chez thompson

Journées du Patrimoine - Part Deux

On the 2nd day of the Journées du Patrimoine, John & Roxanne went in the morning to the Ecole Militaire, whose former students include Napoleon Bonaparte. The Ecole Militaire sits at the other end of a long park (the Champ de Mars) from the Eiffel Tower.

The giant ball suspended inside the Eiffel Tower is due to the Rugby World Cup currently going on in France. Once inside, Roxy befriended one of the military guards.

A mirror in the library still has bullet holes from the liberation of Paris in 1944:

Roxanne had lunch in this grassy courtyard outside the mess, along with a group of soldiers (click on photo to enlarge it):

In the afternoon, all four of us visited the Hotel Matignon, where the Prime Minister lives and works, which is not far from our apartment. Because of the stroller and Martin's cane, we were allowed to skip the long line. The PM has a backyard that is the envy of his neighbors:

Journées du Patrimoine - Day One

The weekend of Sept. 15-16 was the Journées du Patrimoine in Paris, when government buildings that are normally closed to the public undergo an ouverture exceptionnelle. Americans take it for granted that they can go to Washington and visit the Capitol and the White House, but this is not the case with the Assemblée Nationale or the Elysée Palace -- except for one magical weekend per year. For us, that weekend also happened to be the Journées du Patriarche, because Agnes' father Martin was in town for a visit. So the four of us set out to see the (rare) sites.

First stop: the Palais du Luxembourg, home of the French Senate. We saw a dazzling series of beautiful, ornate rooms.

While we were there, we posed for this statue:

The grand staircase:

We then visited the Sorbonne, whose grande salle has a beautiful ceiling featuring the coat of arms of every French town that has a lycée (public high school).