4-17-09 Paris Day 3

Today we took a stroll to the Eiffel Tower. The views from the Park of the Field of Mars surrounding the tower are great, so much so that we didn’t feel the need to pay to go up. The tower was a different color than we expected – it is a light brownish color rather than grey.  We got some decent shots from underneath, and then headed toward Les Invalides, which is host to several buildings, including Napoleon's tomb as well as the Musée de l'Armée.

On the way we stopped for a traditional French dessert, a banana and nutella crepe with coffee (aux lait, which is basically what a latte is back home). This was Natasha’s treat, as I have only recently found a taste for nutella. I had a bite, though, and it was good.

My treat was the Musée de l'Armée. Natasha doesn’t really go in for the war and weapons stuff, but this was one of the best parts of Paris for me. We got to see the tomb of Napoleon Bonaparte, a whole WWI/WWII history museum (which had a decidedly pro-French bias throughout), and a museum of weapons from the ancient world up through the 20^th century. We saw samurai armor, medieval armor, ship cannons, spears, rifles, and everything else.

Next up was the Musée d'Orsay, which is an Impressionist and Art Nouveau gallery, located in an old train station. On the way we had our first occurrence of a car actually stopping for us to cross the road (Parisian drivers are famous for ignoring pedestrians), and walked past the Seine and the French Parliament.

Finally, to top this busy day off, we hit the parts of the Louvre that we missed the day before. I saw the painting on the cover of my copy Rousseau’s Emile, and a painting of Hector handing off Astyanax to Andromache before he goes to his doomed fight with Achilles. We saw the Mona Lisa again, and it was no less crowded this time. They keep you too far away from the painting to get good pictures of it, but we managed to snap a few. We also took some pictures of the cat from the painting opposite.

We had our one and only French McDonald’s experience to wrap things up. Again, the food is mostly the same everywhere, except that here, when they give you “fry sauce,” it turns out to be tartar sauce. Ugh.