Europe trip: Paris (day 9)

Our first real day in Paris! We woke up in our little apartment and dashed out, ready to get going! I was short one metro ticket so we decided to walk until we could get to a station to buy more, then it wasn't really that far, and we wanted to buy a museum pass on the way, so we just walked.

We got separated at a big mall buying passes and metro tickets so we decided to just meet at the Musee d'Orsay. On our way down, Pierce Zoe and I passed the Place Vendome with this great triumphal column for Napoleon.




We loved the ponts (bridges). This one has locks, which I had thought they'd gotten rid of but evidently not.


Matt and Mattie had stopped along the way for something, so Pierce and Zoe and I got a crepe across the street from the museum while we waited. We got Sucre Citron, lemon sugar, and it really was just a hot crepe with fresh lemon juice and sugar sprinkled on it. Delicious!


The Musee d'Orsay is full of impressionist and post-impressionist art. At some point the Louvre divested their later art and moved it here. It's a big huge gorgeous building that used to be a train station. We started off seeing some Van Gogh.







There were such beautiful HUGE paintings.




And isn't this sculpture fun, with the alligator?










I especially loved the Degas.








Some of us were bigger fans of art museums than others. And all of us had pretty tired feet by the time we were ready to leave. This museum has a lot of walking in it.


After the Orsay, we got some lunch, sandwiches and pizza from a boulangerie, and then it was raining so we decided not to ride scooters like we wanted and instead we went to the Louvre for a bit.


We started with some really old religious sculpture, beautiful!










Michaelangelo's captives - I hadn't known that the Louvre had sculpture by Michaelangelo so this was a fun surprise for me (I should have known!).




And other beautiful Italian sculpture. It's hard to know what to take pictures on in a museum like the ones we went to.




When we were exhausted, we tried to ride scooters, but it was still pretty wet and there are some rules we didn't understand about where we couldn't ride. Plus - riding on cobblestones is reallly hard! Too bumpy. We stopped to look at a pont on our way through Isle de la Cite, then went to the Latin quarter, which is busy and full of shops and a great old church, and where Pierce found his favorite treat in Paris, gelato from Amorino. It rained on and off and I think this is it for photography for today.


Mattie's fitbit says 27,015 steps. That's a lot. In retrospect we should have bused down to the Isle de la Cite, but walking seemed fun!

Pierce's Eagle project

I hope I will get back to my Europe trip pictures! But in the meantime, I have some fun pictures from Pierce's Eagle project, which was the week after we got home.

Here he is with the lady whose yard needed to be fixed up. This picture just makes me happy that there are Eagle scout projects and that he was willing to do one.


Here are many of our friends who helped:




And some before/after pictures I put together (I didn't always stand in the same spot like I should have!):












Here's the report we sent to the stake service person (Pierce is still working on - or more likely plans to work on soon - his official report):

Pierce Christison’s Eagle project was on Saturday June 15th. He partnered with the City of Albuquerque’s Department of Senior Affairs to clean up a senior citizen’s yard that had been reported to the city, and who didn’t have any family in the area to help her. The city provided two large trailers, 2 guys, and a lot of tools. Pierce invited as many people as he could to help, and 25 people came. The city’s goal was to have the two large trailers filled with yard waste.

The lady whose yard was cleaned was Mrs. B. She is 100 years old and lives alone. She seemed very appreciative and was very kind to Pierce and the other workers. She had a couple of requests that they were able to meet. The city reported that our group removed 4200 pounds of yard waste.

The people who did the yard work were cheerful and extremely hard-working. It was fun to help someone who couldn't physically do it on her own, yet was required by the city to clean up.  Pierce says he really appreciated the help from the city and the opportunity to help Mrs. B.