We arrived in London mid-morning Tuesday, dropped our suitcases at our hotel, and walked to the British Museum. Lord Elgin removed some of the friezes from the Parthenon and sold them to the British government. We were surprised how much we learned. The friezes were mounted at eye-level, which made them much easier to see in detail. They also had a couple of short movies explaining what we were looking at. The most whimsical thing we saw was a statue that for all the world looked like it was made with ancient Lego blocks.

(Could this be a 2,500 year-old Lego block?) 

While we were there, we stumbled on an ancient clock exhibit. We saw some very old clocks, back to the 1500s. We also saw some chronometers, which is our objective for Wednesday.

Today is our last full day in Paris. Tomorrow we take the chunnel train to England. We spent the morning at the Orangerie Museum, which has Monet’s huge water lily paintings in two very large oval rooms. It also has a large collection of artists from the impressionistic era and later. We stopped for lunch. While we were eating, we saw a large honor guard of maybe 100 mounted police. We found out that the President of South Korea, Moon Jae, is visiting.

After lunch we visited Notre Dame cathedral.

This is also the area where the iconic green book stalls are located. They sit next to the sidewalk. They are easily locked up. When the owner wants to open, they unlock the stall and swing the doors open. Some of these sell trinkets, but most sell used books and magazines.

We’re taking a bit of a rest this afternoon. Tonight we will have dinner with Thierry Koeberle, an old colleague of mine from Malco / Schlumberger / Axalto / Gemalto.

There are no impressionistic paintings in the Louvre, so we we went to the Monet Museum. I don’t generally take pictures of paintings, because better pictures are available on the web. But this painting is unique. Early in his career, Monet and others had an exhibition. Monet titled this painting “Impression, Sunrise”. A critic labeled the exhibition “impressionistic”, meaning it as a put-down. The insult didn’t stick, but the name did.

Having seen some excellent art, what could be better way to spend a Sunday afternoon than a visit to Mont Marte? We viewed the sidewalk artists, enjoyed some onion soup, and visited Sacre Coeur. In addition to the normal things to see and do, Mont Marte was celebrating the 80th anniversary of the concentration of the Sacre Coeur abby. The area was quite crowded with people, food tents, wine tents, etc.

We finished off our day by going to the top of the Arc de Triomphe after dark to see Paris at night. This picture shows the Eiffel tower lit at night  (left). For 5 minutes an hour, the tower twinkles (right).

We spent the morning at the Rodin Museum. There are a large number of works. Many of them are plaster casts, but there are plenty of completed bronze works also. The statues of Balzac were interesting. There’s a nude Balzac in brass at the Baltimore Museum of Art. There is a plaster cast of this piece in the Rodin Museum house. And there is the “finished” brass statue of Balzac clothed in the Rodin Museum garden. One can see how Rodin progressed in his work. Personally, I think the earlier nude is a stronger work.

Of course one should see the Paris Opera House. Instead of taking a tour, we attended a performance Saturday afternoon. The audience was in a festive mood. Many people were taking pictures before the show, both tourists and French. We saw one group lean over their balcony box to take pictures of people they knew in the adjacent box. A man who sat in front of us wanted pictures of his teenage daughter, who was reacting in a typical teenage way. The house was packed. There wasn’t a single empty seat anywhere. I’m not sure how to describe the performance. It was a very contemporary dance. It was the first time I was mooned by a dance troop. (It was a very polite mooning.) Anyway, we had a good time.

While traveling around Paris, I was able to get a pretty good shot of the Eiffel Tower.

We started our day at the Eiffel Tower. We got there shortly after they opened, but the lines were already long. I didn’t realize they have two lines for buying tickets. One line gets to ride the elevator all the way up. The other has to climb the stairs the first 2/3 of the way. I wanted to ride the elevator. We ended up taking the stairs. The line taking the stairs was shorter, and we made it up the steps, but I would have preferred the elevator. I didn’t get a good pic of the outside of the tower, and it was still a little foggy from last night’s rain. Here’s a pic of the wooden “conductor” who sits at the bottom of the elevator with his fake control panel. The elevator is quite large and two stories tall. I thought our line was long, but as we came down we saw the lines were much longer.

Another Paris icon is the Louvre. Our visit focused on French painters. There are no French Impressionist paintings in France’s most famous art museum. We also stopped to see the Mona Lisa. We saw Leonardo’s famous painting, but from 15 or 20 meters away. There was a large crowd pushing to get close to the painting. If there was a line, it was quite disorganized. The view was further compromised by selfie sticks. Smart phones were pushing above the crowd like weeds popping out of the ground in the spring. You can find your own picture of this famous painting on the internet. Here’s a picture of “Winged Victory” — a little less well known, but much easier to see. We saw a lot of tired, zoned out people. Below is a picture of the courtyard, including I. M. Pei’s pyramids.

We went back to the room for a short rest, then went to a concert at Saint Chapelle. This was my first visit to Saint Chapelle, as well as Danita’s. My initial impression was of an unusually striking stone church sanctuary, but without the side vaults and Greek Cross layout. After a minute, I realized the entire wall is stained glass all the way around the sanctuary. It’s not just that there is so much stained glass. It’s that it seems there  can’t possibly be enough stone between the windows to support the ceiling, or even all that stained glass, and it would be impossible to even install one window as tall and as heavy as these windows are. This is the most amazing stone church I have visited.

The concert was unusual but good. It was a 6-piece orchestra, 5 strings and a harpsichord. We heard Vivaldi’s 4-seasons twice. I call it Vivaldi’s 8 seasons. The second pass included lots of different styles and musical jokes. The music was always impossibly fast and impeccably played. I would have thought the acoustics of a large stone-and-glass sanctuary would be too live for music like this, but the echo was quite muted. No doubt the large number of people in the audience helped. I also heard some interesting resonances in the lower musical registers.

According to the tour book, tourists should visit one of the little towns that surround Paris. We took the train to Chartres, about 60 miles southeast of Paris. On the train trip down, we were surprised to see a lot of countryside and farms between Paris and Chartres. This little town has three major churches. The newest on the left is 15th century, but the first church at this site dates back to the 4th century. The oldest on the right is 11th century, and used to be a Benedictine monastery.

Chartes has an active stained glass community. Their workshop doubles as a stained glass museum. The piece above shows St. Michael fighting off the forces of evil. It struck my fancy because the man in the lower right looks for all the world like a little boy who got a boo-boo on his finger. We saw a large number of historic pieces, mostly after 1540, but some going back to 1000 AD. The basement of the museum has a large gallery of modern pieces made by the local artisans.

Chartres is known for their evening illumination. We ran out of things to see, so we found a quiet bench and opened our E-readers. Chartres has some kind of projected light show, which starts at 9. The last train back to Paris leaves at 9:30. We weren’t going to see the show. Along the way, we saw several houses with projections of locals who were important to local history.

An alert reader will notice there are only two churches shown illuminated. We did not see the center church last night. We were standing at the furthest church when a lightening storm started rolling in. We took a quick pic and took hi-tailed it back to the train station. The shortest route didn’t include the middle church. We were still a block from the train station when the rain started in earnest.  Fortunately, we made it back in time to catch an earlier train. Unfortunately, the earlier train was significantly delayed. We ended up waiting at the train station for the 9:30 train.

We obviously missed a lot of history and many interesting stories. But we had a delightful time none the less.

Yesterday was a travel day. Hotel to rental car drop at (the first) Tours train station … to (the other) train station … to Paris … to Hotel. When we arrived in Paris, it was immediately obvious that driving here is another level from driving in the rest of France. The hotel in Paris is a disappointment. The room I envisioned when reading the description is significantly different than the room we have. But things are reasonably clean. The room will suffice.

After we got moved into our hotel, we had a couple of hours before dinner. The Catacombs was right down the street, so we visited that. It is the definition of macabre.

(Clos Lyce, Da Vinci’s last home)

This is our last day in Tours. We visited the official Royal Chateaux (Chateaux Royal d’Amboise). Other than being the king’s official castle, it wasn’t anything super special. WE visited because it is next door to Clos Lyce, the house where Leonardo Da Vinci spent the last years of his life. The king of France was looking to make himself grander. He figured a good way to do that was to have the acknowledged #1 genius of the Western World come live with him. Da Vinci didn’t do anything important in the last years of his life. But he had fun making some special effects for royal celebrations and such.

They had models of many of DaVici’s inventions, including his famous helical helicopter.

Many of DaVinci’s inventions were so futuristic that they were simply fantasies. Others were more practical, but didn’t have the materials required for practical implantation. But many of his inventions were practical then and now, such as the above parabolic bridge. This one is both practical and beautiful. Both the house and the garden were filled with Da Vinci models, and even a few audio clips. Unfortunately, the audio clips made Da Vinci sound more like a space cadet than a genius. Anyway, it was great good fun to walk around.

Chenonceau Chateau was contemporaneous with Chambord. Chambord was uncomfortable, impracticable, garish, overblown, and innovative. Chenonceau was comfortable, practicable, beautiful, and not particularly innovative. That’s probably because the original castle was built by one of the king’s main advisers, who obviously had more sense.

The castle was built at the site of a water mill. One of the later owners thought it would be cool to extend it across the river by building a bridge. Unlike the bridge in Avignon, this bridge goes all the way across the river. But there is no place to to on the other side of the river. Still, it’s a cool castle with a cool bridge.

A cool castle needs a cool chapel. This one is way cool. The original stain glass windows were destroyed during WW II. These were created in the 1950s. But it’s still way cool.

When can a castle owner add to put his chateau over the top? How about a basement spooky torture chamber? A first-rate wine cellar would be a lot better. Many thanks to Danita for finding this wine cellar while I was drinking coffee.

If you get to France and have time to visit just one chateau, make sure you see Chenonceau.

We had a lot of driving yesterday. It was 3 hours from our hotel to the chateau and another hour to our hotel in Tours. When we got to Tours, the street to our hotel was blocked because of the Tour de France bicycle race. So we had to cool our jets for another hour until that had passed.

The Chambord Chateau was a hunting lodge turned into an expression of a king’s super-size ego. It was built in an area of prime hunting, but not so good for fantastic castles. It was swampy, bug infested in the summer, and very cold in the winter. It was impossible to heat the huge rooms. The ceilings were so high that some rooms were split in half horizontally, with servants and storage upstairs and plenty of head room for all. Basic amenities such as wood floors were missing for most of the Chateau’s existence. It is easy to understand why none of the kings visited for very long or very often. One person did live here for a few years. He was a pretender to the throne and thought he could come back to be king of France in the 1800s. One wonders about the intelligence of the French royalty.

(Double Helix Staircase)

In spite of its overwhelming faults, it has a very interesting architecture. It is basically 4 cylinders arranged symmetrically around a very large, double-helix stair case. Unfortunately, they had to use a lot of stone to support the staircase, which hides its elegance. But you can see the double helix if you look closely. The French desperately want to credit the central idea for this layout to Leonardo da Vinci. There is no written documentation about the architect, and none of Leonardo’s notes mention working on this chateau, but they did come up with a clever morphing of the chateau into Leonardo’s spiral-helicopter drawing.

Here’s a detail from the forth-floor terrace.