We left for Paris a few days before Christmas for a week’s trip. We stayed at the Villa Mazarin, a wonderful hotel in the Marais district. It is within walking distance of the River Seine, Notre Dame, the Pompidou Center (modern art), and the Louvre (old art) and hosts a wonderful variety of restaurants. We walked many miles (to burn the calories consumed in the restaurants) and visited five art galleries while we were there. We had obtained a museum pass which saved us lots of money, but especially saved us time as we were able to bypass long queues to get in. We found the Musée du Louvre quite overwhelming with its 300,000 artworks, antiquities and statues. It was our least favorite due to the crowds and huge size. We did see the Mona Lisa but it was smaller than we expected, covered by glass, and there was glare from people taking flash photographs (despite not being allowed). Having to stand behind a railing twenty feet away from it didn’t help matters, either.

Michael’s favorite art museum was the Musée d'Orsay, a former railway station that has many impressionist and post-impressionist paintings. Here we both discovered we liked Manet and early Monet. The Musée Picasso houses the world’s largest collection of the works of Pablo Picasso and it was interesting to see how his style developed, from something we liked to something we didn’t. Musée de l'Orangerie in the Jardin des Tuileries was Rhonda’s favorite. It was small enough to not be too tiring, it wasn’t really crowded, and it was set up in such a way that one could linger over a lovely painting as long as one wanted. It’s where Rhonda’s love affair with Matisse started. Most of the paintings are early 20th-century, including several of Monet's water lilies beautifully displayed in a large oval room upstairs. The Pompidou Center houses the Musée National d'Art Moderne. We enjoyed this very much and were mostly in agreement as to what we liked and didn’t like.

We also visited both Notre Dame and the Sacre Coeur Basilica. Notre Dame Cathedral is stunning from the outside but it was overrun by tourists inside. It was completed in the 1300s, and was the very heartbeat of medieval Paris. The Sacre Coeur Basilica is a relative newcomer to Paris. Built on a hilltop overlooking Montmartre on the site of a Benedictine Abbey destroyed during the French Revolution of 1789, Sacre Coeur was completed in 1919. In contrast with the gothic style of Notre Dame it was built in a Romano-Byzantine style, and its interior is decorated with gold leaf. Despite many tourists, it was still an inviting place to go and pray for awhile.