Europe Day 4 of 59, Paris

Day four started out after 12 solid hours of sleep. I didn't sleep more than 3 hours or so on the plane, and only slept 4 hours night one in Paris, so it was a relief to sleep 12 on night 3. Man oh man, did Barbie's sleeping pill work.

After all that great sleep, we went out walking and had a great lunch (no pics of it) and then strolled towards l'Orangerie.

Along the way, I got this pic of Barbie with our lovely hostess, Robin.

A huge thank-you to my mother for insisting we hit l'Orangerie, which we missed the last time we were in Paris. The zoomless, unadjustable iPhone has no way to capture what you see in the large, beautifully sunlit oval rooms , each with four massively long Monet panoramas, Les Nympheas. (http://www.musee-orangerie.fr/homes/home_id24795_u1l2.htm) Suffice to say, I could have spent an hour plus in each room. Apparently Monet gave these paintings to the city with specific instructions to display them just so. How wonderful is Paris that they built this building to keep their word?

Here's my attempt at capturing the panoramic view.

And a close-up to grasp just how amazingly abstract these impressionistic paintings are up close.

Then we went downstairs where there is a pretty wonderful collection. But the standout, for me, is here.

This may sound random, but after staring at this painting for a while I had a thought. Stephen Hawking explained the dimensions beyond the three that we perceive by describing that if you look at a solid tube straight on at the end of it, all you see is a circle in two-dimensions. As you change the angle of your perspective, that disc becomes a pipe as you see it stretch out in the distance. The other dimensions of matter in our universe are like that. If we were only able to change our perspective, we could see them. But they are there, even though we cannot see them, just as the rest of the pipe is there when you only see the disc at the pipe's end. Now, I bothered with that ramble because I have a feeling that Picasso is painting those dimensions beyond the three that we are normally capable of seeing. His painting isn't random or imaginative, it's the reality we could see if only our perpective allowed us to see it. Or maybe I just really love Picasso. Anyway...

I found it amusing that this girl is paid to stare at a wall of Picasso all day and she looks unhappy and bored. Do you get more French than she? Or, to quote Justice, "Can you do any less?"

The French version of a Roman arch in front of the Louvre. I'm just going to assume that they built it and didn't steal it. After seeing the arches in Rome a few years back, that were built around 500 B.C. to commemorate Roman military victories in faraway lands, I cannot help but snicker a little at the French homage to Roman architecture.

What makes Paris one of the best cities in the world, if not the best, is the city's unwillingness to be ugly. Sure, there's traffic and homelessness, but they don't let that ruin the aesthetic.

By the way, this is supercool. All around the city, there are these bicycle stations. Slide a credit card at the kiosk, punch in the stall of the bike you're taking, and away you go. Then you return the bike to an open stall anywhere in the city and get charged for the time you used it. Genius, no? Apparently a lot of people use them to commute.

A daytime view of La Trinité, the church across the street from our apartment building. It certainly makes getting home on the subway easy to sleep across from a landmark. We ate dinner on night three at a cafe across the street and got to see around eight police arresting five or six kids doing a drug deal. The pics just look like a bunch of people standing around so they don't make the blog, but still, it was enjoyable to think that for these Parisian kids it seemed like a reasonable idea to buy and sell drugs in front of La Trinité.

Obligatory photo. That statue in Paris that is the sister statue of our Statue of Liberty.

Finally, Barbie wanted a picture with this sign. Perhaps when we get home I will remember to say to the people working in stores, "You give me happy price? You give me happy price!"

Sent from my iPhone or my computer or something else.