The last 3 days have gone by in a whirl of sight-seeing. We did the obligatory Louvre trip on Thursday. The problem with the Louvre is that, while being a fantastic art collection in a wonderful building, it's just too big and overwhelming (..and crowded). Given that half the people there only come to see the Mona Lisa, they'd probably be better to put the smiling lady in a separate building to reduce the crowds. Altogether more satisfying was our trip the next day to the Musee d'Orangerie, the highlight of which is two oval rooms in which hang Monet's 8 huge water lily canvasses (Monet himself designed the rooms to highlight the paintings). Having been to his garden and seen the lily's in their pond, it was brilliant to see the paintings. What I hadn't realised is how big they are.
We also ticked off two of the Paris must do's - a trip up the Eiffel Tower (right to the top this time, something we hadn't done before) and a visit to one of my favourite parts of Paris, the Montmatre area. Amy was particularly taken by all the artists sketching portraits - so much so that she has been sketching portraits of people ever since.
Today we headed out to Versailles, another thing that we hadn't done on our previous Paris trips. On Saturday's during summer all of the garden fountains are in action (accompanied by music) so we picked a good day for it (us and about a million other people). I'd always wanted to see the famous Hall of Mirrors and it lived up to expectations. That said, you can see why the peasants were so keen to rise up and crush the nobility back in 1789. A fair bit of opulent decadence on display in the palace!
Tomorrow is our final day in Paris so we're planning to take it pretty easy before packing up once again and catching the Eurostar Monday morning for the trip across to London. Hard to believe that after more than 3 1/2 mths we'll finally be leaving French soil.
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