June 25th blog

There may be such thing as too full of a day. I think I’ve been burning myself out a bit too much. We saw St. Chapelle’s Chapel, Notre Dame, The Pompidou, and the Louvre today. All were beautiful, but I do regret not having spent more time in the Louvre. We were all so tired by the time we got there, and I was beginning to feel poorly again, so we came back to the hotel for a nap before we left for the Eiffel tower. We didn’t end up going to the top of the tower yet, because the third deck was closed and there just didn’t seem to be a point in only going half way up, so we'll try again tomorrow.

St. Chapelle's Chapel was small in comparison to many we've seen, but impressive. The oldest parts of the chapel date back to the 12th century, and at one time held the holy artifacts of the catholic church, till a fire when some were damaged and then moved.

Notre Dame was massive, much larger than I'd expected. The inside was full of chapels dedicated to saints, and candles and ornate masonry were prominent. Although it was jam packed with tourists you still couldn’t help but feel awed at the accomplishment.

I wasn't looking forward to the Pompidou, judging from my experience at the Tate Modern in London, but I was pleasantly surprised.

There seemed to be many more furniture pieces and instillation art that was generally more pleasing to the eye than it was disturbing.

I couldn’t even fathom how enormous the Louvre was, I heard that if a person was to spend just one minute looking at each piece of art in the museum, it would take four months to go through.

The classic architecture of the building itself was impressive, but the modern lines of I.M. Pei's Pyramid entrances was an amazingly complimentary contrast.

The Mona Lisa was beautiful, and the Venus De Milo, but we didn’t spend enough time to see much else. I was enthralled with the design of the escalators, huge circular cutouts on every floor gave, once again a modern geometric twist on the classical design of the building.

If I weren't so exhausted I'd write more, but that will have to do for now.