So Much Culture!

Honeymoon Day 6 - Paris Day 3

Today started a little earlier than we had hoped.  We opened the windows last night and slept much better with the cool air (for some reason the A/C in our room only blows out warm air).  Thankfully I have a white noise app on my phone that drowned most of the traffic noise from the street.  We wanted to get to Versailles this morning when they opened at 9am, but due to an argument with the metro ticket machine, we had to wait for the 9am train.  It all worked out though and we met a nice Canadian family waiting for the same train that we talked to during our wait.

We arrived en mass at Versailles and had only a 5 minute walk until we saw the palace.  Again, there are not words to describe this place.  Every other palace we have seen up to this point pales in comparison to Versailles.  We knew we only had a few hours to spend at Versailles and as the line to get into the palaces was a winding crazy line that we estimated was a good couple of hour wait, we skipped the palace and headed towards the gardens.  We were not disappointed at all.  I have never heard Trent say so many times how amazed he was with gardens before.  Or how grand they were.  Or that they were not what he expected.  We wandered around for a few hours and were delightfully surprised that the fountains were running as our travel agent told us they didn't run on the weekends.  So as we wandered we saw many fountain shows (think Bellagio fountains in a garden) and heard some amazing classical music.  It was truly amazing.  After a few hours (and only seeing a fractions of the gardens) we decided to head back to Paris.  We timed our arrival at the train station perfectly and found our way back to Paris near our hotel.  We found a nice cafe for lunch and enjoyed a leisurely 2+ hour lunch (the French have zero concept of time, which today was quite wonderful).

After lunch, we jumped on one of the big double decker red buses and toured the city.  We stopped at the Museum d'Orsey and we were able to soak up so much french art history, it was amazing.  We skipped to the front of a several hour long line (courtesy of our Paris pass that paid for itself right there) and found ourselves in an old train station full of french impressionist art (Renoir, Van Gough, Cezanne, Monet, Degas).  OMG it was amazing.  I don't know much about art, but I LOVE french impressionist art and this was a little piece of heaven for me.  Trent enjoyed it very much as well and made a comment that after that museum we had to be dripping in culture (hence the name of today's blog).  We headed back out and jumped back on our bus to enjoy the rest of the tour of the city.  We saw a few new sights including L'Arc de Triumphe and the the Opera house and saw several we had already seen, but could never get sick of seeing (the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower).

After the bus tour we took a quick break to check our "to do" list and then took the Metro to a small street south of our hotel a ways that I saw an article about in the flight magazine on the way here.  It did not disappoint.  It was a mostly pedestrian road lined with shops selling wines, chocolate, souvenirs and of course cafes.  It was very quaint and very Parisian.  Unfortunately most of the shops were closed as it was after 7 on a Sunday, so we headed back towards our hotel after a nice stroll and found another charming cafe for dinner.  We are now relaxing after yet another wonderful meal and another crepe (number 6).  Oh and we skipped crepes at lunch and opted for creme brûlée as Trent had never tried it before (it was the best creme brûlée I have ever had).

Tomorrow we are heading to Sacre Coure in the morning and then finding another museum that has more works by Monet, including his famous Water Lilies paintings that supposedly take up multiple walls in two oval rooms.

Love you all!
Kristen & Trent