Paris Has the Best Museums

The first museum we went to in Paris was the Arts de Metiers Museum.  It's kind of a science and technology history museum with some other random stuff thrown in here and there.  Standing outside the museum is a small statue of Liberty and that's what caught our eye.

It had some pretty interesting stuff, and I can tell you that the ipod has officially become a museum piece.  I love that the original ipod is in the display with the giant floppy disk.  They also have a model Mars rover there as well as lots of pretty little trinkets!

 Probably the coolest thing there was this xray video screen thing.  You step on the foot marks on the floor and an xray image of yourself shows up on the screen in front of you and moves as you move!  I'm not quite sure how it worked since I'm pretty sure you're supposed to take some precautions with actual xrays, but I'm also sure that it wasn't a standard digital image that just followed your movements because mine looked different from Erin's.  Anyway, we had fun with this exhibit for a while :)

One display had all these funky cameras disguised as other things.  Here's a camera that looks like a revolver, they also had a top hat, watch, and several other sneaky hidden camera objects.





Here's another funky thing for you.  My guess is this is the Steampunk Batmobile.  I only hope someone actually flew this thing once upon a time (or at least made an attempt to).  Maybe this is where the Subway Station inspiration came from!

  The next few museums we went to were during the Paris museum night.  I cannot believe the luck Erin and I have had with our timing in the countries we've been to.  We have randomly come across tons of fantastic free events in just about everyplace we've been, allowing us to see some amazing things and still stay on our budget (and by budget I mean hoping we can make it back to AZ before we run out of the money we saved before coming as we don't have jobs currently!)  So moral of the story, free is awesome.  Especially free famous art museums!  

It was a little rainy on the day of the museum openings, but we managed to make it to just about everything we wanted to see that night and not pass out from exhaustion!  Here's a pic from the start of the evening of me doing the single ladies dance with a Rodin sculpture.  And you thought Beyonce made that move up!

We started at the l'Orangerie Museum in the Touleries Gardens that was showing a Debussy/Monet exhibit.  It was incredibly beautiful  The huge Monet panels were displayed in round rooms stretching all around the walls.  They played Debussy music throughout the exhibition rooms and the combination was perfect.  We stayed for a while before remembering we had a lot more to go see that night and moved onto the next place.

Our next stop was the Orsay Museum.  This was probably my favorite museum in Paris.  The building itself is completely awesome and it has artwork from Monet, Degas, Van Gogh and more (so much more), not to mention some awesome gems by artists I'd never heard of before.  Added bonus, this super cool elephant outside.  Look mom! The biggest one we've found for you yet!

Inside as a special event for museum night they had live musicians playing.  They were great!  Even the cafe in this museum was awesome.  See pic with the lamps and orange stuff :)

You may recognize some of these paintings, they're pretty cool.

And did I mention the building?  Here's some pics from the end of the museum where you can climb up some stairs and get a view of the whole main room of the museum.  Pretty great.

There were also beautiful ballrooms in the museum that we walked through.  They rivaled several of the palaces we've been to.

After the Orsay we crossed back over the river to check out the Daniel Buren exhibition in the Grand Palace.

                 

Each year the Grand Palace gets an art installation by a different artist and this year it was done by Daniel Buren.  I was intrigued by the exhibition when I read about it while researching things to do in Paris, and was impressed with it when we went.  It definitely has a cool feeling as you walk through the pillars supporting the giant color circles, sort of a cross between honey I Shrunk the Kids and being underwater if the water was multicolored.  It was pretty sweet!

   

Our last stop of the night was over at the Modern Art Museum.  This may actually tie the Orsay as my favorite museum in Paris, it has some great work and again, the building itself rocks.

Erin and I seem to have impeccable timing lately, whether it's catching the changing of the guard by accident or hitting the top of this building just in time to see the eiffel tower sparkle!

The Centre Pompidou in Paris can boast some pretty famous work as well, including pieces by Picasso, Chagall, Kandinsky and more.  It was definitely an impressive collection.

Some of the more quirky works, some foamy letter decorated skulls in a huge tiled display, and a whole room you can walk into that is basically a sculpture itself of textured black and white walls.

I love abstract art so I was in awe of many of the pieces there and I absolutely loved this big huge purple accented metal shiny sparkly human heart like sculpture.  Super sweet.

Now you may be wondering "isn't this a post about Paris museums? what about The Louvre?"  Don't worry, we didn't stay in Paris for a month without visiting the Louvre, we actually went multiple times.  But more about that later, I'll do a post on it's own because that place is MASSIVE (and I haven't uploaded those pics yet!)