A good night’s sleep is essential when one walks all day! Yesterday my iWatch reported 16,200 steps, the most we’ve done in a day so far on this vacation. Both of us slept pretty well, but started the day with the expectation of not walking as much as the day before.
Hah!
The plan was to take the Metro to the Eiffel Tower stop, change to the train and take it to the St. Michael’s stop, then walk over to Notre Dame. It turns out that the train sometimes goes only to the Invalides stop and other times goes to the end of the line. I managed to get us on the train that went to Invalides with no way to get over to the track where the other train would go. There were security folks everywhere. We later learned that the former French president and former prime minister Jacques Chirac had died and would be taken to the Presidential Palace at Invalides today to lie in state. A private funeral will happen tomorrow. I remember Mr. Chirac as the Prime Minister who refused to get involved with Iraq in defiance of President Bush II.
After asking a couple of people, we figured out a route on the Metro that would get us to Notre Dame. We’d have to change twice, but would not have far to walk. Not far on a map is not necessarily not far in reality. But we got there.
The whole area is blocked off and not open to the public while renovations due to the fire are being carried out. We could only stand behind the fence and take pictures. We needed some cash to we walked up the road towards an ATM but took a detour into a Catholic Church where a high mass was underway. The organ was fabulous and filled the whole church with music. So we did get some “church” in us today.
After getting some cash, we walked to the Metro station for the train that would take us to the Louvre. That was quite a walk. We took the Metro for one stop and got off at the Louvre and had lunch in a small pasta / pizza shop across from the Metro stop. That’s where we learned about the activities going on for Jacques Chirac. The big screen TV in the cafe was showing the funeral procession making its way to the Invalides Palace.
We stood in line for an hour and fifteen minutes before getting into the Louvre. They let people enter in batches every 20 minutes or so. Lesson: check into buying tickets for popular venues, such as the Louvre, online and in advance. Folks who had previously purchased tickets showed up at the time on the ticket, were batched up with other people ticketed for the same time, and then let through security as a group on the hour and on the half hour. By the time I checked it out we would be already in the museum before the next available on-line time slot.
There is so much to see in the museum that several days would be required to do it justice. We just had a couple of hours before the museum closed for the night.
That big pyramid thing in the center of the courtyard is copywrited … it’s illegal to take pictures of it lit up at night (you can take personal pictures but can’t pass them along to anyone else, paid or unpaid).
We spent some time on the top floor and the middle floor looking at the paintings and some of the sculptures.
The Temptation of Christ.
Naomi and Ruth
The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. This was part of a pretty sordid chapter in French religious history when the Catholics became enraged when the king’s heir became wedded to a prominent Protestant Princess of Navarre. The uprising assassinated her in her bed as being depicted in this painting. I’d not heard of these religious wars in France, but apparently they went on for almost a half-century between the Catholics and the Protestants.
The last gallery we walked through had a number of paintings from early Christianity. These were often of Mary with the infant Jesus along with other saints and martyrs even though everyone in the picture couldn’t have been there at the same time. This is an example:
This is a painting of Mary and Jesus in the company of two female saints who didn’t live until 200 years after Christ’s death. Most of these paintings include guardian angels.
We took the Metro back to the stop by our hotel.
We had dinner and then checked out a Boulangerie where I’ll probably buy a baguette tomorrow morning.
We’re now in our room chilling out. I’m coming down with a cold so I’ll look for a pharmacy tomorrow morning to get some cold medicine.
We walked 17,040 steps today.