This is the official "love lock" bridge- I could only get a photograph of this tiny section, because a few years ago the locks got so heavy that the fence started to peel down, so they put boards over most of it.
The Louvre! We didn't go in because the lines were huge every day, and Garance said that the Mona Lisa was always super crowded and hard to see, plus it was sort of overrated. When a French art student tells me that French art is overrated, I believe her.
The French opera house!
France has a surprisingly large Japanese population, and there's this area that's basically Little Japan in the heart of Paris. You turn a corner and suddenly everything's in Japanese, not French. Garance took me to her favorite Japanese restaurant for lunch, where we got these bowls of ramen. It was nothing like the ramen I make at 3 am in the dorm microwave when I've lost control of my life. This was AMAZING. Garance could use chopsticks and I tried valiantly for ten minutes to do the same. (Garance, on her part, tried (kind of) to hide her laughter at my attempts.) After not getting any food to my mouth, I gave in and asked for a fork.
A statue of Joan d'Arc.
The Arc de Triomphe
French ads being…normal…
We also went to this Monet exhibit in the Orangerie and it was honestly one of my favorite things we did in Paris. It was all Monet's "Water Lilies" exhibit, which look like this.
The museum had a strict no-pictures rule, so this isn't mine. But wow, it was so amazing. Almost nobody was in the Orangerie, probably because everyone was at the Louvre! So it was just peaceful and quiet, with these connected rooms all with these paintings stretching probably twenty feet long on each wall. There were no barriers, you could go right up and look at it up close. The amazing thing about Monet is that if you get close, all it looks like is random splotches of color. But when you step back, you see the picture. Garance says he's an impressionist, and was heavily criticized as not an artist during his time.
The layout of the paintings- there were probably four or five rooms like this. Honestly, I'd take this over the super-crowded Mona Lisa any day.
