A view, stairs, and an accidental find

Day 6
Today was the day that we were released to our own devices for the day. The only guidance given was to enjoy the city. So I, my wife, and a few more of the group decided to go out for an adventure. I forget who came up with the idea of going to the Montmartre which has an amazing basilica overlooking the entirety of Paris from the top of a huge hill. The stairs were an utter nightmare, each time you thought you were almost done you would look up from the angle you had just achieved only to find another hundred or so left. Now the Montmartre district is known as a nightclub district but we never had the energy to pursue this aspect of the area. But what we did find there was a cultural smorgasbord of people, music, art, and cheap souvenirs. Loud boisterous salesman trying to peddle their wares while a French musician sings covers of American songs for the tourists, he wasn’t bad either, on the steps leading away from the basilica. The view from up there of Paris strangely reminded me of a short time I spent in Beirut, the buildings from that distance look very similar to the houses I saw over there in Lebanon.
Upon coming back from this little venture out in to the city a smaller group of us got together and went to the Impressionist Museum or the Musee de Orsay, this was nice on several levels not only because my wife Cat and I are both greatly interested in several of the artists displayed in this museum but we both were able to get in at half price since we were under 30. This museum was originally a train station but has since been converted to a museum holding several thousand pieces of Impressionist art. While there I was able to see both of Van Gogh’s self portraits, unfortunately The Lilly, Starry Night, and his Sunflower were currently on tour but there were approximately over thirty different pieces from Van Gogh just in this small part of this museum. This doesn’t even come close to the other artists on display from Renoir, to Monet, to Manet, to Degas, just to name a bare scraping of the colossal amount of famous works housed in this museum. I’ll stop here or I’ll be here all night discussing what I witnessed in this magical building.
After we returned to the hotel from this little excursion Cat and I got Chinese takeout and couldn’t finish everything so we invited some of the group up for food then decided to go out for one last look at the city and explore our actual neighborhood. This ended up being an awesome time for we found yet another basilica with an actual moat. While marveling at this site which we will never see in America we see the Eiffel Tower in the distance and want to try to get to it to see it light up with its little light show. So after bumbling around for about half an hour trying to judge where the tower was in relation to where we were, we turned a corner and are looking at the base of the tower with people all over the place doing just what we were doing. But as luck would have not two minutes after we arrived that the tower started its flashing light show, talk about killer timing. So this day can be called nothing but an enormous success.