Morning In Paris

After flying for what felt like a week, we landed at Charles De Gaulle Airport outside of Paris at about 6 am (local time, which is midnight EST).  We decided to take the train to our hotel because it was much cheaper than a cab.  We had to transfer trains at one point, which was BRUTAL with all of our bags because for some reason there were about 20 staircases between the two different trains.  It was also the middle of the morning commute on a Monday morning in a bustling city.  Oh well.  We got to the hotel about an hour later, and we dropped off most of our bags about 7 hours before check-in.  Then, we set out exploring.

We couldn't see the Eiffel Tower from our hotel, but we basically knew where it was, so that was our first stop.  After walking about 10 minutes of winding streets, we started to see it between buildings

Tom took lots of pictures of the Eiffel Tower from every which angle.

 

Another few blocks and we were on the long mall in front of the tower, which is just about as amazing as you'd guess it is.  This part of Paris doesn't have skyscrapers in it, and the tower just stands so much taller than everything else.  (Quick trivia tangent: It was the tallest building in the world for 50 years or so; any guesses what the tallest building was before that?)  

At the other end of the mall is the Ecole Militaire, which is Paris' military school.  I don't know any more about it than that, but it's an impressive building.

We didn't have any set plans from there.  It was about 55 degrees, off-and-on drizzly, and we were exhausted and wearing our only warm clothes (basically pajamas), but we were in PARIS (!!), so we decided to wander aimlessly and explore the city.  We had a map, but no particular destination.  It looked like everything was on the Seine River, so we decided to head a few blocks north from the Eiffel Tower to there. 

We walked for a while, passing a bunch of statues and monuments (fairly similar to the monuments lining Commonwealth Avenue between the Common and Kenmore).  The first major buildings we came to were the Grand Palais and Petit Palais.

The Grand Palais is huge and covered with a glass roof that's visible from a large part of the city

   

We were absolutely starving by then, so we decided to get something to eat, but we couldn't for the life of us find a pattiserie (bakery), a fromagerie (cheese shop), or really any other kind of food.  In retrospect, it was probably our exhaustion that kept us from finding it for so long, because we saw no shortage of food for the rest of our stay.  We finally found a place and bought a couple of quiche-like things, but they weren't made with egg.  I think that they were called pain du laut.  Tom's was all cheese (goat cheese was definitely involved) and Maura's was salmon and broccoli.  They were very good, although that was the only time we found/bought that specific treat in Paris.  Would but that we could say the same for some other pastries.  While we were eating, we wandered a bit more and were surprised to stumble on a large Egyptian obelisk in the middle of a rotary, and we had a distant view of the Arc de Triomph from the same rotary.

Around this time, we decided that we wanted to go to a museum.  We still had a few hours before we could check into our hotel, but not long enough for the Louvre.  We narrowed it down to the Musee de l'Orangerie and the Musee d'Orsay.  We were pretty sure we weren't going to both on the trip, so we went to the Orangerie, which is the museum that holds Monet's Water Lilies, which Maura LOVES.  The museum had other paintings, including a weird exhibit about French impressionists that didn't seem impressionistic to us at all, but the Water Lilies are clearly the main attraction.  No photos were allowed in the museum, but the paintings occupied two rooms, both elliptically shaped.  Each room consisted of four very long paintings that wrapped around the perimeter.  We stared at each of them for a while, sat and continued staring, and walked around both rooms a few times.  Maura was not disappointed, and Tom agreed that it was pretty amazing despite being generally dubious of impressionism.  After an hour and a half in the relatively small Orangerie, we knew it was time to head back to the hotel.