more Paris

The next day, August 28th, we woke up and walked to a more modern building close to where we were staying, the Cartier Foundation by Jean Nouvel (pictured to the left). This building houses offices and a contemporary art museum. The museum has two large glass partitions out against the sidewalk, then an area for trees and plants, and then the building with an almost entirely glass façade. We then took the metro and got off near the Rodin Museum, picked up some lunch at a deli again and ate in a large park where we watched men playing bocce ball. Behind the park was very large building that we ended up walking through and it turned out to be the Musee de L'Armee which also had a very large church and housed Napoleon's Tomb under a gold dome. This was probably one of the more interesting things that we just happened to come upon.

From here we walked to the Rodin Museum where we saw several sculptures by Rodin inside of the house where he lived and sculpted. There was also a very nice rose garden outside with castings of his more famous sculptures, like the Thinker, where we just sat for a while and hung out.

From here we took the train to Centre Pompidou, which was one of my favorite things that we did on the whole trip. The Centre Pompidou, designed by Renzo Piano, is a very large modern art museum that has all of its mechanical systems and its main circulation path exposed on the outside of the structure rather than the inside, like most buildings. We walked through the whole museum, which also happened to have a very large architecture exhibit with tons of really cool models and renderings. We then left and had dinner right at a restaurant right outside before heading back to the hotel.