Tuileries gardens

Right next to the Louvre is a parc area, the Tuileries gardens. Actually it wasn't as nice as expected, a bit too formal and too crowded.
Starting with the rather small Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel there are a couple of basins, a couple of fountains, a couple of statues and a couple of trees and bushes..hope my description isn't too disrespectful :-)


The most impressive view is away from the Louvre, where the Place de la Concorde with its Obelisk, the Champs Elysee, the Arc de Triomphe and the Grande Arch are in line...

Louvre

My personal highlight of Paris was the Louvre, the worlds largest museum. The palace itself is beautiful and surprisingly large, even the glass entry is famous and happens to be the roof of a shopping mall in the basement. Well, it has to serve 30.000 visitors each day(if I remember right).



In fact it's impossible to see everything within one visit, even one month would probably be too short. So I limited my visits to the painters, especially the French.
The floor with the Mona Lisa was the hardest, since many travel parties tried to finish the Louvre within just one hour, so all they did was to find Mona Lisa and take a picture of it, then back to the bus.
I even saw a guy with a videocamera walking along the Gallery filming the paintings for later study at home...
It's hard to describe the paintings, I liked many of them because they somehow touched me. Delacroix and Ingres were pretty impressive, like La grande Odalisque or this one.

Notre Dame

Notre Dame was pretty impressive, although it was later in the day and we were slightly tired already. So we just looked at the outside, next time I have to enter the building.
The place on the Ile de la Cite was crowded with tourist and beggars, guided travel parties all around and almost everyone was trying to take a great picture...just like me :-)
Then I changed to the zoom lens and took a couple of pics of building details, like the famous gargoyles, and of the typical cafe next to the Cathedral.

Place de la Bastille

Well, this is the start of a series about the Paris trip, let's see how many posts I'm going to assemble from the 400+ pictures I made...

The first famous place we came across is the one where the revolution started: the Place de la Bastille, now a huge crossing of several major streets...or better Avenues.A place to gather for a revolution in earlier centuries....
...now a place to meet friends and have a drink in the afternoon, pretty crowded..
We, too, had a drink in one of the bars, naturally :-) With 5.50 Euro for a simple beer it's not exactly a place for poor students, although lots of the people looked like this. Maybe it was the wrong choice for the drink, wine might have been cheaper. (For comparison: we bought a pretty decent bottle of 2006 Bordeaux wine in the supermarket for just 6.50 Euros.)