France Capital Visit

Paris tour, from Monday Jan 21 to Thursday Jan 24, 2013

For 4 days we were among the 42 million tourists who visit Paris each year.

Paris is the third most visited city in the world after Orlando and New York City 

Traveling by train was a good idea, because the weather (cold, snow and fog sometimes  ...)

La Beauce Plain under the snow

The Eiffel Tower was built as a "temporary" construction of Gustave Eiffel for the 1889 Universal Exposition

The tower is the tallest structure in Paris standing 320 meters (1,050 ft).

But as a temporal construction the tower was under the top removal when we tried to visit her …. 

Parc de la Villette, located at the northeastern hosts the 
Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie, the biggest science museum in Europe and the Cité de la Musique features a collection of several hundred musical instruments

Temporary exhibition of Django Reinhardt

Born in the back of a caravan, Django Reinhardt (1910-1953) belonged to the aristocracy of swing

He lost two fingers at age 18, when his caravan burned down but he triumphed as a brillant virtuosity

17th century guitars 

 

The Museum of Music contains instruments used from the seventeenth century to the present time. 

                Among 200 classical guitars we founded the

      Georges Brassens (famous French singer) guitar

Into the Cité des Sciences an temporary 

Leonardo da Vinci’s exhibition to re-discover the specific nature of this genius

The exhibition is based around the magnificent collection of 40 machine models created in the 1950s after Leonardo’s drawings. Visitors can understand who Leonardo was, this painter, engineer, favorite of princes, architect …

Transforming movements (part 2 of exhibition)

Perpetual motion wheels. Leonardo wanted to prove it was impossible to make a device whose movement continues indefinitely  

Imagining flight (part 5 of exhibition)

The mechanical wings which he drew transposed his observations of birds in flight 

François de Closets the famous writer,

 journalist and TV man, specialized in 

scientist topics was among the visitors 

Pompidou Center is a complex in the Beaubourg area

The idea for the Centre Pompidou as a nerve center of the French art and culture

Pompidou Center, with its “exposed skeleton of brightly colored tubes for mechanical systems”

Paris overlooked from the top of
Pompidou Center

The Louvre Palace which houses the museum was begun as a fortress by Philip II

During the French Revolution it was transformed into a public museum

Today, the Louvre Museum is one of the world's largest museums and a historic monument

A glass pyramid stands over a new entrance in the main Cour Napoléon

The Inverted Pyramid, was completed in 1993.

The Louvre Museum contains more than 380,000 objects as Egyptian antiquities, Near Eastern antiquities, Painting …

The Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci, oil on panel, dated from 1503, probably completed while the artist was at the court of François First

And many thanks to my daughter for Christmas gift that 

allowed us to rediscover Paris !