After checking out the Louvre, we walked through the Tuileries, down the wide main boulevard through the park, taking some time to look at all the statues and fountains. I can’t wait to go back during the spring and see it all in bloom. At the end of the garden, there is a ferris wheel, an obelisk (a real one from Egypt!) and a neat view of the Eiffel tower, which looked kind of gloomy the first day we saw it. There were also some neat fountains and a view of the Arc de Triomphe.
Sunday, we went back and walked the other way down the Champs Elysees, and we stopped into a really interesting Toyota concept store/design gallery that had concept cars and other interesting design objects relating to technology and communications.
We also got to see the street at night. It was lined with trees with blue lights on them and they also had these long light tubes that light would fall down in that gave the impression of snow falling through the trees.
We entered through the archway in from of Pont des Arts, looking back on an amazing view at L’Institute des Arts, another beautiful, domed building, and entered a large courtyard where we were surrounded on all sides by very symmetrical, yet ornate stone walls.
Sunday, we went in to the museum, and took a whirlwind tour of its top attractions. We saw the Mona Lisa, which really does seem to change depending on which angle you’re looking from, Venus de Milo and other classic pieces of art. One of my favorite exhibits we saw, though, was the Medieval Louvre, where we got to walk through original sections of the fortress that stood on the site.
Saturday morning, Evan and I took the Eurostar train to Paris. The trip got off to a bit of a rocky start because we didn’t know that we needed to get to the train station 45 minutes ahead of the departure time and due to problems retrieving our tickets and a lot of running back and forth between electronic kiosks and the ticket office and really long print time for our tickets — actually, the agent hand wrote one, which seemed to take forever — we missed our train. Apparently this happens a lot, though, and we were able to switch our tickets for the next train, which was leaving an hour later, at no charge.
