I'm going to do things a little backwards. Here's a photo I took at the end of the day, after dinner and as we headed back to the hotel (the cafe where we had dinner is the one on the right in the photo):
I'm putting it here, because the first photo in the blog is the photo that appears in the thumbnail of the blog title. And I like this photo.
Anyway, back to the beginning.
Andy went running while I had breakfast and tried to figure out this thing about the Paris Museum Pass. A couple of websites were happy to have me buy them online and then ship it to me - not going to work. Or buy them online then go pick them up someplace some distance from here. Not ideal.
Instead, we asked the guy at the front desk. Who didn't quite understand the question, I don't think, until he finally said, "Oh, if you're going to Orsay, just buy the pass there. It's still early - the line won't be too bad." Which is really the answer we were looking for - the easiest way to buy the pass.
Musee D'Orsay (the logo is "M 'O") is only a 10 minute walk literally up the street from the hotel. It's a converted old train station that looks a lot like the train station in the movie "Hugo", including the double clocks on the outside and the huge clock inside the main entrance.
The line did move very quickly; we bought the pass and were inside within 10 minutes.
What a great museum - all my favorite painters (Monet, Renoir, Pisaro, Van Gogh) and many of their most famous paintings all in one place. Plus, the museum is small enough to be done in one day. We started at about 10:00 and we were done by about 3:30, including lunch.
French museum food continues to be amazing - poached salmon for the entree and creme brulee with chocolate for dessert. Oh my goodness, my new favorite thing!
Photos were prohibited in the museum - annoying on the one hand, but OTOH, possibly the reason is to keep the crowds moving. There are so many very famous pieces that the crowd flow would be stalled to a stand still with people waiting for their spot in front of the piece, fiddling with their camera to get just the perfect exposure, then taking the photo, not liking it and starting over...5 minutes later, they finally move off. Multiply by the hundreds of people who want to do this.
OTOOH, I really wanted a photo of the museum itself. So up on the 5th floor, there was a gap in the grating allowing people to take something like this:
So of course there has to be a bathroom story of the day:
Even though the museum has recently been completely renovated, the bathrooms are still in dumb places. And everything involved stairs. Actually even the exhibits required constant stair activity - go up 5 steps to go down 3 steps, or go down 3 steps to go up 5 steps. Elevator not in plain site.
We were on the 2nd floor when I spotted signs for the bathroom. Following the signs took us to the elvator! yey! Except it didn't look like an elevator - just a big blank door. With a button off to the side that looked like this:
Since it said "press the button", I did. And the door popped (really POPPED) open inwards and hit a woman who was standing in front of the actual elevator. No idea why there has to be a door in front of the elevator, but it sure adds another layer of confusion. And yes, the woman was just fine - she (and I) were just a bit startled.
The keypad inside the elevator seemed to indicate that there was a bathroom on the ground floor. So we went to the ground floor. We walked out the elvevator (popped open the outside door) and saw signs for the bathroom. Which pointed upstairs to the 1st floor. What?
Back in the elevator we went (one flight of stairs is more like 3), went up one flight to the 1st floor and found the bathroom.
When we were done with the exhibits on the 5th floor, we had lost orientation as to the location of the elevator. But look, there's escalators! We'll just do that.
But the escalators only took us to the 2nd floor and stopped. Luckily we knew where the elevator was on the 2nd floor.
We bought a few things at the "Musee Boutique" (a/k/a the chachkee shop). But since it was still early, we wanted to try for a Seine cruise. We decided to stop off at the hotel to drop off the packages and take a break from the walking. Museum walking is excruciating and more exhausting than just regular walking.
We took a break at the hotel for a bit, then started out again some time after 5:00. The walk to the Bataeux-Mouche boat dock was clocked at about 40 minutes according to google maps. Took us a bit longer because we stopped a few times to take photos along the way. We got there a few minutes after 6:00 - after a bit of confusion (the ticket person said the next boat wasn't for 20 minutes, but a boat was boarding as we watched), we were able to board the 6:10 cruise.
The cruise was great. Here's Notre Dame:
And gargoyles on one of the bridges:
After the cruise we had dinner at a random cafe on the way back to the hotel. The starter I ordered said it was a salad with goat cheese. What I got looked and tasted very much like a blintze. Actually, a goat cheese blintze is now my idea of a perfect blintze.
Tomorrow: The Louvre
No comments:
Post a Comment