Orsay For The Second Time

Now I am back in the States but I still have many stories to tell so I plan to keep the blog going until I written them all down.

One thing I forgot to write about was what we did after we went to Orsay the day before when we went back to the Tuileries, the gardens outside of the Louvre and we went for a walk in the evening. There is a Ferris wheel on the other side of the park that my Mom really liked and we took some beautiful photos with the sun going down of the statues. I then got some lemon sorbet with mint in it and we just sat and enjoyed ourselves. We saw a man selling small sailboats to float in the small lakes and we were very excited to see this man because my Dad mentioned this to us before we left. It was a great time, because it was quite relaxing.

So today we got started super late, not even setting an alarm, except for the fact that Mom usually wakes up around 10ish and will go on the computer and eventually wake me up and we have our breakfast of fruit and juice and peanut butter sandwiches. So then after we managed to get on our way we walked to Orsay back again to see the rest of the collection. Today we focused on the pre, post and impressionist work and we splurged and got the audio guide of the museum, which of course made our whole visit much longer. I loved getting all those details but I feel like they never have the information on the painting I want. The small ones that are not as famous but they can’t have information on all of them or else we would be there forever instead of just five hours. We started the day with the pre-impressionist and we looked at all the painting that shocked the salons, even though it seemed that every other painting there was rejected by the official art world and shocked audiences and critics. It was funny because we saw a group of French school children on a trip to the museum and it made me wish that I were born in Europe so that when I was in school I could go to museums like that for school trips. I wonder if there is the same resentment of museum trips when you get to go to museums like Orsay.

After the first floor we went up to the restaurant, which was actually part of the hotel that existed when it was still a train station and at the time it was built, for the world fair it was actually quite modern at the time with electric lights and indoor plumbing that was actually just kind of a stopping point for most people taking the train. So the dining room that we ate in was part of the original building and had the original decorations, which were absolutely gorgeous. I had a risotto and this amazing lemon tart and some of my mom’s ice cream, which included some of the best strawberry ice cream I’ve ever had.

We then saw the actual impressionist works which was amazing, of course the same problem of crowds around the most famous, but I saw so many beautiful painting and a couple of Degas sculptures and it was amazing. As Mom and I were wandering around the galleries we saw a couple of people who were dressed in period clothing, complete with hats and makeup. It was as if they stepped out of one of the paintings themselves and decided to wander around the museum. I really wanted to take a picture of them but I felt that would be pretty rude. We also ran into some Canadians who said it was great to hear English, when me and my Mom were talking about paintings, sitting after a couple of hours of walking.

We got to the end of the museum and we looking at one of the stores to see if we could find any Art Deco jewelry for my mom and I was looking at the other stuff they had in the museum shop and I noticed that a lot of the stuff had the Monet bridges painting on them and I hadn’t seen that painting so I decided to go back and try to find it. Then of course I realized that there was a whole other wing of the museum that we had skipped that was most of the post impressionist stuff and so I quickly walked through there while Mom was at the end, which made her worried because I had been gone for so long. I didn’t find the painting- it was probably on loan to another museum. Mom did not find anything, because the bracelet she liked was too small, which was strange because she has tiny wrists. She was having trouble because they thought she was trying to return her audio guide when really she was asking about the bracelet.

By the time we had finished it was closer to five, and we were trying to get to the Rodin museum but we decided that even with taking the Metro that we would get there with enough time so we sat for a while and then we went home and just relaxed. We joked about what we were going to do for the fourth, especially with seeing a “Gad Bless America” sign in one of the tourist shops. We talked about trying to find an American restaurant, saying that we go back to the “Happy Days” diner we saw on our walk on the first day. We didn’t actually end up doing any of that but we spent the rest of the evening napping and interneting.