Saturday, July 7th

Saturday, July 7th, 2007
Paris, France

Today we started off early again, and regretted it later on. We met at Marie d'Issy, a station that was a bit out of the city, at the end of my metro line, to check out Rodin's house and a museum of his sculptures. After taking a bus after the metro, and then walking a ways and asking for directions and a hospital, we finally arrived at the estate where Rodin resided, only to discover that the doors did not open until almost 1. We had about two hours to kill, so we wandered around for a bit and then tried to restructure our itinerary for the rest of the trip.

It was really neat to see so many of Rodin's sculptures (I had no idea just how many there were). We got to see "The Thinker" and "The Burghers of Calais," which were the only two that I could have named off the top of my head before we went. As far as his house went, we were only allowed on the ground floor, which meant that all we got to see was his kitchen and dining room. It was cool though.

After the museum, we went to this incredible pastry shop by the metro station and both ate a sweet croissant and a raspberry pistachio nut tart that was better than I can even explain. I ate far too many sweets in Paris.

Then we met one of my hostel mates, Danielle, at the catacombs. The catacombs were pretty neat--twenty meters underground and just filled with bone art and skull designs, such as hearts and crosses. We learned about all the innocent people whose bones were transported from a graveyard to the catacombs, and the creation of the catacombs themselves was interesting.

Once we finished at the catacombs, which took a lot longer than we thought it would, Julia and I scurried off to the Musee d'Orsay, to try to see what we could there before closing time. The Musee d'Orsay was really really neat--three stories filled with Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Realism, and Sculpture works. I got to see a number of works by a number of artists that I studied in my Art History course last semester. It was so neat. We could have spent longer there, but were lucky enough to see just about everything we wanted to before we left.

Julia came back to my hostel to check her e-mail and we snacked on some cheese and crackers, where we also met the latest arrivals, a guy from Belgium and two guys from Norway. The Norwegians were really cool, and we played cards with them for awhile before inviting them out with us to the Moulin Rouge area.

We took the metro to Pigalle, and this is where things get real crappy. I thought Friday night was bad, but on Saturday night we were caught by the metro police, caught for pretty much no reason at all. Apparently if you are a visitor on the metro and you buy a week long pass, you need to go to the ticket window and get this tourist pass to fill out and keep with you at all times. And if you use single tickets, you must always keep them with you for the duration of your ride, as they can be checked. These two things are not posted widely and one would never know, because a week pass works without a tourist pass, and people throw tickets on the ground all over the place after using them to enter a station. Despite our efforts to make the metro police understand why we were confused, we were both fined significantly. And these ladies had no mercy whatsoever.

We were pretty upset and had spent so much money on the fine that, once we got out of the metro station, we decided to call it a night. We took the metro about forty-five minutes back to Julia's place, I walked her home, then took the metro all the way back to Montmarte. It was not the greatest night, but I think it was better than the night before because at least this time I had someone to laugh about it with later on.