Merry Christmas everyone who reads this blog! Hope you’ve all had a good time with good food and good company. This post isn’t actually about our Christmas (that’s coming in the next post), I was hoping to have this post done before Christmas but I got a little too snap happy on the camera and ended up with waaay too many pictures to sort through. But I have now broken something in the camera and can’t use it so that should make the next post much quicker to put together! If you’re curious, I probably only post about 1% of all the photos I take (and edit and keep), which is why some of the posts can take a while to put up.
Anyway, on to the second part of our Paris trip.
One of the things we did while we were in Paris was to get ourselves a membership card for two of the biggest museums: the Louvre and the Orsay.
The Orsay is full of art from the 1850s to modern art and the Louvre is filled with paintings, sculptures, historical objects and decorative arts. The Louvre is easily the biggest museum we have been to, and has extremely high quality objects on display, so it was great that we could come and go as many times as we wanted and not get overwhelmed by the amount of stuff they had, as well as being able to learn the stories behind some of the objects. Here’s a few examples below.
As you can see, there’s a LOT of different things to see, there’s pretty much something for everyone. And this is why we felt like we needed to go back multiple times. The cards were good value, after 4 trips they had paid for themselves. Comparing the British Museum with the historical stuff in the Louvre; I would say that the British Museum has better labels so you really understand the history. Every object on display has a short description of it and why it’s important, while the Louvre just has an overview of things. Both have very good quality objects on display, but the Louvre probably has the larger collection of high quality items.
Oh and don’t forget to look up in the Louvre! A lot of the ceilings are richly decorated.
So as well as going to the Louvre lots we went to see the Basilica of Saint-Denis which is where all the kings and queens have been buried for 700 years. A lot of the impressive and imposing tombs survived the French Revolution because an archaeologist claimed them as important artworks and sent them to a museum of French monuments.
The bodies of the French rulers didn’t do so well. The Revolutionaries broke into the church and took all the bodies so they could dump them in a mass grave outside the church. They were eventually moved back into the church but since it wasn’t possible to tell which bones belonged to who, they were reburied together behind the black stone plaques in this picture.
Apart from the dead French royals we also checked out the “normal” people in Paris’ most famous cemetery: Père Lachaise. There’s some fancy tombs and some famous people like Oscar Wilde, Chopin, and of course Jim Morrison.
Towards the end of our stay we went to Chateau of Fontainebleau. We actually went there twice. The first time we misread the opening hours on their website, so after an hour on the train and 20min on the bus we got to the front door only to see the sign helpfully telling us that it was closed on Tuesdays. We went back a few days later and this time it was open. The second time around we stayed until closing time and then got locked inside. Luckily there were two staff members locked in there with us and they called security to let us out.
Fontainebleau has a special Napoleon museum so if you’re interested in Napoleon memorabilia you can see his coronation robes and of course his famous hat and big grey coat.
Finally, the other things we did a lot of while we were in Paris was just to go strolling around the streets, admiring the buildings and eating good food. That was probably one of the best things about having a lot of time to explore the city. We didn’t feel like we were on a schedule to see x, y and z and so we could just take our time walking between sights and stopping off at a nice looking patisserie for a snack.
We’re glad we got to have the time to enjoy and explore Paris at a slow pace and really get to feel the vibe of the city and not just run around like headless chooks trying to cram in everything listed in the guidebook in a few days. It’s a much nicer way of seeing places and I’d definitely recommend that everyone chill out and slow down a bit when they go on their trips, regardless of where in the world they go to.
Hopefully you all had a great Christmas and in a few days I should have an update on our Christmas. And yes we did get snow and I finally got to see a White Christmas!
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