D’Orsay and Pompidou

Rather than heading to VERSAILLES due to impending rain (only a few drops came actually), we changed our tour to Musee D'orsay. Luckily, our special "context travel" tour guide Robyn knew tons of information about this place. She had studied art history, Dutch and was from the US. She was perfect, friendly, warm and really knowledgeable about the sculptures-paintings and even the building itself. It was really a joy...we had some fun notes to compare while she had mentioned she had a Dutch boyfriend once--

The highlights of the visit of the museum had to be seeing the Degas Ballet Dancer sculpture, which Bella had read about for the past 2 years in a lovely book about Degas and a story how he sculpted the ballerina-and as a special gift, she gave him the ribbon she wore. Well, the ribbon was on site, as well as many other paintings from Van Gogh, Monet, and more. I know that art can be simplistic as viewing pretty pictures but when you hear about the "why" a painting was painted, or how someone broke the 'mold' of the academics and pushed the artistic envelope- that's what is inspiring.

Alec was mostly bored during this museum visit, but Pieter and I decided that it was just fine for Alec and Bella to get bored too. Part of this trip was learning how much of Paris that we loved, could be loved by a 5 and 8 year old. The other part was learning how to deal with the comments like "I'm tired" "I'm bored" "When will we be home?" or "Can I have ice cream again?" as well as the great ones like "this is the best day of my life" or "WOWWWWWW, look at that!" and "This is the best crepe!" or "I can't wait to see our tour guide again!"

Anyway, in order to switch it up a bit, we did try to mix the cultural visits with a playground, running around activity to get them into their active happy mode too. But this day, we figured we could try to skip it and head maybe to a 2nd museum that night. We kind of learned our lesson. After crepes and a little rest, we headed towards George Pompidou, the cool museum with the escalators that go really high. At least to our kids, that was the highlight. We were hoping that since there was a Calder exhibit who specialized in performance art and creating circus animals, that the viewing would be fun for all of us.

Well, the circus was kind of cool- when you enter his exhibit, there was a 60 minute film on the artist which was a kind of documentary of Calder performing his ART. He created circus acts made of wire, cloth, springs and leather each of them performing tricks. We saw Calder himself display a wire lion jump through a hoop-a trapeze wire act—a dog riding a bike and so on. It was clear that his art combined science, math, engineering, physics and pure ingenuity. The kids were riveted, at least I thought. How did I know that at the end of the viewing of the actual wire circus acts shown in the film- they would ask for the “Real Circus” and then comment on how boring it was??

It was maybe boring to them at the time- but when you glanced at their faces when they spotted the exact wire circus pieces that they had just seen in the documentary on display--they were wowed. They are learning hundreds of things and watching new images through out every day- tasting the Paris they never knew existed. I never realized they would endure walking everyday for 5 hours without complaining- how to eat and drink not upon convenience but whenever we can- and that different art, parks and places exists and can be appreciated.

It just has not all sink in just yet...