J'adore Paris

I am really bad at keeping a journal. Or maybe this is a sign that I am too busy doing cooler things to keep up with a journal that you all probably stopped checking a month ago.

To try to write down everything about my fall break would be futile, and also take more time than I have now. It was wonderful to see my parents…to show them Bath and my house and the city I live in. We spent two days in London, in a frenzy, and then three days in Paris.

I...adore…Paris.

The Louvre was, of course, incredible. It lived up to all expectations. Mona Lisa is by no means my favorite work in the museum…and we only covered a fraction of the exhibits anyway. But I saw so many things from art history class that came to life before my eyes. Venus de Milo, the coronation of Napoleon, and some of my personal favorites- paintings by Panini.

Notre Dame is beautiful, but smaller than I imagined. It doesn’t compare, in my mind, to St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. Christopher Wren designed the dome to be like an observatory between Earth and Heaven, and it’s really breathtaking. It’s the largest dome in Europe (I was surprised to learn that, so I might have gotten it wrong…but either way it’s huge). There’s a window in the top of it. St. Paul’s is also more breathtaking than Westminster Abbey, which was too much to take in all at once. So many people are buried there, it’s just too much to see. It doesn’t feel like a church to me, just a graveyard.
But I was very excited to see the tomb of Elizabeth I.

Besides St. Paul’s, I think all my favorite spots were in Paris. Musee d’Orsay has all the Impressionism and Post-Impressionism paintings I could ever dream about…Van Gogh, Renoir, Degas, Monet, Manet, and lots else. I’ve never enjoyed an art museum that much.

We spent a lot of time at the Eiffel Tower, of course, both during the day and at night. I went up to the very top but I couldn’t see anything because it was foggy. But the view from the second deck was pretty astounding itself.

Versailles was beautiful but repetitive after awhile. We spent about half a day there outside of Paris, but we were still able to see pretty much everything I wanted to see in Paris. As for London, I still want to see Hyde Park (I just rode around the edges of it, but I want to actually be able to see the Peter Pan Statue and the Princess Diana Memorial) and Harrod’s. I’m going back at the end of the month with friends.

And next time I’m there, I’m seeing WICKED! WITH IDINA MENZEL! YESSS!