Paris: May 18: Musee de l'Orangerie, Berthillon, and more

This was meant to be a low-key recovery day after our previous long days of walking and sightseeing. Di Yin managed our timing this day, and it ended up relaxing and fun. Maybe I should let her control the itinerary more often.

I took pictures. Di Yin of course did too. The latter link goes to her first picture from this day (picture #215 in the album). When you see a picture of homeless sleeping on a mattress (with a caption that begins "another day") (picture #296), you're done with her pictures for the day. I'll link to the next day's pictures in the following post.

For once, I didn't begin the day with a pastry! Rather, we ate a makeshift breakfast at home: refrigerated supermarket pancakes (good, better than any I've found in the states) topped with mashed sardines ("better than tuna" Di Yin says) or mashed eggplant; a leftover steamed artichoke, which went really well with the sardines; and French yogurt, pineapple this time. I've also had rhubarb and apricot (both of which I preferred because they were less sweet than the pineapple). And, okay, I did have a bite of the previous day's leftover palmier.

We took the metro to the western end of the Jardin des Tuileries, where the Musee de l'Orangerie is located. On the way to the museum we walked through a fraction of the garden-park.

The Musee de l'Orangerie is rightly famous for its huge Monets. They're a striking sight. Di Yin's reaction was "I just gotta say wow." Also, walking the perimeter of rooms with these paintings so that my field of vision was completely covered by these paintings was an entirely different experience than seeing them from afar.

The museum has an extensive impressionist collection. As I walked through a lower hallway admiring the museum's many nice Renoirs and Cezannes, I thought, "this is my type of museum." It also has lots of Rousseau, Laurencin, Matisse (he's into the ladies), Modigliani, Picasso, Utrillo, Derain (pre-cubism), and Soutine (the bridge between impressionism and cubism). There are practically no one-off paintings--the museum chooses a handful of notable artists and focuses on them.

The pieces are presented well under good natural lighting. No paintings had explanatory labels and the room explanations were only in French, but I enjoyed the museum regardless. We spent about an hour and a half in it.

After the museum we headed to lunch at Le Souffle. It serves about a dozen types each of savory and sweet souffles, as well as other dishes. The souffles we had were good, light, and airy. Nevertheless, I think I prefer Cafe Jacqueline in San Francisco (my review), but it may be due to the difference in types of souffles we ordered.

From Le Souffle, we walked over to Paris's most famous avenue, Champs-Elysees. Because it was sunny and warm (hot in the sun), we stuck to the shade. We walked through its garden end and its shopping section most of the way to the Arc de Triomphe. I know Champs-Elysees is famous for its shopping but I found the window-shopping not as nice as the window-shopping the previous day.

A metro trip later, we were on the other side of the Seine in Luxembourg Gardens, below the Latin Quarter. It's a large, pretty, grand, stately, popular park. We strolled around it and also sat at various places in it.

We decided to walk (indirectly) home from here, taking us past the Pantheon, through the Latin Quarter and the many cafes near its universities, across Ile de la Cite to Ile Saint Louis. At Ile Saint Louis, we stopped by Berthillon for sorbets. They were fan-freaking-tastic, on par with the amazing, memorable gelatos we had in Rome.

After our snack, we finished making our way home. We ate dinner at home this night.