Metro & Museum adventures

Today was scheduled to be a museum day. Molly's one and only "must-do" for Paris was to go to Musee D'Orsay and visit the impressionist paintings. Specifically she wanted to see the famous works of Vincent Van Gogh and  Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec.

We chatted over breakfast deciding on how best to get to the Musee D'Orsay and the possible side trip to Musee Rodin. If you ever come to Paris, download the Paris Metro app and you can use it to calculate and provide you a list of steps to get where you're going.

The ride on the Metro was pretty straightforward if you paid attention to the visual cues and for us, also because I had written down the route beforehand.  I should also add that I watched about 2-3 videos on Youtube.com about how to ride the Metro and that was also helpful.

There were no unsavory characters and a couple of young guys gave up their seats to us immediately which was very polite. We connected onto the larger double-decker train (the RER) to get to D'Orsay and it has quite the step up/down compared to the Metro which is at platform level. Seriously. If you go to Paris, get the Paris Metro app and for the love of God, don't make the same mistake I did and charge your cell phone before you head out.

In planning this trip, I held off on pre-purchasing the Paris Museum Pass which helps you skip the line and gain entrance to several museums and monuments. It's a great value if you're going to spend a good chunk of your days going to enough of these locations to pay for itself. However, this is my first time traveling with a senior citizen and I needed to determine what her stamina was like first.

Besides, we waited in line to get in for all of about 10 minutes and the people in the Reserved queue waited about half that time but paid more than we did. It also gave us a chance to enjoy the lively French music of the trio playing nearby on a bass, accordion and drums.

Amongst all the art we stopped to admire, we saw works of:

• Van Gogh
• Toulouse-Lautrec
• Monet
• Renoir
• Cezanne
• Degas
• Gaugain

Of all that I saw, I was most enamored with a sculpture by Degas, "Little Dancer of Fourteen Years" mostly for what the audio guide explained about how controversial it was at the time and how people accused Degas of "taxidermy" because his sculpture was far too lifelike, especially with the incorporation of real material and real ballet slippers in the wax and bronze figure. Personally, for all the interpretations made of it back in the day, it just looks to me like she's pleasurably stretching her shoulders while in third or fourth position.

From there, we decided to move on to the Musee Rodin but we were also foot-tired. We decided to grab a Pedicab (a cycle-rickshaw). The driver spoke the absolute barest amount of English to know where we wanted to go. And so we pulled out into busy Parisian traffic at about 3:45pm with Florentine at the wheel. What a ridiculously fun thing to do in Paris! A L'Opentop tour bus pulled up behind us and because I was smiling back and forth with the driver he edged his bus close enough to us to allow me to poke his windshield :)

Florentine stopped to show us Les Invalides and point it out on the map and then proceeded "a droit" in the wrong direction. He had to stop and ask for directions and did a u-turn to go around the other side of Les Invalides to bring us to Musee Rodin. Here we saw a lot of Rodin's sculptures (ie: The Thinker and Molly's favorite the Bergers of Calais) but the beautiful gardens are a draw on their own. In reading the descriptive plates next to several sculptures, I can't help but think that Rodin must have been so pissed when so many of his sculptures were not used after he was commissioned to do them or rejected, or he was ignored when it was decided how and where to put a sculpture on display. And yet he persisted onwards with his art. We stopped and had beer and gelato in the garden and I listened to her reminisce about her life as a young woman just as she met her husband.

Finding our way back home via the Metro was a bit of a challenge considering my phone was dead and I hadn't thought to map out our return trip. We stopped at two Metro Information kioskis...."Parlez-Vous Anglais?". Almost everyone answers, "A leetle". We found our way back without much of a hitch other than the two times where we stood at different crossroads wondering which direction to take and whether we had made ourselves understood to the last Information person.

To wrap up the day, we decided to go for dinner at the restaurant/bistro/bar just under our apartment. I said "deux" and "a l'exterieur" to eat outside. We sat and ate quiche & salad and "cote de boeuf avec frites". Many of these bistros serve soft drinks in their old-school glass bottles which is thrilling for me. The waiter brought me a bottle with "Princesse" on it : )

After a delicious dinner we came up to the apartment and reviewed what we're doing for the next few days and now Molly has gone to do her crossword puzzles in bed listening to the restaurant's din below and here I sit again with the windows wide open listening to the same from the dining room.

Today's bonus win: While sitting in the Pedicab, a truck was beeping playfully behind us. I looked over my shoulder and two handsome Frenchmen were waving and flirting at me : )

Ah Paris. Vous etre tres magnifique xox.