Sightseeing in Paris (1st day)

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Mark and my father hadn’t visited Paris, so I had planned visiting the major sightseeing places. We firstly travelled to Arc de Triomphe, one of Paris’ landmarks. As expected, millions of tourists were taking photos of the arch. Unfortunately, I dropped my father’s digital camera, while he was handing it to me, and it resulted damage to the camera. We went to the roundabout of the Arc de Triomphe, and got on the lift to the top. It was misty and cloudy in the morning on 22 June, but we were able to see the famous buildings, e.g. Eiffel Tower, Champs-Elysees, Musee du Louvre, Sacre-Coeur Temple, and skyscrapers in La Defence of Financial district. My father found it boring after getting his digital camera broken. My mother carried the guidebook of Paris and found the Japanese speaking camera shop near Pyramides.



As expected, it was found that the function of digital camera got out of order after dropping it on the concrete road. There were several digital cameras on sale. The Japanese speaking shop manager recommended the slim compact Fujifilm camera. My mother paid for the camera, its battery and memory. He set up the Japanese language on the camera.



We found the café which was selling various types of snacks, salads, fruits and hot meals near the camera shop and had lunch there.



Afterwards, we headed for Musee de l’orangerie via Jardin des Tuileries. Having carried the Paris A to Z, I pointed at Louvre, Orsay Museum, and Arc de Triomphe for my parents and Mark whilst strolling through the garden.



Musee de l’orangerie is located at south western edge of Jardin des Tuileries. We showed our museum passes and contents of our bags to the staff at the entrance. We firstly entered the ground floor gallery where panels of Monet’s water lilies were displayed. Those landscapes of water lilies, weeping willows, reflections of trees and clouds and ponds reflection against sunset and sunset were stunning, and it made me feel that I was looking at the water garden from the garden room.



Next, we went to the basement gallery, and looked round the collections of wonderful paintings collected by the art dealer by the name of Paul Guillaume. It was very interesting to see the paintings of his rooms with various paintings and sculptures. We enjoyed looking at landscape paintings, portraits, and still life paintings by Renoir, Cezanne, Rousseau, Modigliani, Matisse, Derain, Picasso, Matie Laurecin, Utirillo, etc and historic Italian paintings at the special exhibitions.



We spent two hours on looking round the gallery. It was 5 o’clock when we finished looking round the l’orangerie Museum.



There were a number of historic and grand buildings and monuments around the western edge of Jarden des Tuileries and Place de La Concorde. It is where Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette, and their courtiers and servants were guillotined during the French revolution. We saw various monuments, e.g. a tall obelisk, two fountains embellished with mermaids and fish around the Concorde Square, and it was the view point to Champs-Elysees and Arc de Triomphe. We took the metro from Concorde station.



We had dinner at Asian Restaurant run by Chinese people near the hotel on 22 June.

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