“Just say the lines and don’t trip over the furniture.”
Noel Coward
Sites/Topics covered in this post:
• Petit Palais
• Paris Walking
• Night trip on the Seine
Go-Date: Day 130, Saturday, June 1
Lesson Learned: A boat ride on the Seine is the best bargain in Paris. Ten Euros for a one-hour ride. Be sure to do it.
The Small Palace
As normal, our day started with a walk around the city. OK, it started on the metro and we hopped off for a little walk-about. During our walk, we came to the Petit Palais. It was on our list of places to see. There are so many museums in Paris, you need to pace yourself to keep from over-saturation of culture and art. Too much can make you numb to the splendor you see. We don’t have a personal rule, but we try to keep it to one museum a day, and often we’ll skip a day of visiting museums. The Petit Palais (small palace) is an art museum in the 8th arrondissement of Paris, France.
The Petit Palace was built for the 1900 Exposition Universelle (“Universal Exhibition”), it now houses the City of Paris Museum of Fine Arts (Musée des beaux-arts de la ville de Paris). The Petit Palais is located across from the Grand Palais on Avenue Nicolas II, today Avenue Winston-Churchill at the intersection of the Avenue des Champs-Elysees and the other side borders the Seine.
The Petit Palais is one of 14 museums of the City of Paris that have been incorporated since January 1, 2013, in the public corporation Paris Musées. It has been listed since 1975 as a monument historique by the French Ministry of Culture.
They call it the Small Palace because it is across the street from the Grand Palais. Its small only in the sense of comparison. If you dropped it in Washington D.C. it would dwarf, or at least rival any museum in the city. In 1894 a competition was held to select an architect to design a new exhibition hall for the 1900 Exhibition. The competitor architects had the option to do what they pleased (alter, destroy, or keep) with the Palais de l’Industrie. In the end, Charles Girault won the competition and built the Petit Palais as one of the buildings that replaced the Palais de l’Industrie. The construction of the Petit Palais began on October 10, 1897 and was completed in April 1900. The total cost of the Petit Palais at the time of the construction was 400,000 pounds (I have no clue to how many Francs that was).
Since 1902, the Petit Palais became the “Palace of Fine Arts of the City of Paris”. The art was stunning, and the structure even more so.
Purely Tourist Thing to Do & We Like It
Take a boat ride on the Seine. For a gorgeous, and affordable way to see the city we decided to grab a tour on one of the Seine’s many “bateaux mouches” boats. They’re trite, and very touristy, but a truly great use of your time and money. Instead of taking a cruise by day we decided to take a night cruise (shades of the movie Charades).
It stays light later in the day here than it does back home, and nightfall doesn’t descend on Paris until after 10. We caught the next to last cruise at 9:45, just as the sun began to dip which presented us with a spectacular sunset on the Seine. You should take the cruise by night and experience the city of lights illuminated.
The tour takes around 1 hour and goes around the city. The boat we took departs from Pont Neuf on the Ile de la Cite’ cruised down to Liberty Statue located in the Grenelle Bridge, before making a U turn to see the Eiffel Tower sparkling its thousand lights, an amazing show that takes time every hour makes a U-turn and sails up the river, around the island and back to the quay. During the cruise a live guide gives an informative history of the city, its beautiful bridges, and magnificent building along the river. Oh, and there is a bar on board so bring on the booze.
