L'Orangerie, Encore une compete, et le baby-sitting....

So I am currently doing the last of that list -- not actually sittng on babies, but guarding these two adorable French boys as they sleep -- or as one sleeps and the other keeps wandering out because he can't sleep.

Yesterday, I succeeded at forcing myself to do a cultural activity! I went to L'Orangerie -- or the place where Monet's big paintings are....First of all, it's not overly easy to find. The metro stop is Concorde, but then you have to walk all the way around the Tuileries and pass by the Jeu de Paume museum as well -- and then L'Orangerie is this long skinny building over closer to the Seine. It's clearly an old building -- and right outside the giftshop, they have models showing the evolution of its architecture which is really interesting. The two long white oval rooms with Monet's Les Nymphaes (http://www.musee-orangerie.fr/homes/home_id25184_u1l2.htm) -- it's really quite something, but at the same time, you get up close to these enormous panels and realize it's just a bunch of random brushstrokes -- but I guess every painting is...

Anyways, I spent about an hour perusing the Monet pieces and also went downstairs to the other collection which included many different artists -- from Picasso to Renoir to Cezanne (many of whose pieces had been loaned to the Musee du Luxembourg for its Cezanne exhibit) to Modigliani. Many names that I've heard before (maybe from the movie, Midnight in Paris?) -- and so it was nice to finally see their work!

Today was spent at a swim meet -- yawn (well, literally at this moment...yawn). I only swam the 200 back which was fine -- the only problem was that there's no separate pool for warm up and warm down, so you kind of have to go cold turkey. This morning wasn't so bad because I swam about 20 minutes after the warm up time had ended....this afternoon was another story -- I swam an hour and a half after the warm up had ended....and it hurt. They had divided the finals up by age group, so I was in the Junior/Senior heat -- where there were only three of us...but I won! Woo hoo! The girl that came in second was only 10 seconds behind me....(but overall, I think I would have been third?).

Well I'm going to try and take a little nap and hope that Mr. I-Don't-Want-To-Go-To-Sleep changes his mind soon!

Here are few pictures that I took around the L'Orangerie yesterday -- it was a beautiful, yet chilly, day!

I felt like I was interrupting.....:)

A bientot!