Paris Day 5

On Wednesday, October 28th, I said goodbye to Mr. Araj, who had to go to his university, and Julien, who was heading off to visit a friend in Reims, the famous champagne city. I vowed to make up for the lost time of the day before. The night before Sohail had mentioned the Musée de l'Armée, located inside Les Invalides, which Julien and I had overlooked. Next door is the Musée Rodin, so I connected metros to the Varenne stop. A stationary hundred-person line wrapped around the Musée Rodin, so I opted for the Musée de l'Armée instead.

The museum was an extensive exhibition of military artifacts, memoribilia, uniforms, and weaponry.

In WWI, infantry used this contraption as a portable shield.

These look like grenade-launchers of some sort.

Another Big Gun

For a change of pace, I moved over to the Rodin Museum where the line persisted. A professor once explained that people are happy in a line, only when they are constantly moving forward. This line favored long pauses rather than continuous flow. Once inside, I saw some amazing sculptures - some by the museum's namesake Auguste Rodin. Most of the sculptures were found inside the converted hotel and former residence of Rodin, but a few, including the iconic Thinker, were spread amongst the hedges and plantings outside.

Le Penseur - The Thinker

Musée Rodin

Outside the museum walls, I headed down Rue de Rivoli and stopped at an English bookstore to pick up a Spanish phrasebook and a newspaper. Further on I spotted the Luxembourg gardens and entered hoping to peek inside the Orangerie museum before it closed. It was closed on, but I stopped by the nearby pond dotted with snare drums. Kids scooped rocks from the dirt and pegged the drums with them, turning the pond into a dysfunctional instrument.

These funky pond flowers are actually snare drums

I continued past the Louvre on Rue de Rivoli all the way into the Marais section of Paris, where I found a pedestrian-only area to soak in the sights. Eventually I made my way back to the hostel to pick up my bags and charge my ipod. I arrived in plenty of time for my night train to Madrid and was waived through without any glances at my brand new Eurail pass. With only fifteen days of travel at my disposal with the new pass, I was happy to slip by. I kept in mind the previous times I had been wronged by the French rail company SNCF to justify my "theft".