** Sorry for the lack of pictures, there’s something wrong with the media upload. Will add some soon when it’ll let me**
The past six days have been a whirlwind. So far we have visited several churches, plenty of parks, a few museums and walked (according to the tracker on my phone) a grand total of 27.8 miles. Granted that’s probably a lower estimation than what we’ve actually done. Because we covered so much and this blog website was shut down on Thursday and Friday, I wanted to talk about parks, paintings, and the Palace of Versailles.
The parks in Paris are very well designed and many of them offer shade and water fountains where you can fill up your water bottles. This has especially come in handy since it’s been pretty hot. I have come to notice that a lot of Parisians as well as tourists like to sit in the shade of the trees or tan on the grass in many of the parks. They can be a social gathering spot for friends and families to get together or a relaxing getaway from the hustle, bustle, and heat of the city streets. Even the benches are specially designed so that you can sit back to back with another person and physically not touch with them allowing for air circulation to make it easier for cooling off on a hot day.
When you come to Paris, the one stop almost everybody makes is to the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa. Yes, I can officially say I saw DaVinci’s famous work of art in person, but to be completely honest, I was more impressed by the architecture of the Louvre than some of the paintings. The magnificent details on the exterior of the museum rival the works of art sitting inside of it, likewise is to be said about some of the rooms within the Louvre.
I’m currently reading Monuments Men and a main part of the book talks about the French effort to protect masterpieces such as the Mona Lisa from Nazi art looters. It was very difficult to picture the main corridor of the Louvre completely empty; frames stripped of their paintings, white chalk labels across the walls noting where each painting was located. It must have been an eerie sight to walk around an art museum without any art in order to protect it from the Nazis and preserve it for future generations.
After an hour on the sweltering hot tram and RER yesterday, we arrived at Versailles and instantly, the palace took my breath away. The architecture, the overly gilded exterior and interior, the gardens, the size: okay so pretty much everything about it was super impressive. I remembered learning about Versailles in a world history class during high school, but I was surprised to learn that the palace I thought I was built entirely by Louis XIV was actually started by Louis XIII as a small hunting lodge. After leaving the palace, Holly, Kerry, and I made our way through the expansive gardens which seemed to stretch on for miles and miles. We even managed to find some row boats and took one out onto a small man made pond for a little while! Even though I ended the day with horrible tan lines from my backpack straps, it was still an amazing experience to see such an important palace in French history.