Last day in Paris

The day has come, our last day in Paris. We have gone from being wide eyed tourists to feeling quite comfortable with the way that things happen here, albeit a little tired from constantly translating everything with our little, but increasing, knowledge of French. Today I ordered our breakfast completely in French with my new vocabulary, I would love to stay here a little longer (living not as a tourist) to see how much I could pick up. It really is much easier being immersed in a language.

Etienne Marcel Metro station

So, what did we do today ... Firstly we took a trip out to Gare de Nord which is only a few metro stops away, to see how difficult it would be to traverse with our luggage. We came to the conclusion that we will brave the metro and hope there is not a rush hour at 7:30am to get to the train station to head to London tomorrow. We had an interesting encounter with a French man who thought he was charming, his words of "You are so beautiful, you are an angel" had us running to hide in a cafe. I don't think that was his intended outcome.

Centre Georges Pompidou

Our next stop was Centre Georges Pompidou which is the Paris modern art gallery. This is such an impressive building. It had much less crowds than the more well known galleries with the older art, which was quite a nice change. So we wandered for about 3 hours looking at artwork by Kandinsky, Picasso, Matisse, Pollock, and Warhol, to name a few. Some of Picasso's paintings were quite disturbing.  I think, apart from seeing the work of Van Gogh, this was my favourite gallery. It has been interesting to see the progression of artwork here in Paris from the very early religious art through to the new collections at the modern art gallery.

Andy Warhol

Pablo Picasso

We wandered home and Jane found a fabulous frivolous French frock. We are starting to get to know our way around but seem to keep coming across places that we thought were far away but are only a few streets away in reality. We keep saying that the place has been cursed by Harry Potter, streets move and time disappears.

Lastly, we went to a wine tasting session at O Chateau. It was fabulous. The French wine expert was named Pierre (I wonder if he made that up?)  And we tasted three different French wines. Pierre had nice things to say about everyone else's country in the room but sneered when he came to NZ. We think he felt threatened by our superior wines.

O Chateau wine tasting

So that is our last day. It has been grey and rainy today, but that is okay, it is our last day, and we know that Paris is sad to see us go (ha). Time for a last dinner before we try to squeeze the suitcases shut with all our fabulous French fare.