Day 193, Paris, France
Ever since I took The Arts at Goshen College with Mary Oyer, I’ve loved Monet’s water lillies. We even named our first child (a yellow lab) after the artist. How we have been to Paris as many times as we have without having visited the Musee de l’Orangerie that houses the over a hundred linear meters of water lillies. Maybe that will mean something to the mathematicians in my family. All I know, is that it was all encompassing and stunning. There are oval-shaped rooms which, except for the doorways, surround you with four expansive paintings. Having visited Giverny a few years ago, it was also fun to know we walked through the garden and saw the lake, and walked on the bridge in these paintings. Now I want to go back again. It’s my new favorite museum exhibit of all times.
Eventually we managed to tear ourselves away from these two rooms, since there were paintings from other well known artists on the floor below, as well as an exhibit on women photographers from the 1839-1919. I appreciate a museum of this size, where you can cover everything, miss nothing, and still have feeling in your feet. It gives you a sense of completion the Louvre simply won’t.
Since we did have feeling in our feet and we were hungry, we headed across the Place de la Concorde over to the Christmas market on the Champs (Cali hates it when I shorten it to that, so I try say it hourly).
A row of enormous skillets caught our eye. You can get a sense of how big these were.
One of my favorite parts of travelling is trying the comfort dishes of other countries. One of the favorites here, is raclette. I would call it a softish cheese with a leaning toward jello-like springiness, but the French categorize it as semi-firm. Have it your way. There is a little heater next to each half a wheel. After it’s warmed, they scrape some on to your plate where I sure we can all agree to describe it as hot, gooey yumminess.
