Mark's favorite day: Paris

My favorite time on the trip was a morning in Paris, in which Brennan and I jumped off the tour and did my favorite way of experiencing a new city: serendipitous strolling.

We popped out of a Metro stop in the middle of Paris and aimed at what our map called the "Open Air Sculpture Garden."  On the way, we stopped into St. Sulpice (above). It is the second largest church in the city, huge, monumental, big-boned, with squared-off columns and limited light.  We found that Blaise Pascal was buried there (bottom), and that the solstice line (depicted here on the left and in The DaVinci Code) actually exists there: a Enlightenment Era scientific study, not conspiracy-theory hocum.  We left there and wandered a block into the Luxembourg Garden, the second biggest park in Paris.  Huge, sprawling, and tightly manicured of course, but with charming small spaces, fountains, areas for children to play, shade for walking, and some sculptures.  We really enjoyed the monument to Delacroix below.  An old, muscular man is struggling to hoist a powerfully-built woman who in turn is straining to reach high enough to place a laurel before Delacroix's bust.  Meanwhile, a young man sits and seems to be offering advice: "Just a foot higher!" 

 Next we found flowers that were planted so that they give the appearance of diagonal stripes, but only when seen from afar.  Out of the garden, we popped for a moment into the Parisian Pantheon.  (beige image below)  Originally a church, it was converted in the Revolution into a burial site for the great and sometimes even for the foolish (Rousseau).  It turned out to be the site of Foucault's experiment with a pendulum which demonstrated that the earth indeed rotates.  Brennan enjoyed the swirling masses of photos of modern French faces that look down from the dome and up from the floor.  How unexpected!

Just past the Pantheon, we found St. Etienne, which I'd never heard of.  (It is the white image above that of the Pantheon.)  Jumping in for about 5 min, we found it lovely, feminine, filled with light, and slender, light-colored, rounded columns and arches.  What a contrast to St. Sulpice.  Called away on rescue-duty, we never reached the Sculpture Museum, but we had so much fun talking and ambling toward it while letting ourselves get distracted by anything that we passed along the way.  Great time!