Day 43- Wednesday 20 July

Right, so this morning I met up with Layne, Lauren and Helen to take an English-speaking tour of the Opera Garnier which, as mentioned, was the inspiration for the Phantom of the Opera, which also had insufficient light for my beleaguered camera so my pictures are going to be worse than usual. Apologies in advance. It was, of course, crazy decorated, not too big but definitely fun, and our guide pointed out the tiniest things that the architect had thought to include, symbolism in the faces of lamp posts, a calendar clock, obsessive detail everywhere, twenty-four different kinds of marble, yikes. Here's an inept picture of the grand staircase, which only society's elite, the ones who rented boxes in the auditorium for the year, were allowed to climb, which is now a fave spot for I Was Here photos:

Now we're inside the auditorium, where it was more difficult to take photos. Here you can see the stage before they put the fake-curtain backdrop down in front of it to hide it, and it is apparently big enough to fit the Arc de Triomphe inside it [the stage, that is]:

And this is a large corridor to the side of the main room with the staircase where men only used to go after shows to conduct business:

After a good two hours, I went back to the apartment for lunch, dallied for a bit and then our class met up at Reid Hall to try to hack our way through more poetry for a while before heading over to the Centre Georges Pompidou. So here is a view from the sixth floor looking roughly south, where the pointiest things are Notre Dame and the Tower of St Jacques, and those fake people:

Now we're looking roughly south-east-east, and this one is for Tori- you've got St Jacques on the far left again, but then that black thing is the Tour Montparnasse, the only skyscraper in the first zone of Paris. I've always assumed that everyone knew about the building codes in France, but Tori didn't, so sorry: Pretty much everything is the same height, as demonstrated:

's vahry pretty, non? And this is just a photo:
We split up and then I had to go to the Louvre again for class stuff, and I perused northern seventeenth-century European genre scenes for a bit before trying to get to the French section one last time but I took a wrong staircase somehow and ended up in the apartments of Napolean III, which were beyond belief, crazier than Versailles, than anything so far, I couldn't believe our profs hadn't mentioned them. Here's a bit of a sitting room:
And some dining room:

I couldn't take any more photos as the Louvre police at this point began herding us out because the museum was closing. Some people are just too rich. It must be really hard to dust in there. Walked around, went back to the apartment and Maria had made ravioli for dinner, lots of it, remembering that I loved it.