The Sound of Music

As I write this, I can hear beautiful piano playing coming from another apartment. This morning it was the sound of Chopin echoing across the courtyard to my window, earlier this evening it was Beethoven, and now it is a song I am not familiar with but equally as nice.

Today was wonderful and I saw a lot of things, even though I didn't get out of bed until after ten in the morning (I set my alarm, but I turned it off to sleep a few more minutes ... and a few minutes turned into a few hours! I will blame it on the jet-lag.). I left the house at around eleven and walked down the Champs-Élysées, crossed the Place de la Concorde and went through the Tuileries gardens to get to the Orangerie museum. It has impressionist and post-impressionist paintings like the Musée d'Orsay, but it is not nearly as big and way less crowded. Definitely worth a visit, especially since I got in free! Technically you're supposed to pay once you've turned 18, but the man at the desk was really nice and gave me a free ticket!

My favourite part of the exhibition was the section with the huge paintings of waterlilies (or nymphéas) by Monet. There are two oval-shaped rooms, each with four gigantic canvases that curve with the walls, giving you the impression that you are standing on an island in the middle of a pond! It's amazing that an eighty-year-old man painted these when he was nearly blind, although an eye operation did improve his eyesight and he was better able to work on the paintings. Unfortunately, after all that work, he died before the exhibition opened, and when it did, impressionism was already out of style and not very many people came to see it. Worse, a shell fell through the roof of the gallery during the liberation of Paris in 1944, and after that the gallery was renovated in a style that was not at all what Monet had wanted (he painted the Nymphéas canvases specifically be placed in a certain way in the gallery). Now, after a renovation between 2000 and 2006, the paintings are displayed in the way that they were originally intended to be.

I had a more quiet afternoon. After wandering around Saint Germain de Près I found a small shop where I bought some lunch, which I took back to the jardins des Tuileries for a picnic. The weather was beautiful and the lower park was crowded with people, but the upper part was much quieter and I spent several hours just sitting and people-watching. In the early evening I decided to try out the metro in preparation for getting to school tomorrow. It is so quick and efficient; if there was a better view down there I would take the metro everywhere instead of walking, but as it is I like walking and get more exercise this way anyway! Then it was back to the apartment for dinner with my host family and the Dutch girl who is also staying here and going to the same school. Monsieur Z is a great cook - especially when he makes blueberry rice pudding - so I guess it's definitely a good thing that I'm getting lots of exercise!