Free Museum Sunday!

Sometimes life just ends up working in your favor. Because I did this program when I did I ended up being in Paris at a very fortuitous time in that we ended up there both at the beginning of July when all the clothing stores are having sales and on the first Sunday of the month. In Paris many of the museums have free admission on the first Sunday of the month, which is great for us, but I was a little surprised at because in my experience with other museums, they seemed to have one free day a week, instead of just once a month. I was wondering if this had to do with the sheer volume of people going to the museums in Paris as oppose to the ones in the States. So Sunday for us it was back to the museums!

We started at another thing that Mom missed on her last tour of Paris, with the Rodin museum. It was really amazing, since the museum is actually in his house and in his gardens, which were quite amazing by themselves. We had a bit of trouble in that we couldn’t really figure out where the museum started, since the entrance was a newer building with a temporary exhibit that was not free, except that we tried to go in there twice with our limited French. But eventually we managed to find out way out in the garden and began by looking at the statues there, including one of his most famous “The Thinker.” We went over to another famous The Burghers of Calais which is the one statue that my parents managed to see through the fence of the museum. It had an amazing story behind it in that during the Hundred Year War six principle citizens of Calais offered up their lives to spare the rest of the town, until the queen begged the king to spare their lives. We also saw The Gates of Hell that is a huge set of amazing doors, with amazing intricate details. We then moved to the inside and looked at some of the smaller statues and also saw some of the works done by his protégée/lover Camille Claudel, who was actually quite a sculpture in her own right. Although it was pleasant outside it was very stuffy in the house with all the people in it so it was really nice to get back out into the gardens. We saw some more amazing statues, like one of Victor Hugo and move further into the shade of the garden. There was a beautiful fountain there and we walked along looking at all the amazing statues. There was a funny moment where I was trying to figure out what the name of the statue and after I figured it out and told it to my mother, this guy comes up to me and asked me in French about the same statue and I managed to communicate the right statue to him and that always makes me feel good. At this point we were getting pretty hungry but we decided to press on.

We made our way to Napoleon’s Tomb thinking that it would be open for free as well but as we found out from the guard, it was not and we decided that it wasn’t worth going in but we did go to the cafeteria, where we had a delicious lunch of quiche and tart. It really perked us up.

Next we made our way back to the Louve for one more visit. There were some works of art that I studied in Art History 101 that I did not get to see on our first tour of the museum. I was expecting the worst, since the Louve last time was a nightmare and people had to pay to get in, how was it going to be when it was free. We were actually very surprised, since we were looking at the less obviously famous works of art it was actually much more pleasant experience. Sticking to the ancient works of art was a really cool experience, especially after the better understanding that I got after Art History 101, although I realized just how limited one semester is to cover such an expansive period of art’s history but I truly love seeing things that I’ve studied. When I was explaining The Seated Scroll to my Mother some British women starting asking me questions about it, which was kind of cool but I felt awkward with her just jumping in.

I got a little pissed off when I saw that people were touching works of art, especially with the ancient stuff and taking flash photography. A lot of these works are thousands of years old and people just run their hands all over them like it is no big deal. Since the museum is so crowded and big, there aren’t nearly enough guards to watch over every room and if I had known French I would have been all over that, especially since a lot of the times people seemed to be doing it mindlessly, as they were walking. What the hell? And every once in awhile I would see a flash and that was fairly annoying, especially since it’s pretty damaging to paintings. But over all it was another really enjoyable visit.

Then in the evening we went on a walk around our neighborhood and look at all the amazing Paris architecture. It was a beautiful night with great light so we snapped a couple pictures along the way. We also saw this completely burned up something that seemed to an art project because Mom saw some paper with writing on it. She also saw a puppy which she try to get the lady to let her pet, but she didn’t understand English and she kept looking for me for answers but I couldn’t explain it to her so we didn’t get to play with the cute puppy but it was a fabulous day otherwise.