Travels: Paris Day IV

Day four (Friday) in Paris would be another long one. We started with a train ride to Versailles. I ate a banana on the platform and felt quite cool and calm, considering we almost waited for the wrong train. After about a 40 minute train ride and a seven euro ticket, we were wandering the halls and rooms of Versailles. For anyone who doesn't know, the palace was lived in by the French royal family, so there were tons of paintings and sculptures of Louis XIV, Maria Theresa (his wife), Napoleon and his wife and loads of other people who did fancy important French things. I know so much. ;)

Chapel exterior; the entrance gate; chapel interior; a determined looking horse statue (Louis XIII?).

Two of the prettiest parts inside were the chapel and the hall of mirrors. Mostly, I think I was just jealous of the personal chapel. How awesome would it be to hear Mass at your house? The hall of mirrors was very cool, but also kind of dirty. Hmm.

Giant painting of Mary Magdalene washing Christ's feet; hall of mirrors ceiling;
fancy wallpaper in the queen's bedroom; outside gardens

The outside also was gorgeous. We entered through the back gate into a stone courtyard and exited into the expansive gardens. We only walked around some of them because construction work was being done and we wanted to get back with ample time for...

Aphrodite with Cupid; the Three Graces;
Venus de Milo; Nike (sooo cool)

The Louvre!

The Louvre was twelve kinds of amazing and we only managed to visit a couple of sections that day. It is monstrously huge and all we did that day probably took three hours. There were people sketching in the corners of rooms, which was pretty cool. There were also a lot of people getting in the way of my pictures to take pictures of sculptures from behind, which was not cool and was quite confusing sometimes. Some of my favorites are above (I actually made a big deal about Venus de Milo and why was it so cool? It's actually pretty cool.).

My reason for coming to Paris. Besides macarons.

I absolutely could not leave without seeing Paolo Veronese's The Wedding at Cana. It was the painting I most wanted to see and it is gigantic. Large paintings baffle me.

By the time we left, I was absolutely starving, so we hopped back on the metro to look for restaurants near our hotel. My boyfriend found one as we were coming up the escalator which looked promising and ended up being a pretty good choice, especially for it being Friday and having some meatless options (which is crazy difficult to do in Paris unless you just want dessert). We returned to the hotel sufficiently spent.

Tomato penne, cheese ravioli and chocolate cake dessert.