Along the way we walked by these Oblisks. I am not even sure we realized we were at the Place de la Concorde. We didn't even notice the Eiffel Tower in the background when we took this picture. Way to be observant travelers.
In my humble opinion, the Musee d'Orsay is a better art museum to go to than the Louvre. The building is an old train station and has a better collection of paintings that interest me. They have works by Monet, Manet, Seurat, Van Gogh, Rodin just to name a few. There is also this really cool clock on the top floor.
View from the clock:
Museums are very tiring. We spent several hours going through the audio tour and it's surprising how worn out you can get. We left the Museum to find that it was pouring rain outside. We were hungry so we figured we could find a nearby cafe. We were also really indecisive and passed a lot of cafes thinking we could find better prices or better food. In the end, we made a bad choice and had not very good crepes for way too much money.
There was still some time left in the day so we consulted our map and saw that the Hotel des Invalides wasn't too far off. Our previous experience with the map was that things that looked far away were actually really close. We figured we could walk. Not a good idea. Terrible idea. Probably the worst idea of the trip. It was so rainy!
By the time we reached the museum we were completely soaked and it was about to close.
I was thankful to have a little time out of the rain, no matter how small. The Hotel des Invalides is an army museum and the final resting spot of non other than Napoleon Bonaparte.
The interior was very cool and most importantly, dry.
We were walking so quickly with our heads down we didn't even notice what the building looked like.
The doors look like this. Parisians know how to make fancy doors.
The way home was a little complicated and involved several transfers on the Metro. Missy and I had the maps and had assumed most of the navigation responsibilities. We were coming home during a busy time and the trains were mostly full. We were a little confused about one train and Missy tried to ask about it just as the doors started to close. I pushed past the closing doors and looked back to see Rilie and Liz left on the platform.
Missy and I had all the maps and no way to contact them. We hoped they'd get on the next train and get off at the next stop. We waited as several trains passed with no Liz or Rilie. They had hoped we would get off and go back to get them. We had decided not to do that because of the time it would take for us to get from our platform to the other platform. In the end the only thing we could do was go to the apartment and hope they figured out how to get home. Which they eventually did. Thank goodness. But in our worry, we didn't stop to get any pastries for the night....
