Our first full day in Paris, and what could be more appropriate than Impressionist art and the Eiffel Tower.  Things got off to a slow start and went downhill from there until mid-afternoon.  Everyone was still tired, so Melissa and I wandered the neighborhood to see what was here.  We found a nice patisserie on the corner, a charcuterie down the street selling great looking aged beef, patès and sausages, and a produce store across the street selling delicious fruits and vegetables; we’ve already eaten a kilogram of cherries.  We stopped at the Vavin Café on the corner for cappuccino and watched the parade of people going past.  One thing we noticed was nicely dressed men and women passing by on adult sized kick scooters- and looking quite elegant as they glided along.

After a late breakfast of croissants and Coffee,we finally headed for the D’Orsay museum.  By now it was really getting hot, but not too humid so if we walked in the shade it was tolerable.  At the museum there was a huge line, and although we had museum passes and knew there was an express line to get in, we couldn’t find it.  In the process of searching we all got separated, all eventually found our way inside, and all eventually found each other.  It’s incredible how dependent on our cell phones we’ve become, and how lost without them.

The museum was great: full of Monets,Manets, Cezannes and Van Goghs.  The museum is in the old train station, with great natural light, and arranged in a linear fashion that highlights the development of the impressionist style. A second section is post impressionists, including this guy:

We snacked on pâté, cheese and sausage for dinner, then joined the crowd heading for the Eiffel Tower.  as dusk settled the lights on the tower came on, the crowd got larger, the hawkers with beer, wine, light up toy Eiffel Towers and food grew bolder. Finally, at 11:00 the moment everyone was waiting for arrived and the tower lit up with thousands of blinking lights like a giant Christmas tree.  After a minute of this spectacle the flashers stopped.  Time for us to go home to bed.