Journées du patrimoine.

Yesterday and Saturday were unbelievably beautiful days in Paris. The weather was beautiful, cool but sunny, with a cloudlessly blue sky. Good weather is in and of itself something to be happy about, but when you are walking around getting to know a city, it's glorious. And this weekend, cities all over France celebrated the "Journées du patrimoine" (something like Cultural Heritage Days): museums were free, monuments open late, fees waved, tours given, and, best of all, special access to buildings normally closed to the public, like the presidential mansion.

So, in the last two days, I've been all over Paris. I've visited eight of the city's twenty districts and memorized a few good chunks of the metro map. Here are some photos from my travels!


This is Père Lachaise cemetery, a huge space on a hill in the 20th Arrondissement. Lots and lots of famous people are buried here -- politicians, artists, writers -- but their graves are suprisingly difficult to find, even with the aid of a map. I think I expected there to be big, flashing red lights and signs saying "Famous Person Here!" But since Père Lachaise still functions as a cemetery today and not a museum, I guess that would not be so great for the non-tourist crowd.

I was also really pleased to be here because it is the site of a very famous scene from a Balzac novel: "À nous deux maintenant!"


We went on a walking tour of the Marais, one of Paris's oldest neighborhoods, and saw a progression of architecture from the medieval to renaissance, ancien regime to 19th century. I have a lot of pictures of this, but here's the coolest one, of a 13th-century building still in use today.


The Eiffel Tower! I went with friends under the assumption that it would be free, on the Journées du patrimoine, to go up to the top. Alas, this was not the case, and there were also about five million tourists there. We took many, many pictures and decided to come back another time.


Across the river from the Eiffel Tower. Hi, it's me!


This is the central debating room of the French Senate. I decided to stop by here at sort of the last minute on Saturday (my feet were pretty tired from walking from the Marais to the Latin Quarter to the Eiffel Tower to the Arc de Triomphe to the Champs-Elysées to the Latin Quarter again) but it was the coolest place I went to. The French Senate is usually closed to the public, which is a shame, because the inside is just incredible. Every room was like this: over-the-top with gilding, molding, sculptures, and painting. The inside of the building glows.

My camera ran out of memory at this point, so I don't have pictures of the other cool stuff in the Senate -- Victor Hugo's outline for the 2nd Republic, Napoleon's throne, the unbelievably amazing Senate library that looks like the library in Beauty and the Beast. I went with a friend, Allison, who did get some pictures, though, so if I might be able to put up at least Napoleon's throne in the next few days. This is probably an obvious thing to say about a piece of furniture designed for Napoleon, but it was small!

I have more pictures and definitely more things to write about, but I must unfortunately head out and get to class. Today my program, CUPA, is taking interested students on a visit this morning to Université de Paris 8-Saint Dénis, and since I am planning on taking all of my classes there, I'm very interested. This week is my last of Orientation (and this weekend we are taking a group trip to Brittany to see the Mont St. Michel!), and despite all of my assignments being due in the next day or two, I'm hoping to have some time to write some longer entries and post some more pictures soon.