Passport to Paris

The marathon of traveling continued after my weekend in Galway with a weekend in beautiful Paris. The title of this post is yet another shout out to my days as an Olsen twin fan. Paris looked amazing to "middle school Maura" when I watched that movie, but it was even better in person. Everyone always says that Paris has character and this special life to it, and they are exactly right. It's hard to describe and hard to pinpoint, but it's definitely true. Sitting under the Eiffel Tower, as it glittered (which it does once every hour each night) and eating a nutella crepe, I just felt the vibrance of the City of Light and was so so happy to be there.
We got in on Friday night and booked it to the famous Louvre, since they have this deal where you can get in free after-hours on Friday, and Megan and Kaitlin and I love being smart, money-saving travelers. Since it was pretty close to closing time, we did the Louvre on fast forward, hitting the Mona Lisa, the Parthenon statues, the Venus de Milo, and attempting to find the Code of Hammarabi (which took me back to sixth grade social studies with Mrs. Soule!) before they kicked us out because they were closing the galleries. Then we took a nice evening stroll along the Seine River to see the Eiffel Tower and have our crepes.

Saturday and Sunday consisted of hitting all the best and most famous sites of beautiful Paris: the Arch de Triomphe (which is not, in fact, behind the Louvre. That is another arch that we all have an embarassing amount of pictures of because we heard some French lady call it the Arch de Triomphe as she walked by...), the Champs de Elysses, the Eiffel Tower again (where we climbed all 700+ steps to the top--what a workout!), the Bastille neighborhood (which really made me want to re-read A Tale of Two Cities, so it's first on my summer booklist), the famous Notre Dame de Paris Cathedral, where we went to Palm Sunday Mass, the Moulin Rouge, and Montmarte, the adorable neighborhood up on a hill with the best views of the city!
We also went to the Musee d'Orsay, an impressionist museum, where I decided that Degas is my favorite impressionist painter. I'm not quite how I became cultured enough to have a favorite impressionist painter, of all things. But I've seen his work at many of the museums I've been to this semester and even wrote a paper for my London Writers class comparing his painting to Virginia Woolf's stream of consciousness writing in Mrs. Dalloway, so I've seen a lot of Degas this semester. I just love how he captures a snapshot of motion, whether he is painting a scene of people or his favorite, ballet dancers. His work seems to capture the essence of a scene, while the subjects aren't looking. And it doesn't hurt that he uses the most beautiful colors, either.
And on Saturday night we went to an awesome jazz club to hear live jazz. It was in this underground club where apparently Robespierre and his people would hang out during the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution and plot to kill people. So a little bit morbid, but also really cool, historically speaking, and as a jazz club. The band was amazing! And their lead singer spoke English, so we knew what was going on, which was great. It just felt so classy and European, to be in a jazz club in Paris. Here is a video of one of the songs they played:

And since this was Paris, Megan, Kaitlin, and I naturally continued our food tour of Europe with pain au chocolat, croissants, beignets, French bread, and crepes--delicious!

And for more Paris photos: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=410045&id=538960556&l=340f5ed3ea