Walking Tours of the Right Bank and the Ballet

Today was one of the most obscenely busy days of my life.  As I write this I'm thinking back to what I did this morning and it feels like all of that happened ages ago!  I got up around 8 am to get ready and have breakfast.  By 9:20 am I was leaving the Foyer and heading across the Seine to the Louvre.  Instead of going inside today though, we were going on a 17th century classical architecture tour.  So we started with the Louvre.

Then we moved on to look at Palais Royal, which is an old royal palace with a large central garden, built by Louis XIII.  He lived here for several years, as did Cardinal de Richelieu.

We finally finished the tour in one of the most expensive parts of Paris: Place Vendôme.  The place used to be the home of Chopin, the composer, and Coco Chanel, though today the square's most famous resident is the Emir (basically the King) of Qatar.

When the tour ended, most of my classmates went back to the Foyer for a bit of a break before our afternoon class, but me and two other girls went back to Louvre for pictures out front with the pyramids.

Despite the bad weather, we definitely got some great pictures.  After heading back to the Foyer for lunch, we had our Parisian Literature class.  Today we started reading and discussing "La Vie Parisienne," a very famous operetta by Offenbach that we'll be going to see in a few weeks.  After class ended we had another walking tour, this one was all about the two islands in the middle of the Seine: Île de la Cité and Île Saint-Louis.

Our first stop was Pont Neuf, which translates to New Bridge.  Ironically it is the oldest remaining bridge in Paris.  It's well-known for the carved masks along its sides and the fact that it was the first stone bridge built in the city.

Square du Vert-Galant Parc was our next stop.  The park is located at the very edge of Île de la Cité and looked like a great place to spend a sunny afternoon.  We then weaved through the rest of the island, looking at the Palais de Justice (all the courts and the police headquarters are there), several older churches, Hôtel de Ville (city hall), and finally some of the oldest houses in Paris.

These ones pictured above are from the 14th century.  How the wooden beams have held up that long is beyond me.  After the tour ended we went back to the Foyer very quickly because we had to get ready for the Ballet tonight.  Getting ready was easy, getting there was not.  We ended up getting split into two groups, I was in the later one.  My group got separated on the RER because the rest of the group didn't fit on the train.  On the train, we were packed in tighter than sardines and traveling at an excruciatingly slow pace.  When we finally got off at our transfer, we realized we didn't know where to go to get to the Opera so we had to spend time figuring that out and then running to the train.  We had less than 15 minutes until they locked the doors.  Fortunately we made it eventually.

 In the Palais Garnier Opera house, we had seats on the second level towards stage left.  We also had a six person box, all to ourselves.  It was fantastic.  The view was almost perfect, the dancers we amazing, and I could barely believe that I was in the same building that the Phantom supposedly haunts.  I could definitely see a scarred and angsty Gerard Butler lurking deep in the back corridors, attics, and cellars of the building.

The experience of actually attending a ballet in Paris was amazing.  I have to say that it almost rivaled my experience at the Louvre.  There's the same level of artistry, if not quite history, to both of the trips.  They'll both always stand out in my memories of Paris though, that's for sure.