12th September - Paris

Paris - Bike About Tour / Louvre Museum / Jardin des Tuileries/ Musee de L’ Orangerie

Today we had a little sleep in, as mum booked a Bike About Tour for 10am.  When we went downstairs to walk to our meeting spot at the Notre Dame, it started to rain. (bummer)  We met our tour leader Pamela who is from Chile but has been working in Paris for 12 months. She was great and very funny!!  We had to go down to the carpark to pick up our bikes and the tour started from here.  Pamela took us around all the Arrondissements and showed us things that the average tourist wouldn’t see or know about.  It was great riding through Paris, on the roads and the cobblestoned laneways.  We stopped a lot along the way at different important places and Pamela gave us heaps of history on each place.  One place we stopped at was a boys school in the Jewish quarter that during the 2nd world war the Nazis went through and over all sent 11,000 children to Auschwitz concentration camp in Germany.  The french government has set up a wall with the names of all the french people who helped hide the jews and get them out of the country during this horrific time!  We rode to the Louvre museum,( HUGE) and along the Seine, Notre Dame, lots of places. Overall the tour took 5 hours to complete, if you ever come to Paris you must do this tour.  After the tour we walked back to the Louvre and Jardin des Tuileries which are gardens adjoining the Louvre as we wanted to go and see Monets Waterlillies at the Musee de L’Orangerie.  These paintings were beautiful  there were 4 paintings in each oval shaped room, each taking up half of the wall.  Overall there were 8 paintings.  Downstairs were paintings by Renoir and other famous french painters, it was interesting to see the different styles of painting.  We walked to the Metro and caught the train back home, we had Chinese for dinner right next to our apartment, the food was delicious.  Tonight we decided to stay home as were are all a bit tired after our bike riding, but another great day!  Tomorrow we go up the Eiffel Tower, should be awesome. 

The guy that made the Philosophers Stone. Remember when Harry opens up the book in the restricted section and it screams??  ......  Well yeah....  Thought you'd be interested in it.

Theres heaps to come!!  This is just a quick sneak peak to what we have been up too!!

he he  :)