Trip Report: Day Twelve - Paris

France became the third country in which I have bought Strepsils. We may need to stop going on vacation when it's cold outside.

I didn't feel too bad other than a scratchy throat, though, so we set out for the Orsay Museum. We saw this on the way and I asked Ben if he thought it was a real cat show but apparently that's a ridiculous thing to wonder.

The line for the Orsay turned out to be crazy. Even the Museum Pass line. We were kind of sick of big museums, anyway, so we popped over the the Orangerie instead so I could make Ben look at the rooms specifically built to display Monet's water lilies. There was also an exhibit of American art, featuring the American Gothic painting! They did not allow pictures in there. This exhibit was one of my favorites from the trip, though.

There were surprisingly few people in the water lilies rooms. Ben complained about how boring the paintings were, so maybe that's why. Maybe everyone thinks they're boring.

We had skipped the line at this place with our Museum Pass too, and when we left the line was crazy. I really could not believe how many people were at the tourist sites on this trip.

We walked over to the neighborhood around the Opera House to see some fanciness.

It was fun looking at the windows of high end jewelry! In France they have a law that says you must show prices for anything displayed in a window, but there must be an exception for wildly expensive jewels, because none of this stuff had prices on it.

Then we actually went shopping for a while at the Galeries de Lafayette, the world's first department store! Oh, and I bought some sweatpants at Benetton to wear on the plane home.

This was an alarming trend I noticed over and over - so many people wearing nude pantyhose! Let's all hope that doesn't make it to America.

Ben drug me all over the place looking for this dome he'd read about in a guidebook. It was pretty awesome, I have to admit.

So fancy!

After this we were super hungry and in an inconvenient location for our metro line, and the situation deteriorated very quickly. We ended up inside a packed metro station at Chatelet and no trains were coming, with more people pouring onto the platform every second, and then some guy started walking back and forth shouting things in French in a threatening manner, and we got the hell out of there. I'm sure it probably would have been fine, but I kept thinking, "this is the moment when people convince themselves somebody isn't going to do something terrible and then they all get killed by a maniac." So anyway, we grabbed a piece of pizza for sustenance at a little place near Notre Dame, and then took a cab back to the hotel, where I quickly discovered I had a fever and was all shivery and pathetic for the rest of the evening.