After a typically late start to the day (jet lag is SO annoying when on a vacation) we went down to the dock and got onto a "hop on/hop off" boat tour. Normally a city will have tourist buses like that; you buy a ticket and can get on or off this bus at any stop in the city. Same idea here, just on a boat. We naturally started at the Eiffel Tower stop, as that's right where we live and took it down to Notre Dame. No, it's not pronounced Noater Daim. Nuttre Dam is an anglified pronounciation of it for you...roll the "r". Moving on. Notre Dame was amazing. Just wow.
One of the things about traveling and seeing historic places like Notre Dame is that often there are regulations regarding cameras; in some places, particularly museums, there is a flat out ban. Other places you can't use flash. Sometimes they specify that tripods cannot be used. Etc. Naturally I very carefully keep an eye out for signs such as these, and was very surprised and happy to see that no such restrictions existed in Notre Dame. As is probably obvious, in a dimly lit place like Notre Dame (I hope you're pronouncing it right now) a tripd is necessary to have good pictures as the flash will be useless. I was happily snapping away, moving along the designated pathway, and so on, past several workers there (all of whom saw my tripod and said nothing), when another worker came past me and told me to pack it up....and proceeded to leave without any explanation. Frustrating. Not a single sign saying they couldn't be used and yet they expect people to know not to use them. So for the rest of the building i only got one or two decent shots, and those were of stained glass where you can have a shutter speed of 125 and up since you're shooting directly into the light.
Continuing on, we got back on the boat and went to Le Musea d'Orsay (I probably spelled "Musea" wrong...) with the intention to see some paintings by Monet. What's interesting about this museum is that the building that houses it was originally a train station. No, it's no a train museum; it's an art museum. As Murphy's Law states, the one exhibit we had come with the express intent to see was the one exhibit being renovated. While it wasn't a complete waste of time to go there, it was rather frustrating that the reason we went wasn't there. Apparently, however, the paintings had been moved to another exhibit in another museum nearby, in the Petit Palais. We went there, and after waiting for a good half an hour/forty-five minutes in the freezing cold (the high that day was about 45 F...this is now in the evening so approaching freezing) we finally got in. Our wait was rewarded as the exhibition here was a special Monet exhibit with paintings from galleries all over the world. Monet did a lot of "light studies"; painting the same scene at different times of the day to see how much the light changes things. So here in the gallery there were all these scenes side by side so we could compare them easily, but they were coming from different galleries, so at no other time would these paintings be able to be viewed side by side. Pretty cool stuff. Needless to say, neither art gallery allowed photography of any kind, so my pictures yesterday were somewhat limited.
I did get some shots of the interior with the tripod before being told to stop using it. Lucky you guys. :)
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