Day 4: Walking with Ingrid

Kirsten's sister Ingrid, who took the train in from London for the weekend, met up with us this morning. We grabbed a quick breakfast at a bakery down the street from our apartment before setting off for the Musee D'Orsay to see their collection of Impressionists works. Unfortunately when we got there. . . you guessed it, we were again deterred by the length of the line. Long lines seem to be a common thing in Paris.

Being mildly discouraged we walked over to the Musee de l'Orangerie which is a smaller museum with a later opening time but has a nice collection of Impressionist works including eight enormous murals by Monet of his water garden. It was quite mindblowing to think about him creating these huge paintings, especially while he was going blind.

From there we walked along the Seine to the Place de l'Alma where we stopped at a small cafe for a lengthy lunch. I had a croque monsieur that was pretty good but was made better when I put on some of their very spicy horseradish mustard on it.

After our lunch we went down the street to the Musee d'Art Moderne which was surprisingly free and not crowded. They had a few famous works there that I recognized and a few more that Ingrid pointed out as being famous that I didn't recognize. And of course no modern art museum would be without a few odd exhibits. In this museum's case there was a room full of dots painted on the walls in different colors and a ten foot tall portrait of a woman peeing.

From the museum we swung north to the Arc de Triomphe and Champs Elysees. The Champs Elysees was very similar to Michigan Avenue in Chicago minus the tall buildings. It's a very wide street with lots of traffic and high end stores. The lights in the trees were very nice though. The Arc was beautiful and much larger than I had imagined it to be. It was also great to see it all lit up because it was already night time when we left the museum.

After walking the length of the Champs Elysees we headed back into the thick of Paris looking for a restaurant to eat at as earlier attempts at making reservations had failed at the particular restaurants Ingrid was interested in taking us to. We finally settled on a little place called L'Arbre A Cannelle in the Passage des Panoramas, an old shopping arcade, that was superb.