Paris Part II

View from the Arc de Triomphe

Paris has a lot to offer. I'm just going to answer your question right now - yes, I saw the Mona Lisa and no, I did no climb the Eiffel Tower. I'm not sure why that is such a big thing... sure it has amazing views of the city, but when you take panoramic photo of Paris, the most iconic structure is not in the picture! So instead we climbed the Arc de Triomphe. It was really cool because twelve roads lead to the Arc de Triomphe into a big roundabout around it, so you get some really cool photos down the streets. About the Eiffel Tower - its a great place to have a picnic, and every hour on the hour starting at 10 you can see the tower sparkle and its really magical!

Sarah at the Louvre

When we were in Paris, we bought a museum pass, so we of course went to the Louvre, at night in the rain, which was pretty cool. We also went to the Orsay museum, which was Sarah's favorite of the art museums. It has a huge collection of impressionist art, and it was really beautiful! The Orangerie is another smaller art museum with more modern art, but they had this cool oval room with Monet's water lilies surrounding you.

My most favorite sculpture EVER. It's
so amazing. 

Paris also has some rather unique and random museums - such as the Sewer Museum where you actually go down into the sewers that smell awful and learn how it works. That was pretty cool, but I wouldn't go again because of the smell. 

Catacombs - really hard to take photos in here because its really dark and
you can't use flash. Wish I had a tripod for this place!

We also went to the Paris catacombs (tunnels under the city where they got all the stone for building pretty things), which is by far the creepiest place I have ever been and everyone should definitely go!! We had to wait in line for an hour, which was the longest we've ever waited for anything I'm pretty sure. It was so worth it. They give the whole history of the catacombs, and at one point they took all the bones from an old mass grave that needed to be moved and they hired a guy to organize the bones in a decorative fashion. Once, they even held a concert down there with a full symphony and played various funeral marches and stuff. That would have been really weird.

Notre Dame

The Notre Dame, of course,is beautiful. The thing with Gothic cathedrals, is they mostly all look the same inside, but the outsides are all quite different. I'm sure Sarah would disagree with that and say they all look the same everywhere. Parisians prefer Notre Dame from her backside, and its very easy to see why. She's quite pretty, with a nice little garden as well!

Louvre at night

There is a bridge in Paris called Pont Neuf that is the oldest standing bridge across the Seine, because its the first one they built out of stone. Henry IV commissioned it, and there's this really funny legend that goes along with the bridge. If you look closely, all along the bridge are sculptures of really grotesque faces. Apparently Henry IV threw a huge party with lots of famous people there to show off his bridge, and he hired a bunch of artists to sketch the guests with the bridge as a souvenir, but he figured they would all get lost in the river, so he had the artists sculpt them. Unfortunately they were all drunk already and so all the faces on the bridge are of drunk people at Henry IV's bridge party. 

Pont Neuf

Making use of our museum pass, we hit up a few more random things. One was the Conciergerie Palace, where they imprisoned people before beheading them. They have Marie Antoinette's cell there, and it was pretty interesting. Pretty much right next door is the Sainte Chappelle which was pretty small considering churches in Europe, but it has really pretty stained glass, and is a good place to peek in if you have time.
Also we went into Hotel des Invalids where Napoleon's tomb is (which is really huge and fancy), and also there is a war museum there of sorts where there is Napoleon's horse in real life. Apparently Napoleon stuffed him. Of course there's lots of swords and guns. Then on the top floor is this really cool thing where they have relief models made in the 17th century they used for defense technique planning. I really liked that.
Of course we went to MORE museums - one being a music museum, which was really fun and Sarah really liked it. They had tons of old instruments and sound samples of them being played. There was also a huge collection of really pretty pianos.