Day 7 - A more modern day experience.

Good day! Short blog tonight. I am tired and I'm surprised Christian is even upright. Today brought us more cold and rain outside so we took it upon ourselves to head indoors once again to view some fantastic creations of art... modern art. Well... more modern than we saw yesterday. It's still old, just not as old. But these are the faves of them all in my mind, and Christian's. Where did we go to see these great works you ask? La Musee de'Orday. This museum was made out of an old train station that was a working station back in the early 20th century. They made it a museum when the platforms were deemed too short for the new trains. This place rocks! Christian wants to know if we can buy it and make it our home. Uhhh... no. It is very cool though. I understand the desire.

This is where a lot if the most famous pieces of art known to modern man are housed. You must have Monet to buy Degas to make Van Gogh. If you run out of Monet you will be Baroque. Ha, ha... get it? Oh well... I tried to be funny. Christian loved this museum. He recognized several of the paintings right away. He said his art teacher, Mrs. Mergalman (spl.???) would love this place. Right away he picked out his favorite, a Vincent Van Gogh. It is a painting of his bedroom when he was staying in Provence, France. "Bedroom in Arles" is very recognizable to most. No other paintings are like it, but no other painter was like Van Gogh. He also loved the paintings of Degas, Renoir, Manet and, of course... Monet. Ahhhh... I could stay and look at these all day. What a shame we can only tolerate so much art in a day when we are 8.

After we took in some Rodin sculptures and some other great works we took off for lunch and then on to another climb... a climb straight up. If you are ever in Paris this is a must see. We climbed the towers of the Notre-Dame, all the way to the bells (no hunchback to be found). First of all, I don't know how many people have done this before us, but there were some serious crevices in the stone steps. And to make things more challenging, the spiral staircases were way tighter than the Arce de Triomphe. What a wild climb. Who needs a gym membership when you could do this every day. Christian loved to be right up close to all the gargoyles that surrounded the top. He also loved getting right next to one of the bells. HUGE bell!!!! BIG bell!!!! It weighs somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 ton. Don't drop that on your foot when you're cleaning it, Monsieur. I guess when we were up on the top they had high enough winds to close the airports and cancel flights for some time. Who knew? I guess we are so use to high winds in Loveland we didn't seem to notice.

Tonight we walked down to see the old Opera house in the ritzy part of Paris. I wasn't sure we could afford to look around at the shops that surrounded us. 20 euros per glance. No, not really. Very upscale stores though.

Well, tomorrow is our last day. We are torn... we miss Mom and brother a ton, but there is still so much to see. Check in tomorrow to see how much we can cram in. Good night! Oh yes, I almost forgot... Christian had his first eclair today. Mmmmmmmm!!!!!