Eiffel and Rodin

Time is getting short and we hadn't yet visited a few of the sites we wanted to get to. So today we took the Metro to the Eiffel Tower and then later hoofed it to the Rodin Museum. We left early enough so that we were competing with the rush hour crowd underground, but we managed to get to our chosen destination without any trouble before most of the crowds arrived. The Tower is the most visited of the sites in Paris and it has long lines of tourists and very many guys hawking varied sizes and shape replicas of the big tower. Since we had been to the top a year ago, we opted to watch from below and marvel at the hugeness of the place. I always wonder how they were able to build such a structure in the 1880's without our modern tools.

I took some photos from very near the base to try to catch the scale of it.

Comforting to me and to perhaps many others, there were security guys, gendarmes with machine guns, strolling about doing, probably illegal in the USA, profiling of visitors.

Then off we hiked the several blocks to the Auguste Rodin Museum. Very many of his famous sculptures are located in the gardens there. He's one of my favorite sculptors and I took quite a few photos there. "The Thinker" is one of his most famous and it sits in what is called the Rose Garden, for obvious reasons.

After lunch at the museum we came back to the Ile de la Cite to finish the day. There are favorite parks nearby that I revisited, including the one just across the Seine from Notre Dame near the Cathedral of St Julian the Poor. It's well endowed with the blooming flowers of August.

Ah, Paris.

French Kings wore crowns and not berets

Contrary to popular belief, very few people wear berets in Paris these days.  It's just too much like World War II  headgear.

It was a nice morning, sunny and warm, and I walked over to the Notre Dame Cathedral, just a block away to look at the garden behind the old church.  There are blooming roses and many other varieties of flowers growing there.  It's also an opportunity to photograph the famous flying buttresses that support the walls and make it possible to have large stained glass windows in the church.

The Jardins des Plantes was my destination again. It is a large and well used Paris park and botanical garden featuring plants from all over the world as well as some old and large French trees. I think I recognized this plant as a Minnesota plant - I think horse tails - but the name on the tag was in either French or Latin and I can't confirm that it is the same.

This is the large field of plants, at least a couple of city blocks in length containing mostly colorful flowers, but also edible vegetables.  There were lots of French families visiting the gardens - including small children.  There were also runners, some of whom used the paths through the flowers as they pursued their exercise strategies.

This is one of the areas that is structured like classical French garden and includes some old and quite striking sculpture among the plants.  There was also a carousel in this area that was not in use but had seen much wear over the years.

I also visited the Pantheon and a pair of old churches on my way back home for lunch. After lunch it was time to visit the ancient castle of French kings from the time when it was built in about 1150 until Versailles was built about 1682 for Louis XIV. For 500 years the king used this castle for a hunting lodge and as his favorite place to hang out outside the bustle of Paris.    It features a lot of security features including a deep and wide moat.  It looks to my eye what a castle should look like, one where Cinderella might dwell.

This is a good depiction of the entrance and shows the moat pretty well.  The moat is now dry and a good crop of grass is growing at the bottom.

It was a good and also active day and I'm worn out from the all day walking, but I saw some new and beautiful sites and think I have a better understanding of how medieval castles were built and protected.