C'est la vie in Paris: Part Deux

After visiting the coolest department store I have ever seen, we walked over to the Palais Garner. The Opera House was built in 1875 and is one of the most famous opera houses in the world. The opera house was the inspiration and setting of Gaston Leroux's Phantom of the Opera! It was absolutely beautiful! I would have loved to see an actual opera there!

After stopping at the Opera House, we made our way to the Louvre. Words cannot express how excited I was; all I could think about on the way there was that I was finally going to see one of the most famous museums in the world! Aside from the enormous collection of famous artwork inside, the Louvre Palace itself is a work of art.

The Palace began as a fortress in the late 12th century under Philip II and it was extended multiple times to form the present palace. The Palace opened as a museum in 1793 after the National Assembly decided that the nation's masterpieces should be displayed for all to see. When the museum first opened, it only had 573 pieces and now, it has over 380,000 objects and displays 35,000 works of art at any given time. I only saw a tiny fraction of the works of art in the few hours that I was there but I could honestly spend a week there; each collection was so impressive! Here are a few of my favorite masterpieces that I saw:

Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa! Obviously.

Napoleon III's apartments!

Venus de Milo

The Winged Victory of Samothrace

Michelangelo's Captive

Canova's Amor and Psyche

I absolutely loved the Louvre and I wish I could have spent more time there!

The next day we went back to the Eiffel Tower to see it during the day. The Eiffel Tower was erected in 1889 as the entrance arc to the 1889 World's Fair and has since become a global cultural icon of France as well as one of the most recognizable icons in the world. It is 1,050 feet tall and gets on average 7 million visitors each year! 

In the area surrounding the Eiffel Tower, people were handing out free roses to promote world peace and to bring people together! They each had a note attached to them which read:

I am not sure how these people were managing to give out hundreds of roses for free but it created such a uplifting and feel-good atmosphere in the crowds of people near the Eiffel Tower. It's amazing what one small gesture such as a rose can have on a group of people and I am so glad that I got to witness it! 

We each got a rose!

After going to the Eiffel Tower and strolling down the Champs de Elysees again, we went to the Arc de Triomphe, one of the most famous monuments in Paris that stands in the center of the Place Charles de Gaulle. It honors those who fought and died for France in the French Revolution. 

And of course a trip to Paris wouldn't be complete without a picture of me in a beret...

I think I can totally pull it off ;)

To be continued...