Free Museum Sunday

As we were pondering what to do on Sunday, we realized that it was the first Sunday of the month, which meant a whole pile of museums were offering free admission for the day. Conveniently, the Paris Marathon was also scheduled to be whizzing past our corner starting at around 9:00, so we had another good reason to get out of the apartment at a decent hour. Below are a few pics of the speedsters at the front of the pack and a crowd of runners surging past the Louvre.







After watching the runners stream by for 15 or 20 minutes, I finally worked up the courage to shout at a group of three passing women wearing matching blue t-shirts, "Allez les femmes bleues!" ("Go, blue women!"), which caused them to turn to smile and wave at me. I was a little disappointed the crowd wasn't more enthusiastic; people seemed to mainly be searching for runners they actually knew and not cheering for strangers (which, as Sarah G. has taught me, is lots of fun, too). Probably the greatest crowd/runner interaction near us was thanks to a fire truck parked at our corner with a half dozen or so fire fighters in uniform perched on top, watching the race -- enough of a spectacle that many of the runners themselves would shout as they passed, "Eh, les pompiers!" ("Hey, firemen!")

When the large crowd of runners (over 40,000) had dwindled to the last few stragglers, we headed over to the Orangerie, a small museum next to the Tuileries that had been closed for renovation when we were in France in 2005. The first floor is dedicated to two oval-shaped galleries displaying Monet's Water Lilies; the lower level contains a small collection with works by 8 or 10 artists, including Renoir, Monet, Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne, and Utrillo. Thanks to the marathon, we got to the museum in time to enjoy a little bit of fairly quiet gallery time before the critical mass of tourists had finished their croissants and coffee and gotten started on their Free Museum Sunday rounds.









(The last picture above is Picasso's Woman in White Hat.)

After lunch and some down time back at our apartment, we crossed the Seine to the Left Bank for museum #2: the Musée National du Moyen Age (a.k.a. the Cluny Museum). There we saw, among other things, a round, darkened gallery dedicated to displaying the six-tapestry series The Lady and the Unicorn. It's well known enough that I had a vague sense of familiarity with it (I think others have told me about it after trips to France), but I don't think I had ever read the explanation of what each of the tapestries ostensibly represents. It's pretty interesting -- trusty Wikipedia appears to provide the same explanation that was given in the museum, if you want to check it out (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lady_and_the_Unicorn).

The pictures below are all from the Cluny Museum. Erik and Tami, the last two are for you!













Our final free museum for the day was the Centre Georges Pompidou, which houses, among other things, a modern art museum. Since neither Aaron nor I are actually very big fans of modern art, we mainly wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to see the inside of the building and take the escalators in the odd and eye-catching transparent tubes mounted on the outside of the building. So we weren't all that disappointed when we somehow managed to take the escalators all the way up to the top, and then all the way back down again, without finding any signs for the (free) permanent collection -- every floor seemed to indicate it was either the ($$$) Alexander Calder special exhibit or else closed for renovation. Ah well -- the time spent waiting in line was well worth it for the view from the top floor!



In the evening, we had dinner with a high school classmate of mine who has been living in Paris for the past two years...but I will leave talking about that for another post.