Paris Part 1 (Sacre Coeur, Pere Lachaise, Centre Pompidou)

On Saturday my friend Alex and I went to Paris. Our train left at 7:15AM, so we had to get up super super early (okay well like 6AM, but that's hard on a Saturday morning!) We arrived at Paris-Montparnasse at 9AM sharp, and amazingly my friend Andrew (who's currently studying in Germany) woke up and met us at the train station. From there, we hopped on the metro and went to see Sacre-Coeur, a white, relatively new church in Paris (it was built in the 1800s). Here's a picture of Andrew and me in front of it (click to enlarge):


It's utterly massive, and at the bottom of the stairs lurks a troop of random men that try to sell you string and then curse at you when you don't want to buy any. It's good fun. After that, we wandered briefly around Montmartre. The area we walked through was essentially a giant conglomerate of fabric stores; Montmartre is supposed to be the artsy neighborhood. Case in point, check out this grafitti:


Once we were finished wandering, Alex and I parted ways with Andrew and headed over to Pere Lachaise, which is a giant cemetery in which a bunch of famous people are buried. I'm not really sure what the appeal in it was, but it was cool to go hang out briefly with Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde (all told, they weren't very good company).

From there, we decided to go to Centre Pompidou, the big modern art museum in the center of the city. It looks like this:


Cool, right? I was so excited to even see the building; I had been wanting to go for years and years. In front it has a big gallery of permanent outdoor art:


We got a little distracted by something else before we actually went into the museum, but I'll talk about that next time I write. Here are some photos from inside the museum:

Alex and me chilling by the escalators

Some pipes on top of the museum

A hallway in the museum

I think this piece is funny. It's a regular old urinal, tipped on its side, signed and called art.

This piece was see through, and I was apparently ambivalent toward it.

There's a lot more yet to come from my crazy Paris day-trip, stay tuned!