holus-bolus: Paris

Our family has a tradition of taking family history trips with our kids when they are 13. Helen turned 13 in December and Becky and Helen left for our trip on June 18. Sarah and Zina joined us for a remarkable adventure with stops in Paris, Copenhagen, Billund and Aalborg. Our first night in Paris we went on a bike tour of Paris. We started out about 6:30 pm. Everyone in the tour wore yellow vests for safety.

We rode past the most recognizable landmark in Paris, the Eiffel Tower.

Our tour guide, Tobias, wore an orange vest to stand out. We followed him like a row of ducklings. There was quite a lot of traffic on the streets and sometimes it was a challenge to keep up with our guide.

Our tour took us past the Notre Dame cathedral.

Tobias pointed out a row of 20 kings of France carved above the entrance. He said during the French revolution, the revolutionaries cut the heads off the statues as well as cutting the head off the living king. The heads were later restored.

By one entrance is a different headless statue. This is St. Denis, the patron saint of Paris, and he was carved headless on purpose. He was the first bishop of Paris and lived in the 3rd century AD. According to legend, he was decapitated by the Romans for being Christian. He picked up his head and walked for several miles, preaching a sermon on repentance, until he finally died. His followers built a church on the spot where he died and it is now the village of Saint-Denis, a suburb of Paris.

Halfway through our bike ride, we stopped for sorbet at a sidewalk cafe. Helen had red peach, Zina had berry and Becky had pineapple/basil.

Around 9 pm, we parked our bikes along the river Seine and got on a boat for a boat tour.

As it got darker, the city lights came on. This is a view of the Eiffel Tower, lit with golden lights.

After the boat tour, we got back on our bikes and rode to the Eiffel Tower again. Every night at 11 pm, the tower twinkles with sparkling lights for about 5 minutes. We then rode back to the bike tour office and caught a train home. We were tired, but excited by our first day in Paris.

For our stay in Paris, we rented a tiny apartment in this cute neighborhood near the Louvre.

Here's the outer door to the apartment.

The outer door opened to this courtyard with entrances to several apartments.

This is the door to our apartment. We loved our quiet street that was centrally located.

This cute market was across the street. It didn't have a lot of groceries, but it had amazing produce that was perfectly ripe. We ate peaches, plums, raspberries, figs, bananas and oranges.

On Tuesday we rode the train to Versailles. We had a little wait for our tour because the employees at Versailles were threatening to strike. Fortunately, they just decided to open late. We were only in France for a few days, but from our experience, French workers like to strike. This is a view of the back of Versailles.

Versailles was built in the 1600s by Louis XIV. French kings lived there until the French Revolution. It became such a symbol of excess that no king dared to live there after the revolution. Instead, it became a museum. The gardens and parkland around Versailles are beautiful and extensive.

We had lunch in a cafe among the trees. Helen ate french fries, (frites) and a cheeseburger.

The palace of Versailles was crowded and lacked privacy (then and now) so the kings built a couple of smaller palaces nearby which they could escape to. This is the Grand Trianon.

Marie Antoinette had a small hamlet built where she could go to pretend she was a farm girl. It was at the edge of the park, but worth the walk. This was our favorite part of Versailles. The farmhouses were charming.

This is Helen smelling roses.

The queen's house is across the pond.

We stopped at a stand for a glass of fresh squeezed orange juice. There have been orange trees in France since the 1400s. The orangery at Versailles was built by Louis XIV. Today, some of the trees are over 200 years old. The orange juice was refreshing on a very warm day.

After we saw Versailles, we hurried to the Paris temple to do baptisms. We changed into skirts at the visitors' center. We brought about 25 family names from home to be baptized for. Zina even found a woman born in Alsace (the northern part of France) when she was preparing names to take to the temple. Here are Sarah, Zina, Helen and Becky outside the door to the baptistry.

A statue of the Christus is the centerpiece of the garden.

Here are Helen and Zina sitting next to the temple. The temple grounds have become a meditative and quiet place for the neighbors.

The statue of the Christus was supposed to go inside the visitors' center. President Uchtdorf suggested the statue go outside in the garden instead. This beautiful stained glass window was put inside in place of the Christus.

On Thursday we started at the Louvre museum. It was a short walk from our apartment so we got there shortly after it opened. The entrance to the Louvre is through this glass pyramid.

The Louvre holds 40,000 artifacts. It would take you 3 weeks to see everything if you spent 1 second looking at each artifact. We prioritized and went to see our top choices. Of course, we had to see the Mona Lisa. It was stolen in 1911 and recovered in 1913. Other vandals have thrown rocks and acid at the painting. As a result of these attacks, the painting hangs behind bulletproof glass and 4 security guards sit next to it.

We also looked for the statue of Victory, brought to France from a temple in Samothrace, Greece. The statue is beautiful, even though it is incomplete.

We spent most of our time looking at the collection of Egyptian artifacts. This odd little man is the Egyptian god, Bes.

This hall held some of the largest artifacts.

We ended our visit in the basement of the Louvre. A much smaller castle called the Louvre was built in this location in the 1200s. These are the foundation of the castle and the city wall. The girls are standing where the castle moat would be. The Louvre has changed dramatically in the last 800 years.

We went back to our neighborhood for lunch. This crepe shop advertised gluten free crepes. They were delicious!

Our quiet street filled up at lunchtime with Parisians getting lunch and shopping. We loved this art supply store, especially for its beautiful cards.

After lunch, we walked to the other end of our street to see the outside of the Paris Opera House. The Opera House inspired the story of the Phantom of the Opera.

We took the metro to see the Eiffel Tower again and ride the elevator to the second level.

Here's the view from the 2nd level platform.

This sign near the Eiffel Tower elevator made us laugh. We saw "itinerant salesmen" all over Paris, mostly selling models of the Eiffel Tower.

Here's an example of an "itinerant salesman" with his goods on a blanket. His blanket made it easier to gather his goods and walk away if the police stopped him.

This is Helen's handful of Eiffel Tower keychains she bought from a street vendor. So far, they have not shown dysfunction.

After the Eiffel Tower, we headed to the Catacombs. Beginning in Roman times, limestone was mined underneath Paris, far below the level of the metro. The mining left behind tunnels. In the 1780s, workers removed millions of bones from the overcrowded city cemetery and stacked them in a portion of the underground tunnels. The ossuary (bone storage area) has been a tourist attraction since the 1800s. The sign above Helen and Zina says, "Stop! Here is the Empire of Death."

You can see some bones stacked behind Helen and Zina. Workers used the large bones like femurs and skulls to build walls, then they tossed smaller bones behind the larger bones.

Walking back to the metro station, we saw a sidewalk crowded with people watching world cup soccer. France's team was in the world cup and we also saw fans of Brazil and Argentina.

Earlier we saw a bakery with soccer ball shaped cookies and a loaf of bread.

Our last museum for the day was the Musee d'Orsay, the museum of French impressionism. This elephant statue by Emmanuel Fremiet is near the front door.

The museum is built inside an old train station. We were all tired from our day's sightseeing, so we only looked at one gallery with paintings by Monet, Manet, Gaugin, Van Gogh, Seurat, Degas and Renoir.

The Musee d'Orsay is right across the Seine from the Louvre. We knew we could walk home from the Louvre so we decided to walk all the way home from the Musee d'Orsay. This is Helen and Zina on the edge of the Seine, looking across to the Louvre.

Here they are on the other bank of the Seine, looking across to the Musee d'Orsay.

We walked past this fine statue of Joan of Arc.

On Friday we took a train ride north of Paris to a little village named Vernon. From Vernon it was only 5 km by bike to Giverny, the small village where Claude Monet painted and gardened.

There was a bit of a line to the ticket office so we got some ice cream to eat while we waited.

Monet's house was colorful inside and out. This is his kitchen, with pretty blue and white tiles and copper pans.

Monet bought his farm in 1883 and worked on his garden until he died in 1926. It became his living painting and he experimented with color and shapes in his garden the same way he experimented on canvasses. The overall effect is an explosion of color.

You can see Monet's pink house with green shutters in the background of this photo.

From the main garden, we crossed a street through an underground tunnel to Monet's water garden. Monet was inspired by Japanese gardens and art. The pond was Monet's inspiration for his water lily paintings.

A man was cleaning algae from the pond while we were there. Monet had a similar boat he used on the lake while he painted. The water garden was our favorite part of Giverny. It was stunningly beautiful and restful at the same time.