Saturday April 7, 2012

Today I planned to do the other two tours of the Hop-on-Hop off, which took me by the Sorbonne, which to be honest I missed as we drove by.  I expected something big and imposing and it was just kind of lost among buildings.  I did like the Palais du Luxembourg, which was beautiful.  We passed the Observatoiri de Paris and the Cimetiere du Montparnasse which is a big cemetary with many famous french people buried there.  We also passed the Tower Montparnasse.  I probably should have done this tour before the grand tour since many things along this route paled in comparison to seeing the Louvre, Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower.  

The final tour I took was the Bastille-Bercy tour.  This went into the southern part of Paris and much of it ran along the Siene.  This appeared to include  newer parts of Paris. 

This tour started off along the edge of the Latin Quarter where I'd been the night before and passed the St-Nicols du Chardonnet church, a very old and beautiful church.  We continued on to the Opera de Paris Bastille, which was opened in 1989 and the tour said the President of France had asked for new and exciting architecture.  My first thought was how could they get any more exciting than the wonderful architecture they already have, so it seemed out of place and I found it underwhelming.

From there we went to the Gare de Lyon which has this beautiful clock tower.  We continued along the Siene where we saw one of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France - the national library.  It is four "L" shaped buildings each on the corner of a rectangle.  In the center is a garden that is not open to the public that preserves a variety of plantlife from around France.  But it is the library itself that is amazing.  I houses over 80,000 books, has modern and ancient books/manuscripts and an entire digital section.  I surmise it is comparable to the Library of Congress. 

We crossed the Seine and passed the Ministere de l'Economie - a new building that now houses most of the Ministries of France that up until recently were housed in the Louvre.  It is an architecturally stunning building, but again I thought so out of place with all of the marvelous architecture of France.  We also passed Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy, which is a 17 thousand seat sports arena.  It is covered with grass and the top appears to be glass.  They said it was used for sporting events, including a US Football game, concerts and a big truck rally for which they removed the roof.

 We finished the tour at Notre Dome and I took the bus back to the Opera Garnier, one of my favorite places.  I walked home from there with a stope at the Hard Rock Cafe to buy pins for a friend and a Raspberry Mojito (and some dinner) for me.