Le Notre Dame and Art

Monday we met at the Notre Dame cathedral and had a lecture on some French history, the Notre Dame cathedral and L’Île de la Cité in particular. (We should have a French history course as part of the French language program at RWU by the way). After we waited in line to visit the cathedral (it surprisingly went by very quickly) and we were lucky enough to see part of the midday-mass (we didn’t stay to watch it, though). Afterwards we went to L’Île de la Cité to get some lunch and some of the famous ice cream. Unfortunately the ice-cream shop was closed, but we had a very nice lunch with everyone. After running around with Tony and Caroline to find a metro shop with mobilisse tickets for the class we went to L’Orangerie next to la Place de la Concorde (the guillotine used to be here during the French Revolution, now it’s a beautiful square with statues for each of the major cities (Rouen included) and a crazy roundabout. L’orangerie was amazing! They have a lot of different impressionist works, but it’s most popular for the Water Lily paintings by Monet. It was beautiful and very well done. There were 3 rooms dedicated to the Water Lilies, each with 3 paintings. The paintings were huge! They were approximately 4-5 feet tall and ranging from 20 – 40 feet long. The paintings were hung on white walls with benches in the middle of the room so you can sit and admire them… which we did. It was an incredible experience.

Afterwards we went to the Tuileries Garden to eat our dinner (sandwiches smuggled from the hostel, cheers for that!) and had some fun with the fishes and birds around the fountain. After eating we went to check out the modern art museum, Centre Pomidou. Generally I’m not fond of modern art, but I liked the floor we went to. A lot of the paintings had bright colors and crazy patterns, or would take a well known monument, such as la Tour Eiffel, and distort it to make it their own. It was a cool museum. Plus, the really nice view of the city made it an even better visit.
At dusk we went to L’arc de triomphe to climb up and see L’étoile at night. We were able to catch the 10 pm night show at the Eiffel Tour, when the Tower lights up and glitters. It was very nice, worth the crazy spiral of stairs to reach the top.

Bisous,
Lisa