Day three was Museum Day.  And boy, was it.  We left the apartment after breakfast at about 10:30 a.m. and didn’t get back until almost midnight.  The kids were absolutely delirious, but for what all we did, they behaved amazingly.  Garbanzo had no nap (and ultimately had no afternoon nap the entire week, except for a few snoozes in the stroller here and there — nothing longer than an hour).

The first stop was the Musee de l’Air et l’Espace — the Museum of Air and Space.  We saw tons of airplanes, starting from models of the earliest attempts at flight to two modern-day Concordes.

Highlights were seeing the Bleriot, the first plane to cross the English Channel from Paris to London — Chickpea and I are going to read about that in a book for school in a few weeks; biplanes used in World War 1 (complete with the black German cross, made famous by the Red Baron), and getting to walk inside the two Concordes.  I thought the coolest plane was the Dakota, a WW2 fighter plane that would send out parachuting soldiers.

The Air & Space Museum was a few minutes outside town, so we headed back in the rain via bus and went straight to the Musee d’Orsay.  The Orsay was my favorite museum — it picks up where the Louvre ends, showcasing art from the mid 19th century to 1914.  This means it’s mainly impressionist art, heading into art deco and some other bits of modern art.

It was really cool seeing original work by Monet, Degas, Van Gogh, Renoir, Cezanne, and Toulouse-Lautrec.  These are some of my favorite artists.  There was also plenty of sculpture.

There was lots of nudity, as is usual in art.  Chickpea found this… interesting, to say the least.  Lots of questions were averted.

After this, we went straight to the Louvre, which was just a few blocks away.  It was already almost 7 p.m., and we were tired and hungry.  The Louvre is actually attached to a mall (weird, I know) with a fancy-schmancy food court.  We ate there, and the kids were getting seriously restless.

By this point, we decided that we could not ask the kids to wander the Louvre with us for hours, after having spent the day at two other museums.

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(Oh, by the way, the reason we did it all in one day was because we got this great deal museum card thingy, where for a set price, you could see like 30 museums.  But we got the one with the shortest amount of time, which meant we had two days to see everything on the card.  It covered the Arc de Triumphe yesterday, and the three museums today.  Anyway, back to the Louvre…)

So per the recommendation of the really good guide book we were going by, we decided to see the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo, and whatever we could see along the way.  We’ll just have to come back to Paris, either sans kids or when the kids are older.

Yep, the Louvre is huge.  Huge.  Unbelievably huge.  We saw one little speck of it.  The art along the way to our two stops was amazing, so we are really excited about coming back one day to see more.

The Mona Lisa is actually bigger and better than we anticipated, because we’ve heard all our life that it’s really small and kinda unimpressive.  So with low expectations, it’s great.

The Venus de Milo is much bigger than I thought it would be, and was really cool.  I don’t know much about its history, but honestly, there was equally impressive sculpture along the way.  All the sculpture there is really unbelievable — the fact that human beings can carve that kind of intricate work out of rock is mind boggling to me.

We left the Louvre absolutely exhausted, with aching feet and swirling heads.  All four of us were definitely ready for a break.  So we headed to the metro station inside the museum, ready to plop down in a chair and veg for a few minutes before walking the rest of the way home.

But we just managed to walk through the doors to the station to have missed going through the gate to board the train, yet were locked in the opposite direction at just that moment because the Louvre closed.  So in other words, the doors we just went through were locked, and the gate in front of us was locked.

We were trapped with about 20 other people, and the metro people took their sweet time unlocking us.  Apparently, this stop closes earlier than all the other stops because the Louvre closes before the metro does.  But they don’t so much have a plan to make sure all the people get through the metro before the shut the doors.

So 20 minutes later or so, we pass through the metro station, get on a train, and head back to the apartment.  What felt like hours later, we crashed in bed.

On the way home, Chickpea summed up our day perfectly, and quite possibly said the best line of our entire vacation:

“Well, we sure saw a lot of cabooses today.”

That we did, Chick.  That we did.

posted: 09 December 2
under: chickisms, family, paris, travel