Monet...et Obelisk! (a walk)

Today was kind of miserable because it was raining. The only good part about walking in the rain, was that the area was simply beautiful. We started off directly at the Jardin du Tuileries because of the rain and went into the Musée Orangerie. Here's a pic of us in the beatiful gardens while under the rain:

So I guess this garden used to have a palace but during the French Revolution they destroyed it. Louis the XVI and his family ran fled through this garden (they didn't flee fast enough obviously). Here's a pic of the fountain that survived. It would be really nice in the summer:

The Museée d'Orangerie hosts a lot of stuff but the main exhibit on the first floor are Monet's impressionist paintings. They are in these huge rooms and are huge. In the background they play classical musical and it really feels like you're in a garden.

That's not saying the bottom floors didn't have anything good. There were a few Picasso's and I'm sure a lot of other famous people that I just didn't know. The temporary exhibit had a lot of cool things about children. The whole thing featured paintings of kids in different ways but we weren't allowed to take pictures there. Here's a Renoir, a famous French guy. The only thing I know was that mama said he likes to paint girls' cheeks really red.

Then afterwards, Lihui (He's the other chinese guy in the rain, he goes to school at the Sorbonne and wanted to hang out with us to practice english but he kept talking to me in madarin the whole time haha. He's from Chengdu-and I had no idea where it was but he says that's where the pandas come from) took us to little Chinatown to eat some hot chinese beef noodles. It was really good. There's one more little Chinatown that he will show me later. By the time we finished the Museum it stopped raining so we continued the walk. We walk to the Palais Elysée...where Nicolas Sarkozy lives. There were a ton of guard all around the palace. They really take this seriously. Here's a picture of one of the older doors,

Then we went to Place de la Concorde where the Luxor obelisk is at. This was called Place de la Revolution at one point and the guillitone was placed just nearby the Obelisk. During that time, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were beheaded here, and even Robespierre himself was guillitoned here.

Last of all, just to prove that in the movies, no matter where you are, the Eiffel Tower always seems to be in the background: