Art Galleries, Cemeteries and more!

 

 When Joani and I talked about going to Paris, My original thought was... "The Orsay"! The greatest collection of impressionist art in the world in my opinion. Having seen it once, I thought, I have to go back. For those of you who are thinking, wow, his poor wife, I am going to tell you that Joani loves art as much as I do. Our tastes in art run different at times, but there's a big overlap in tastes and we can each appreciate the differences.

 After The Orsay, my only other thought was the " Orangerie", another art gallery across the Seine with more impressionist and post impressionist art that we hadn't seen the first time we were in Paris.

 So when it came time to actually plan the trip, I told Joani that these were my only two priorities and that she was in charge of our agenda, knowing full well that she would come up with some hidden gems to round out our short jaunt to "The City of Light" If you know Joani, you know that she never disappoints, hence the cemeteries. We managed to visit two cemeteries and one tomb and while I'll explain in detail in a later post, they were all very interesting. And I'll mention that we visited two other Art galleries, plus Montmartre which basically holds an outdoor art gallery every day. Did a wine tour and tasting in the heart of Paris, and basically walked for hours every day through the Labyrinth of streets in Paris, getting lost, finding ourselves, only to get lost again and again almost every day.

 Now for some random photos taken on our whirlwind trip.

We'll start with Joani and a reminder that Paris is hosting the Olympics this year, and I forgot to mention that all of our travels also consisted of navigating around numerous large construction sites devoted to event sites as well as extra athlete and visitor housing, so every day we would leave our temporary housing with a travel plan which would continually be subject to change and adaptation, to get around closed streets, subway stations, and entire city blocks. I love a challenge and Joani loves me so we always prevailed.

This is a view from a window in the Orsay and I've tucked it in here because I need to say that everyone should go to Paris at least once to take a walk along the Seine.

 Any Visit to Paris isn't complete without going to the Arc de Triomphe. 

When construction is finished this will be the new, refurbished Notre Dame Cathedral.

This Dome was our our sightline help for finding the Tomb of Napoleon.

Joani and I loves cats. We have two of our own which only increases my fascination with this photo. This street artist plays the accordion and as he opens and squeezes shut the accordion bellows, the cat crosses from one side to the other. If our cats are any indication, cats are untrainable, but this cat was a performance artist very much enjoying itself and this duo were doing a great business on the streets of Montmartre.

 A scene from the top of Montmartre

And I'll end with how I started. A photo of Joani. 

True confession time. This is all being posted from home as my blog site would not allow me access without security protocols which included getting a phone call to my home phone number. This prevented me from posting on the road as I usually do but I wrote most of my thoughts down at the end of each day and referred back to elaborate notes to start posting.

 I'm  going to either bore or captivate you with three or four more posts about this short trip. We packed a lot in.

 Garry