pollack that they had there. Overall it was a pretty great museum with a lot of famous stuff that I had learned about in my AP Art History class in high school.

After the museum, we all met up and grabbed some lunch to go. We took our lunches to the Jardin du Luxembourg, which was absolutely beautiful. The garden is a large park area with a large fountain in the middle and a large building, which apparently used to be the house of Catherine de Medici (remember the Medicis from Florence, Mom and Dad?). Lunch was lovely. We sat on a nice grassy area and soaked up the Parisian sun. It was a little warmer than I would have liked, but the blue skies were worth the heat. After eating I walked down to the fountain/ pond thing. They have a place where kids can rent little sailboats to sail across the pond. It was really neat to just sit there and people watch and look at all the cute sail boats.

After lunch, we got back on the metro and rode over to the Latin Quarter area. Notre Dame is around this area so some of the group went in there. I had already been, so I decided to go to Saint Chapelle, which is a tiny little chapel that I had heard from my previous trip was really beautiful. It did not disappoint. The chapel is really tiny, but the stained glass was amazing. Basically all of the walls on the second floor of the chapel are made out of stained glass and the effect is completely breathtaking (literally... it took my breath away!). It was probably one of the most beautiful places I have ever been.

Once we met back up, we wandered through the Latin Quarter, which used to be (and still kind of is) an area where a lot of the students in Paris hang out. During this time, La Fete de la Musique, an annual music festival that Paris has where they have bands playing on street corners all over Paris, was starting to heat up. Audrey have some friends who are in a band that was playing on one such street corner so we made our way over there and spent the night watching them (there were two different bands with her friends in them).

Getting home after the bands had stopped proved to be fairly difficult. We had to go through some really crowded streets, trying to keep 12 people together. I've never really seen this many people before in such a crowd, so I don't really know what to compare it to, but it was mass chaos. We all just wanted to make sure we got to the train station all together before the last train left for the night. The metro was incredibly crowded so we had to jam ourselves in and luckily we only had to go one stop because it was incredibly claustrophobic. We did make the last train out (cutting a little close for my taste, but what can you do) and we made it back to Audrey's safe, sound, and utterly exhausted.

Coming tomorrow to a blog near you, the exciting conclusion to "A Weekend in Paris."

Love to all!
Court