Paris October-November 2022

We took the metro to Place Concorde. Large square, not so much traffic (but much more on the périphériques along the Seine).  The queue to the museum was large, but thanks to our museum Pass, we could get in within 5-10 minutes. We saw some fresques from Monet, huge, but I am not able to like or understand / appreciate the work. We then walked along the Seine to the Jardin des Tuileries, a very nice large park. We had a cookie,, ice-scream and a coffee. Metro again (we have 6 days pass, works wonder ;-) to Hotel de Ville and we walked to the Centre Pompidou, still dry and rather warm weather. Beautiful modern art, too many to include here. With two of my favorites (Braque - on the left and Picasso)  Antoine Pevsner Oue legs being very tired, we went for a beer and returned to the Atelier Brancusi , a Romanian sculpture we appreciate very much (Ta introduced me to his art in RO). . We then walked around the Quartier des Archives and found the National Archives building by chanc...

After the Musée de l'homme we went and photographed the Eiffel tower and walked down to the Seine. Unbelievably crowdy. See more pictures of Paris at the bottom of the page. We climb back the hill and visited the Cité de l'architecture. A big surprise : reproduction (as a mean of preservation of church fronts sculptures, model of church architecture. Some XI preserved portail. Notre-Dame during the revolution period. On the second floor, modern architectural designs of buildings to live in or industrial and leisure (sports) and prized projets of sustainable architecture (still as projets, I am not sure how they will scale up). Metro and dinner in the Marais (St-Paul). Very average food (too expensive for the quality). Back to the hotel for dessert and last drink (20h15).

We took the metro to the Town Hall, and saw a big queue for the Sainte-Chapelle, went to the tourist office to ask for maps, museum pass and metro pass, the subway to Charles de Gaules, line 6 (if this info is a bit useful ?). See pictures on the other page of this day. Musée de l'Homme Very nice museum. The introduction was a bit long (what is a species, difference between species and genus, the link between Homo and other organisms) and superficial. The section about the evolution of homo was interesting, well documented, could have been going into more details (pictures of digs, details of bones recovered).   Lucy was there, at least her bones.   Then we went to the section about Neanderthal and Denisovan which was illustrative. I missed maps of the out of Africa and detailed presentation of the actual knowledge of the DNA sequences and the percentage of Neanderthal DNA sequences found in human (around 2%) and in Denisovan. One of the oldest burial (a woman, 24'000 ye...

 Place de la république, manif des iraniennes, Canal St-Martin. Repas resto traditionnel face à la gare de l'Est, on a mangé presque comme à la maison, un peu moins bien. Place de Bastille, place des Vosges, Vue sur le canal St-Martin depuis l'arrêt métro Bastille .

Visite du magnifique musée national d'archéologie, repas salade... Magdalénien : about 12'000 years old 25'000 years old - Brassempouy Passé par la fondation Louis Vuitton, petite balade, architecture imposante. No tickets, no entray and Ta was more interested of the magnificent architecture than the paintings by Monet.

 We were going to take the train from Neuchatel to Frasne. When I checked the schedule, the train was canceled. New route via Lausanne. Church in St-Blaise and foggy lake Neuchâtel 

The trip was rather uneventful, except we had an unscheduled stop and then the train had to wait for traffic congestion , never heard of that in a train. And I was sure I reserved forward facing seats 😕. The train hit 293 km/h, normally TGV cruise around 250 to save a bit of energy.  We arrived at Gare de Lyon with a 20 minutes delay. Which was OK with us, since we had no constraints😏. We went searching for the tourist office in this huge station, with two halls (like train terminals) and one limitless hall a level below. Could not find it where it was supposed to be (maybe because of the important renovation in progress?). We went to the Citizenm Hotel and changed room as most beds were against the wall and one would need to climb over the other in the night. We got a very roomy room ;-). We went out again and purchased metro tickets and a map and off we went to Hotel de Ville and walked around, and around Notre-Dame under major repair after the terrible fire. We had a good dinn...