Paris Day 5

Today we were in the famous Calleboite painting - Rainy Day in Paris. It's a lot more pleasant to look at this huge painting at the Chicago Art Institute than to actually be IN it...but we had a good day anyway.

We went first thing today to the Arch de Triomphe and climbed up 284 winding steps to the top. That was, as the French would say, formidable! A number of years ago I swore I would not again walk up the Statue of Liberty. I will now add the Arch de Triomphe to that "do not repeat" list. It was amazing to see the view from the top, though the pictures will not show much because of the rain.

We then did a REALLY STUPID thing! In a hurry to have some lunch, we actually went into the McDonald's on the Champs Elysee. It was exactly lunch hour and most of Paris and most of the tourists were all in the place and, of course, we were in the line being manned by a trainee. Dumb, Dumb, Dumb!

Then we metroed (is that a verb?) east and found the Picasso museum. I loved it! It follows his artistic life from the blue period through late works. Very cool and I got a couple of cool books in the "librarie" there also that will be neat additions to my Picasso lecture.

From there it was a short walk to the Pompidou center through the Marais area which is one of our "friend" Rick Steeve's favorite areas. It is very pretty. The Pompidou is an unbelievable building - huge with all the normal "inside" stuff such as escalators, pipes, etc. on the outside! All very brightly colored. There were some neat things to see fitting my artistic interests - some Picasso's, a few cool Dalis, a lot of cool Joan Miro's and lots of more modern things that Kevin loves.

By the end of our visit there we were pretty worn out and soggy, talked with Dick who said to come home for dinner which we gratefully did. The Mann's other friends, Kathy and Charlie Bilodou arrived from Chicago this morning, so we are now six in our French maison. We had fun drinking lots of wine and talking over a long dinner. Our contributions to dinner and tomorrow's breakfast were baquettes, a wonderful gateau (raspberry mouse cake) and croissants which I successfuly ordered at the local patisserie. Yeah!