mattAtomic: Europa - France Part II: Paris

Saturday, October 29, 2016

Europa - France Part II: Paris

We took the Paris Metro from Disneyland into the City of Lights. We visited the Père Lachaise Cemetery, the largest cemetery in the city. Among those interred are Composer Georges Bizet, Composer Frederic Chopin, Mime Marcel Marceau, Cinematographer Georges Melies, Singer Jim Morrison, Singer Edith Piaf, Writer Oscar Wilde, along with other notable persons. We went to The Musée d'Orsay, a museum on the left bank of the River Seine. It is housed in the former Gare d'Orsay, a Beaux-Arts railway station built between 1898 and 1900. The museum holds mainly French art dating from 1848 to 1914, including paintings, sculptures, furniture, and photography. It houses the largest collection of impressionist and post-Impressionist masterpieces in the world, by painters including Monet, Manet, Degas, Renoir, Cézanne, Seurat, Sisley, Gauguin, and Van Gogh. We visited the Arc de Triomphe, one of the most famous monuments in Paris. It stands in the centre of the Place Charles de Gaulle, at the western end of the Champs-Élysées. The Arc de Triomphe honours those who fought and died for France in the French Revolutionary and the Napoleonic Wars, with the names of all French victories and generals inscribed on its inner and outer surfaces. Beneath its vault lies the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier from World War I. We walked from the Arc de Triomphe to the Eiffel Tower. Shane and I decided to go to the top of the tower to take in the view of the city. We arrived on the top level observation deck shortly before sunset. We both got a flute of champagne to watch the sunset and to toast what a whirlwind two week adventure we had been on.