Rise and shine! My first time to ride the regional train to Paris! I really wanted to give this a shot so that whenever I wanna to Paris, I wouldn't need to pay for the reservation fee. There are three things to remember with regional trains: (1) there's no guaranteed seat, (2) there are a lot more stops and (3) expect a lot of people! Instead of an hour of transport, Kwi and I ended up traveling for 2 hours. It's okay, at least it's free!
We got down Paris Nord and we decided to just walk since we had a lot of time left. I kept on seeing writings on the streets!
Between us both, I'm usually in charge of the itinerary (Kwi is in charge of train tickets and hostels). Here was the agenda for the day:
(1) Musse de l'Orangerie
(2) Angelina's for its famous hot chocolate - late merienda/lunch
(3) Sainte Chapelle
(4) Centre Pompidou
But you know how it is when girls see the word soldes displayed at the windows of shops, especially shops they know! This happened to me! I saw in H&M and I just had to go inside! We were so lucky cause we were the first few customers. That's why I got pretty solid buys, everything on sale of course! :)
After the quick shopping, I just want to share the other things I saw along the way to Musee de l'Orangerie.
Acamademe Nationale de Musique
Place de l'Opera
Eglise de la Magdalene
We passed Gucci and we found out that it has a museum in Florence. I bet it's just a collection of all the products they've created so far!
Weird display of hands and feet!
Place Vendome
One of queens and she's from Lille! Woohoo!
Oh and of course, the Eiffel!
In order to get to Orangerie, we had to pass by Jardin de Tuileries. The park looks bare but it really gorgeous with the leaves falling. The pretty sight of autumn in unfolding in front of my very eyes :) The good part of this day trip was that it was sunny the whole time!
Beside the Orangerie are orange trees. But according to Kwi, they're lime.
The museum is quite small compared to the Louvre but I must say it's a nice place to see the paintings done by Monet, Picasso, Matisse, Derain, etc.
There are two rooms for the huge paintings of Monet. These are the following paintings I saw:
Big warning (side note), this blog entry will be filled with a lot of artwork so for those who are not a fan of artwork (paintings, sculptures, etc) I suggest you skip my blog entry so that I won't bore you :P I'll just be posting my favorites.
Setting Sun / Soleil Couchant
The Clouds / Les Nuages
We got out of the museum and we saw this! Haha. This is just to show that French really adore making out! Peace to my French friends! :)
Next stop was Angelina's. According to a lot of people they serve the best hot chocolate in Paris.
And they're also famous for this desert called Mont Blanc.
Since we found out that eating in the cafe costs a lot more than taking them out, we decided to just order the hot chocolate. The hot chocolate we ordered is called L'African and it's served with whipped cream on the side.
I must say I still like the hot chocolate I had in Spain more than this. Sorry Angelina lovers!
We were walking towards our next stop when we saw a cute novelty shop. Check out these rubbers! Poor pope!
Our third stop is Sainte Chapelle. It's the only surviving building of the Capetian royal palace and was commissioned by King Louis IX of France to house his collection of Passion Relics, including the Crown of Thorns.
Kwi and I super prayed that we won't get charged to enter the place. We were going to pull off the "I'm 17 years old and here's my lovely cousin Kwi" so that I could get in for free and the both of us could just split the cost of Kwi's entrance. But in the end, we were honest! And we were rewarded fruitfully! Free entrance -- yes, the perks of being an international/exchange student in France (most of the museums in France are free!)
The first floor.
I don't know if you remember but one of the people I met in Barca told me I should go to this church. It's the most amazing church he's gone to so far. He most especially mentioned the second floor of the church.
And he was indeed correct! The second floor is so amazing! It was all stained glass windows (this is by the way the most famous feature of the church)! And if you look closely at the stained glass, they are actually images from the bible. Each window displays a book, either from the Old Testament or the New Testament. Another interesting thing to pay attention to is the manner of looking at the images. It was mentioned in the flyer that I got that one has to read the images from left to right and from bottom to top.
One side of the second floor is still undergoing restoration so I bet if all the stained glass windows were all clean, then I'd get a stained glass heart attack! :) This church is really pretty but the best church I've been to so far is Sagrada Familia. Sainte Chapelle wins second place!
I saw this outside the second floor. At first glance, I thought these were sculptures of the parables. But I realized that it's the story of creation, including Adam and Eve.
The outside of the church.
After the third agenda, we wanted to do something fun and spontaneous. I heard from Kwi that all year long there's always this long line outside A&F Paris. We really didn't know what was going on there so we wanted to see what the big fuzz was about.
We passed by the Seine River before hitting Champs-Elysees. Beside the river, there are so many cute vintage shops selling vintage books, posters, etc.
HAHAHAHA men!
We passed by the famous bridge called Pont des Arts, Passerelle Leopold-Sedar-Senghor with all the love padlocks. FYI: These lovelocks disappeared suddenly in 2010. Oh and these are affixed by sweethearts to symbolize their everlasting love.
Still walking. The evidence that's almost autumn!
We finally got to A&F. And yes, it really looks like a castle!
We were so fortunate because the line in front of the store was just this short.
It even has a little garden/walk way in front of the store.
When we got to the main entrance, both Kwi and I were shocked. It didn't look like a store.
It sort of looked like a club house! A metro looking club house (no offense to the metro people reading my blog). It had murals of half naked guys all over the place!! The whole store was dark, just like in a disco house. And the salesmen and salesladies were all so good looking, dancing to the beat of the music.
The minute we entered, there was this girl who asked us if we wanted a picture with a model. Sure why not? Haha. And each of us got a free polaroid with the guy, whoever he is! To be honest, his body really looked fake! So.. Now I know why so many ladies fall in line in front of this store, every single day!
I was lucky to take stalker shots of the place, since no one is allowed to do so. Haha. Even though the place really was something different, I still couldn't buy anything because they were all expensive! One top for 100EUR :|
The fifth agenda today was to go to Centre Pompidou, a modern art museum. Check out this metro station, I think it's too pretty to be called a metro stop.
It even had a touch screen monitor for directions!
Here's Centre Pompidou. The entrance to the museum is in the ground floor but in order to get from one floor to another, you'd have to use that awesome escalator!
Again being students of IESEG gave us the advantage of entering the museum for free! :)
Actually, the center not only holds the museum but also other exhibits, cool computer room and even a bookstore!
The museum actually reminds me of the book of David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day. I'm still currently reading the book so I don't quite know what happens in the end. But so far, I'm quite amazed at how these modern artists get to have their artwork displayed. Most of the pieces are things I myself can do but didn't do it earlier than the artist who made the piece. Maybe if I just lived in NY or here, I would a part time career as a modern artist. Lol.
The Cave.
You see? Who would have thought a canvas board painted in black is already modern art?
This is me studying art.
But hey don't get me wrong. I actually love modern art. It's so out of this world! I doodle a lot in my planner but I think I should go to the next level already and bring my pieces to museums >:) Let's see if I can be a world known artist! Haha
There was just so much to see in the museum. I think I got more tired here than in l'Orangerie. The spaces between each piece was huge so Kwi and I had really walk far to see each artwork.
I was really happy to enter the museum because it gave me inspiration to explore my creativity again. I'm graduating soon (by June hopefully) and I hope not to lose my creative side when I start working.
This reminded me of my guy friends back home! Haha I'm pretty sure they know what I mean. Shout to the boys, Noel, Ige, Lowski, Pau, Flip and Migi, oh and of course Buchay! :)
The museum also has access to the outside of the center. It was almost sunset and I just had to take a picture of the Eiffel.
There was a lot more art pieces I found interesting but if I post them all here, I'm pretty sure all of guys will get bored.
It was getting pretty late already and we had a train to catch at 9. Kwi suggested we eat in one the bistros she read in her travel book.
Bistro Beaubourg. This place is supposedly under our student budget of around 10EUR.
We got the Entrecote (steak) since Kwi has been craving for steak ever since she saw this guy eating it back when we were in Barca. I must say, the steak was really good! Medium rare :) oh and the fries, they're pretty good! The mustard that they serve is the spiciest mustard I've tried so far! Super goooooood :) :)
As I said, we had a train to catch. We ate our dinner so quick so that we could have time to walk back to the train station. But I already warned Kwi that I wasn't too keen in walking anymore. We walked the whole day and my feet were getting numb and tired. It was a mistake to walk from the bistro until halfway of the train station because in the end, we still took the metro. And when we got to the train station, we had to do another amazing race episode! Our coach was far away so we had to run for our lives in order to not be left behind. @_@
xx
