Un blog entry anglais avec un titre ennuyeux angais.

Yesterday I went to the Picasso Museum with my Art History class. Now, I'm not a huge a cubism person, and to be completely honest, I don't really like Picasso, but I actually really enjoyed the museum. If you ever come to Paris for a reasonably extended period of time and get all the touristy, Parisian stuff out of the way, I'd definitely recommend going there.

My favorite thing in the museum was a painting that Picasso did when he was 13. It was absolutely gorgeous, and I guess I never realized that he was capable of painting dans le style classique.

Unfortunately no pictures were allowed, but I did get some cool photos of the outside of the museum, where there's a temporary "installation" of these crazy mirrors and colored panes of class. I was a fan.
Then after returning to BU for my literature class, we went to a tiny theater in the Latin Quarter and saw La Cantatrice Chauve (The Bald Soprano), a piece of absurdist theater by Ionesco. It was fantastic! It's been playing every night at the same theater for 50 years now. Isn't that incredible?

Anyway, afterwards we came back here and I finished my paper (you already know how that went!).

Today I only had one class and --miracle of miracles!-- there was no conference tonight so I thought it would be a great time to finally go visit the Louvre (I know, I know, I've been here a month, it's terrible...): I had plenty of free time, I didn't have any huge assignments due, it was rainy and gross...

So I left BU, hopped on the metro, got to the pyramid, met Sam and then we discovered that, oh, the Louvre is closed on Tuesdays. Fantastic.

Le Louvre!

By now it was raining quite hard, but we decided to walk through les Tuilieries anyway, since we were right there. So we trudged through them for a bit before finding a little cafe in the middle and stopping for some hot chocolate.

After our little break from the rainstorm, we headed back out and continued walking, with the intention of crossing the river and hitting up some museum by the Palais de Justice. But we got distracted by this interesting looking building a few blocks up, and decided to find out what it was.

Sam kept saying that it was the Grand and Petit Palais, but I was convinced they were somewhere else. Lessons learned today: I never should doubt Sam, and I definitely should never rely on my horrid sense of direction.

Sam outside the entrance to le Petit Palais.

We went inside le Petit Palais, which contains the Museum of Fine Arts. It was a gorgeous building and had some interesting stuff in it, but of course as soon as we went inside, the sun came out.

When we left the sun was setting, the sky was clear and we had a gorgeous view from le Pont Alexandre III of the Eiffel Tower and Les Invalides.

Very, very pretty.

But as we were standing on the bridge, admiring the view, we noticed that there was a line of about 40 police vehicles coming across the bridge from Les Invalides, heading towards le Petit Palais, where we had seen at least 10 other vehicles amassed earlier. The line of trucks went flying over the bridge and then we realized there was another huge line of police going over the next bridge as well! It was absolutely crazy!

See that line of white trucks? All police!

As we were a little freaked out, we decided to head home. But all in all, it was a very enjoyable afternoon. It's gorgeous.

You can find the pictures I took today here, and you can see other pictures I've taken recently here.

P.S. Just did a little research and apparently the police were getting ready for an education manif. The article I'm reading says there were 17,000 police and 50,000 protesters. Wonderful.