Paris: May 22: Eiffel Tower and the Architecture Museum

Following K's request, the day's goal was to see the Eiffel Tower up close.

I took pictures. Di Yin took fewer, partially because she didn't take pictures on our late afternoon excursion. The latter link goes to her first picture from this day (picture #163). If you're in slideshow mode and see a picture of us on a train, you've cycled back to the beginning of the album and are viewing pictures from an earlier day that I already linked to.

But first (before the real adventures): another day, another pastry run.

After breakfast, we hung out in the apartment until it was time for our early lunch reservation at Breizh Cafe, a restaurant known for its Breton style crepes. (We had an early lunch so we could make it to the Eiffel Tower before K had to leave.) Brittany crepes use buckwheat flour rather than the standard egg crepe batter. Interestingly, the cafe has three locations: Brittany, Paris, and Tokyo. The menu was in Japanese in addition to English and French. We were a bit overwhelmed with the number of choices. For details on the meal, see the pictures.

After lunch, we took the metro across town to the Eiffel Tower, disembarking at the station (Trocadero) just across the Seine from it. We took many pictures as we approached the tower, from beneath it, and as we retreated in the opposite direction. We passed lots of people peddling stuff on blankets; this didn't surprise us much. More surprisingly, we saw a number of card sharks, each with quite a crowd.

Having had our fill of the Eiffel Tower, we headed back to our apartment. (We didn't feel any need to ride up the tower, especially considering the tremendous view we got from the Sacre Coeur the previous day. The tower would've shown Paris from a different side of the city but I didn't care enough.) K had to pick up her bag to head to the train station for her train home.

After dropping K at the station, I advocated to Di Yin that we should go explore more. I felt as if we didn't do enough this day. Happily, Di Yin was persuaded, a good thing because the museum we ended up going to turned out to be one of our favorites on this trip.

The museum we selected, the architectural museum, Cite de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine, was back across town, near the same station by the Eiffel Tower that we disembarked at earlier this day.

The museum covers a millennium of French architecture. The bottom level exhibits tons of casts of church facades. It's shockingly extensive. I was impressed with the V&A Museum's Cast Court, yet that's a mere two rooms and this is perhaps a dozen. There must be four times more casts in this museum than in the V&A! It was neat to see these facades at close proximity without crowds (as there would be if we visited the churches in person).

The cast section also has a great 3-d interactive computer system for virtually visiting many churches. One can pan around in any direction and zoom in. The comprehensive imagery (one can look straight up, straight down, where-ever) and the detail (zooming in, one can see more details than one can with the human eye standing in the same spot) makes this an awesome addition to the museum.

An upper level in the museum has lots of models of more recent buildings: houses, sports venues, cultural venues, public buildings, and, yes, churches.

A special exhibit about the creation of social housing discussed each housing project on a theoretical level about its architectural style and about its architectural construction of space and community.

A separate wing of the museum has accurate copies of church murals (complete with the degradations that happened over time). This exhibit is quite an extensive complement to the casts of the church facades.

Not everything was translated into English but enough was that I was happy. Plus, the exhibits are all visual, meaning I didn't feel like I had to read much to get something about of them.

As an added bonus, the museum has great views of the Eiffel Tower from its huge windows. The Eiffel Tower views were arresting. No matter how many times I saw it, I paused every time I passed a window.

We spent about an hour and a half in the museum before they kicked us out at closing time. We saw almost all the permanent exhibits.

I was very happy we went out again after dropping K off, both in terms of seeing more and because the museum turned out to be great--our "delightful surprise" for the trip.

We went home for dinner.