Simona's Paris

Picture Perfect Crepe Store in Paris

We got back from Paris sunday morning and I had a blast.  We visited many museums including, the Musee D'Orsay, the Louvre and Rodin museum which held many of Rodin`s most famous sculptures, including the Thinker. 

Les Invalides

The most interesting to me was the Louvre. It was a gigantic never ending museum filled with 35 000 paintings and sculptures made by hundreds of different artists. I was very excited to hear that the Mona Lisa was in the museum and was eager to get right to it, but I was expecting the portrait to be much smaller, because people had told me that it was smaller than they expected it to be. The Mona Lisa was painted by Leonardo da Vinci and is a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a wealthy businessman in Florence. Leonardo da Vinci began painting the Mona Lisa in 1503, and completed it in four years.

Another section in the museum that I really enjoyed was Napoleon III "apartment." It was really just his office building that he used to work in that is called an apartment but looks more like a palace. It felt so royal and the ceilings and the walls were all carved into different patterns and designs with golden coloured wood. While we were in Paris we also went to a Claude Monet exhibition with most of his paintings from all over the world, including three from Canada. We waited in line for almost four hours just to get into the exhibition, but his paintings were worth the wait. I love his paintings of women with their parasols taking a walk in the summer, and his lillypad paintings. I like his technique of tiny, short cut brush strokes.   Too bad I can’t paint like that!!

Wow!!

I was very excited to go see the Eiffel Tower and it turned out to be my favorite part of the whole trip. We climbed six hundred and eighty steps to the second floor at night and seeing  the whole city lit up looked so cool which made the climb truly worth it. Every hour the tower sparkles for ten minutes on the hour. I loved watching it twinkle in the dark sky. It almost looked as if a giant came and sprinkled glitter on the tower. To bad it was raining the whole time we were there, because it would have been nice to sit on the grass outside the tower and look at it. 


Simona