Day 85 = March 29

We woke up this morning and got ready to go.  We had a great view from our hostel window, which was really cool.  We ate breakfast, checked out and headed down to the free walking tour.  We took the metro to get there since it was a quite a long ways away.  The tour started out in front of the Fountain of St. Michael which is located in some campus.  We then walked across a bridge onto the island where the Norte Dame is located. It is a huge cathedral that was the original cathedral to have flying buttresses.  We continued across the bridge and stopped beside a building that was the Police headquarters.  In Paris the police are nick named chickens, random fact.  On the side of the building is one of the only places in Paris where you can see scars from WWII, there are a few bullet holes in the walls and that is it.  After that we walked down along the river and were given our 10 minute history lesson on Paris and stuff that had happened there.  We were then shown a bridge that was really old, can’t remember how old but it was not new.  Anyways on the side of the bridge there are over 300 heads of men and the legend goes that one night a king had a party and they were all drinking and having a great time and so the king had their portraits painted while drunk.  The next day when the king saw the painting he liked it so much that he ordered that the heads of all the men to be put on the side of the bridge.  Remember they were all drunk, so they are some really goofy looking faces.  Don’t know if that is actually true buts it is funny. 

We then walked down the river and back across a bridge and along the river some more until we came to an Academy,  where the French Language is persevered, in other words when a new word comes about, this place makes a new word in French so the French language is “pure.”  And in the French language everything is either masculine or feminine, and so when the IPod came out they had to decide what it was, it was said that it took two months of debating to decide that it was actually masculine.  My question is, what about the pink IPods?  (Ok so someone on the tour asked that but whatever)  We then walked back across another bridge that at one point in time had been hit by a drunken boat driver which made the bridge collapse.  

When we made it across the bridge, we walked into a court year that was not in the middle of the Louvre, which is the museum that houses the Mona Lisa.  We did not go see the Mona Lisa because we did not have enough time during our trip to Paris.  We were told that the museum has so many pieces of art that they can only display a small portion of them at a time and if they could display them all it you take a person, 63 days to look at every piece of art for 30 seconds, that’s looking at them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  In other words it’s something that I do not want to try to do. At one time the building was part of, or was a palace that held many different kings and royal members.  We then walked out into the court yard at the entrance of the Louvre where there stands a big glass pyramid.  This is the entrance into the museum.  There are also 3 other smaller pyramids in the court yard as well.  We left the Louvre and went onto a side street where we saw some opera house and then we got to eat lunch. 

After lunch we walked down the 5^th avenue of Paris.  We walked pass a statue of Joan of Arc.  We then walked back into the long green area in front of the Louvre where we learned about some of the many statues and fountains there.  We walked in the opposite direction of the Louvre where we walked down a very long and straight corridor of sidewalks and streets and was part of the planning of Paris to make it pretty.   We came to a big turnabout that in the middle of it had a big Obelisk from Egypt.  The obelisk is said to be stolen from Egypt and is also older than Paris itself.  Paris is about 2000 years old, give or take a few but the obelisk is over 3000 years old.  Then just off of the turnabout was the most secure building in Paris.  It was the US Embassy.  After that we walked some more down the corridor and came to some museums.  That ended our tour.  I took some more pictures of the area we were in and then we headed toward the train station.  We bought some souvenirs on our way and made it to the train station.  When we got there we had problems finding a way out of Paris to make it back to Leiden.  We ended up having to transfer to another train station that was about a 45 minute subway ride out of the city.  We made it to the train station with about 10 minutes to spare before the train left.  The train ride back was not too bad.  After that we made it back to Leiden and went to bed.

Rick