Au revoir! (Paris, Part Trois)

(Scroll down for Parts 1 and 2)

On Sunday, we started at the Musée d'Orsay. They had a lot of good stuff like more Monet (yay!), including the one that I have hanging in my room:


They also had the Renoir panting that Mommy and Daddy have in the living room, Le Moulin de la Galette:


Some other things I saw, listed in order of the pictures below: Van Gogh's Room at Arles, Whistler's Mother (which I was supposed to be pseudo-imitating next to it, in the picture below), and Renoir's Luncheon on the Grass, which I actually knew a little bit about from a European culture class I took and barely paid attention in. Like, I can tell you the fact that the woman is naked and the men are clothed is important, but I can't tell you why. Oh, the proportions are off, which is also significant. Why? No clue.


There was a lot of sculpture, which doesn't really interest me, but they had The Gates of Hell by Rodin, so I snapped a picture for Uncle Frank (because, unfortunately, I might not get to Florence for something Dante-y).


For lunch we went to a café that was amazing. I had a sandwich on the best bread I've ever tasted (and brought a baguette home for dinner... sooo good). Had a super-yummy chocolat & créme pastry from there later, on the train home. Wish I had gotten 20.

We walked around for a bit, passed the French parliament building (Asemblée Nationale) and stopped in a park, where we could see the Hotel Invalides (not a hotel, but an old hospital and where Napoleon is buried, I think):


Then, off to the Arc de Triomphe and the Champs Elysée, where all the high-end shopping is (I got a picture of Cartier):


Before going to the train station (yay, passport stamps!) we stopped at a crazy-overpriced café that's used to tourist and jacks up all the prices. A single espresso was 3.90 euros, which is what a friend and I said we wanted (and the French-speaking sister told the waiter, in perfect French, what we wanted). I guess the asshole thought he could screw over some unsuspecting tourists and brought us doubles, but we didn't realize. Then the bill came and it was 7.50 euros each for coffee, so we brought it to the waiter's attention that this wasn't what we ordered. He didn't care and refused to change the bill, and it ended up becoming very heated between my friend and the waiter. Service is very different in Europe, but especially in Paris. In London, they just don't really do much for you. In Paris, they might be outright rude, and it's the norm. This guy was nasty, and finally the manager came over and gave us the price we should have paid, just to try to quell the yelling match. How nice.