Paris Part Two

There is so much to see in Paris that a week is way too short a visit to do it any kind of justice. There are museums and churches around every corner as well as magnificent public spaces.

We believe this is where the mayor of Paris carries out the work of the city.
There was a man creating large bubbles for no apparent reason, but they floated into the field of view quite nicely and all of the passing children enjoyed.

And then you get churches like this with apartments pressing close.

The Opera

The Senate, with lots of guards with their versions of AK47's, is set at the head of the Luxembourg gardens.

We went to several markets and they are quite an adventure. In the large one near the Bastille, which operates on Thursdays and Saturdays. We went on Thursday which is mainly meat, fish and vegetable day. There were also quite a few stalls with clothes and household items and several food stalls with coffee and crepes made to order. The fish and meat stalls were a sight to behold, I just wish we had these in Oregon!

This is the general view of the Bastille market with the monument in the distance, which is where the market starts.

The photos above are from another market that we happened across, quite a bit smaller, but we spotted a couple of the same vendors that were at the Bastille market the previous day.

We wanted to take a boat tour on the Seine and this photo shows the boat before it began to fill up. We were advised to get to the dock early to avoid the crowds, so we took the first boat of the day. The boat moved quite quickly, so it was a bit difficult to get any good images.

This was our narrator and he spoke very good English as well as French (of course). The river was very high, so we had a slightly different itinerary from normal.

All of the bridges we passed under had some form of art attached to them, isn't that a nice idea?

Parisians measure the flood stage of the Seine by how far the river comes up the statue. Not long ago a flood came up to his head, so you can see we had a way to go.

On this bridge near where we stayed, there were always photographers out with tripods etc. This was my handheld version, David W, you would be proud.

Tree avenues in the Luxembourg gardens.

Lots of people go to the garden on their lunch break and this day it was quite warm and sunny.

Coffee was always fun and we found a lot of different places and only once did we go to Starbucks. In the last one above, we found some customers also partaking of their morning glass of rose wine, very civilized.

One of the sights we visited was Sainte Chappelle, with its incredible stained glass windows. We were lucky to be there on an overcast morning that made photographing the windows a little bit easier (but not that much!) It is hard to grasp how all of this was accomplished so many years ago.

We also got to visit the Musee d'Orsay when it was open late and the ticket lines were short. The museum is housed in a former railway station built between 1898 and 1900. It is quite a wonderful place with mostly French impressionist artists from the mid 1800's to mid 1900's.

Vincent van Gogh self portrait.

I think I liked this version the best, the brush strokes were fascinating.

We went to visit the area around the Poilane bakery in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés district. It is an amazing place with famously decorated breads as seen in the window above.

This photo is in the courtyard of Saint Sulpice as we near the end of our last full day in Paris. We realized the extend of what we did NOT see on our taxi ride to the Opera area to catch the Roissy Bus to the airport. We kept seeing areas that we had not explored all within short walks of where we stayed. We picked up our car from the Hertz rental place in Charles De Gaulle airport after a very long wait at the service desk and then had to wait again for a car to make it's appearance. I am glad we got to the airport early as we faced about a four plus hour ride to our next stop on the Normandy coast.
More of that later......