Paris!

Well, we've been having such a fun week here in Paris with Emily's parents! It's been filled with museums and monuments and delicious food and lots more! Since it would be far too much to write about everything we've been doing, I'm just going to give you the highlights.

As far as the sights go, we have basically been to all the most famous ones in Paris. We saw the Notre Dame (and a Gregorian chant concert there!), climbed up most of the Eiffel Tower, saw the Bastille memorial, went to the top of the Arc de Triomphe, and saw the graves of Jim Morrison, Frederic Chopin, Gericault and the Stroganoffs. For museums, we visited the Sewer Museum, the Louvre, Musee d'Orsay, the Victor Hugo House, Musee de Musique, and the Pompideu Center. We've been very busy, as you can tell. To make it more condensed, I'll just tell my favorite places.

My favorite of the monument was the Arc de Triomphe, I think. It was so much fun to stand on the very top and look down at all the cars during rush hour trying frantically to take the right turn off the rotary. The Smart Cars were especially funny to watch, since from above they look ridiculously small compared to the normal-sized cars, which looked small on their own.

I also really liked Pere Lachaise, which was the graveyard. It has the graves of so many famous people, including Jim Morrison, Frederic Chopin, Gericault, Edith Piaf, Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt, Camille Pisarro, the Hugo family and so many more people. We visited the first three of those graves, as well as the Stroganoff family. Pere Lachaise is one of the most famous cemeteries in the world, and is also almost unnavigable. Unfortunately, we forgot the book with the detailed map and home and didn't want to buy a map just to visit a couple of graves. Needless to say, it was quite an adventure. Some of the graves we found simply by following groups of other people or looking for where people were crowded around, which is how we found Jim Morrison and Chopin. Gericault's grave was the first we visited, so we tried our hardest to remember from the map at the entrance. Gericault, in case you don't know, was an artist who painted "The Wrath of the Medusa", among others. On his tombstone, there was an engraving of this painting, so it was quite a gorgeous tombstone.

How we found the Stroganoff family, on the other hand, is quite a story. Originally, we were trying to find the Hugo family plot, which was surprisingly difficult. On our way to find it, we found this huge monument to the Stroganoff family. After looking them up online we discovered that they were a family of Russian barons and traders, and beef stroganoff is thought to be named after them. Just a random fact.

My favorite museum was Musee de Musique, which showed the history of musical instruments. Some of the old instruments they had there were amazing, like a guitar with the back of the guitar made from a tortoise shell and a huge collection of lutes. The museum was very interesting, especially since three out of the four of us are musicians.

Of course, I also enjoyed the bigger museums, like the Musee d'Orsay (which had paintings by nearly every famous impressionist painter), the Pompideu Center (a modern art museum), and the Louvre. Unfortunately, a lot of these museums were so huge that it was impossible to see everything. We spent hours at the Louvre and really only saw one wing!

The most interesting and unique museum, however, was the Sewer Museum. It consisted of an underground tour of the Paris sewer system as well as the history of and just about everything else you'll ever need to know about the system. Although it was quite interesting, it was difficult to breathe freely in due to the overpowering smell of feces.

That's all for now, keep reading for weeklies in a couple of days!
Ariel