Round the World with Us

Paris – for us – the city of cultural treasures – wonderful food – two hour lines – and hundreds of stairs!

Paris is the capital and largest city of France. It is on the river Seine, in northern France and its administrative limits have been largely unchanged since 1860. The metropolitan area has about 12 million residents. Paris is a beautiful city and is one of the world’s leading business and cultural centers, and its influences in politics, education, entertainment, media, fashion, science, and the arts all contribute to its status as one of the world’s major global cities. We were 5 of the 27 million foreign tourists who visit Paris annually, another 18 million visit from other parts of France. We encountered many of them in the one or two hour long lines at each of our destinations!

The history of Paris (and of France) is fascinating and we enjoyed learning about it.

As we browsed books at Shakespeare and Company across the Seine from Notre Dame, we found a great little book that covers the history of France in a unique way, with comics and fun-to-read text. Alex is reading it now and will write a post about it when he finishes. One thing that struck us while we were there was that the French seem to own their history more than the average person we encounter in the US. They will say, we did this and we did that in talking about events from hundreds of years ago…and you can hear the passion in their voices as they say it.

If you want to read a brief outline of the history of Paris, we think this in a good place to start:
http://goparis.about.com/od/historyculture/a/ParisHistory.htm

One of the things we loved best about Paris, was just walking around the city and taking in the sights.

Around every corner you find a new delight for the eyes in the beautiful architecture or in a world famous institution like the Louvre or the Musee d’Orsay.  Within those building are more feasts for the senses – such as standing in front of an original Van Gogh – quite an experience!

When I learned about Van Gogh in school and saw pictures of his work in a book, they didn’t really touch me, but in person it was a whole different story.  I am not sure I have ever seen colors come alive so vibrantly!  Monet is my favorite artist and it was a great experience to see his paintings as well.  I loved the story of Claud Monet’s “Lunch on the Grass”, which was intended to be a monumental 4 meter by 6 meters.  As Monet tells it, “I had to pay my rent, I gave it to the landlord as security and he rolled it up and put in the cellar. When I finally had enough money to get it back, as you can see, it had gone mouldy.” Monet got the painting back in1884, cut it up, and kept only three fragments. The third has now disappeared.  I know it is a relatively common story with artists, but I wonder at the fact that someone as talented as Monet was so poor he had to give up his canvas in the middle of his work because he didn’t have enough rent money!  It took him a long time to get the money together to get the canvas back and he said that he couldn’t sleep at night, tortured by the agony of not being able to get the rest of his vision for the work onto the canvas.  Imagine the passion he had for his painting!

But, I am off topic – and that is just what wandering Paris is like – you start down a cobblestone road, you get lost in a store full of treasures like Shakespeare and Company, you settle into a cafe, eat the most wonderful bread, sip a coffee and people watch, or you wander into into a museum and can’t believe the wonders of art and history that stand before you.  Before you know it, the sun is setting across the magical city and it is time (in our case anyway) to climb the 102 steps up the twirly stairs to our little room in the dormers of our hostel, looking out over the rooftops and wondering if life could be any more enchanted.

Pictures!

I am finally posting Paris pictures.  The ones on this post are of us wandering the city – and using the awesome and easy to navigate subway system.  I love the ones of the people and pigeons!  Other albums are attached to other posts, or you can click through to Flickr and view them all.

Au revoir and happy travels!