Museum planning can be quite a challenge in Paris. First β which museums? Choosing between the options looks daunting. Second β which days are they closed? While we waited to get into the Palace there was a little guy, probably about seven years old, having a meltdown about having to visit the palace. He screamed and cried and his adult spent some time talking him down. So how else do we decide on museums to visit?
Well, when you go to a lot of museums in France, and in the world, you see connections. At a museum in β Lyon? What what what? That sounds fascinating. So it was marked on a Google map and Rich remembered and off we went.
Even with only a month in Paris it was so fun to circle around topics or artists and come across them in different exhibits or even in cemeteries. Although we missed the re-opening of Notre Dame by a few days, we did get to see four chimeras removed during a restoration in the s. Gargoyles spout water away from a building, chimeras are ornamental, adding to the overall atmosphere of the Cathedral.
He was a talented and famous Tunisian couturier and shoe designer. There were other museums we visited β my head is still spinning from what we saw β and of course, the best museum of all: the city itself. Thanks to our new friend Roy, whom Nancy met on her flight over to Paris, we even got to see a Chambre de bonne. But how? Well, have a friend who makes friends. Everyone who travels will tell you that the most amazing experiences are not found in guide books.
They happen. We have a running joke while we travel where we put things in a Bay Area context for each other. Guanajuato is the Mendocino of Mexico City. When we discovered that Paris is actually smaller in size than San Francisco, but with over twice the population, we felt a bit more at home. We lived in SF for decades, most of those years without a car, so Paris felt like a super lively, more busy SF. Almost every Metro trip we mapped out on CityMapper was about 30 minutes or less from our Paris apartment.
