day 2

up river

& round the bend

…

I’m continuing to use the gold-leaf sculptures atop columns and plinths as the featured images. Today’s sculpture is atop the Pont Alexandre III bridge pylon.

Rather than walk all the way up river, we decided to buy tickets on a hop-on/hop-off boat that cruised up and down the Seine. Our first stop was Le musée du Louvre. The story we will all take from this our first stop of the day, is that Dom got lost – hey, he was doing his thing. And being a good, frugal Canadian, he was damned if he was going to turn his phone on and pay the soul-sucking provider $15 a day. So we had no way of phoning or texting him. Naturally, I texted his kids back in Pickering telling them we had lost their father in the middle of Paris. After all, we all want to know of any breaking news, right?

But the more lasting experience was at Le Musée de l’Orangerie and interacting with Monet’s surreal, fascinating and other-worldly water lilies – le célèbre cycle des Nymphéas. At the entrance to the oval gallery, the notice asked that we remain quiet and respectful. I laughed; in Florence you were asked to remain quiet and respectful in the Medici Tombs; in Paris we are asked to remain quiet and respectful when interacting with beautiful art. I may have been born in Italy, but my sensibilities are certainly more French than Italian.