Centre Pompidou and the Louvre

Most people would never imagine you could see Saint Chapelle, Centre Pompidou AND the Louvre in one day. Fact: you could spend the whole day at the Louvre and still not see everything. Welcome to Interior Design Study Abroad.

Saint Chapelle was built in the Tudor style. The walls of the chapel upstairs is made almost entirely of stained glass. It is also completely covered in brightly colored patterns.

Centre Pompidou is a contemporary building designed by Renzo Piano. This building is unique for it's exposed architecture. Most buildings hide up all the innerworkings of a building, but Piano kept it all on the outside, saying it should be celebrated. The zigzag looking thing going up the building is the escalator, and you can get an awesome view of the city from there.

Inside Centre Pompidou is a museum for contemporary art. We had to go through it pretty quickly, but I absolutely loved it. It had some iconic chairs that I recognized, some paintings whose artists I recognized.

Chair from Le Petit Comfort series

We had a lunch break then walked to the Musee du Louvre. The Louvre was originally a fortress in the 12th century. It was turned into a palace for Fracois I and Louis XIV, and has been a museum since 1793. Its most recent addition has been the Pyramid by I.M. Pei. The Pyramid is very contemporary and has a strong juxtaposition with the rest of the building. Some people love it, some people hate it. I didn't like it much until I actually went to see it today.

We were all very tired by the time we got to the Louvre so we didn't spend a lot of time there- about 3 hours total. We did manage to see a few very famous pieces- you know, just the MONA LISA, and the WINGED VICTORY. Nothin special. Hardly worth mentioning. Leslie and I sketched the Winged Victory, and as we were sitting there people kept peering over our shoulders to look at our work. We even had some people take pictures of us! I didn't know how to react to that so I just pretended I didn't notice. It was kind of hard to not notice though- once I looked up and this old lady had a giant lens pointed right at my face! It was kind of fun. I won't pretend my sketch was anything incredible, but it was still a confidence booster :)

We got Chinese food for dinner.  I don't know if this really counts as Chinese, but I tried roast duck for the first time. It tasted like chicken.

P.S. Now that I'm all caught up with my blog posts, I should be posting every day again. :)