November 8th

Today has been full of late 19th and early 20th century Art. Joy and I got up and went right to the Muse d'Orsay this morning. We got ourselves confused as to where the various rooms we were looking for were, and ended up in a section on Art Novoue (no idea how to spell that), which was facinating. We walked through rooms of delecately grand and sweeping furnature, all carved out of wood. Eventually we figured out how to get to the Impressionists, which was where we were headed to begin with, and found lots of Monet, Degas, Van Gough, and so on. There were a few rooms full of Monets, which was wonderful. We went further to the Post-Impressionists galleries, which had a full range from the original carefully dotted post-impressionism, to Gaugin (again with the spelling?) and many more. The best part about this Museum, apart from the art itself and the amazing building, was the information sheets that they had at every area. They were extremely informative about the particular art movement that you were seeing. Joy went to class at about 1:15 and I wandered through the Museum a bit more, finding more impressionists and a strange display of two Van Gough paintings in a cart of plastic citrus fruit.

After that, I decided to walk to the Rodin Museum, as it has been a lovely sunny day. Unfortunately, there were no sandwitch shops between the two museums (strangely, this whole day has been a failure to find the sandwich shops I thought were everywhere). The Rodin Museum is wonderful! The garden outside is relaxing and quiet, while the extensive collection of his sculptures inside is amazing. I particularly like his pieces where he leaves a lot of the marble in a very rough state. He manages to still capture detail and a huge amount of movement withough fully developing the bodies he's sculpting. That said, there were also amazing finished pieces, such as "The Kiss" and several of sets of hands.

Tonight Joy and I will do dinner on the boat again, though we are still staying at the hotel for better sleeping arangements.