Montmartre & Palais de Tokyo

On Sunday, we went to Montmartre, because neither of us had been to Sacre Coeur.

It was sunny out, finally.  There were hordes of tourists, but it was still beautiful.

No photos from the inside, because there were signs that specifically said not to take them (gleefully ignored by everyone else). But the stained glass was really interesting and relatively recent. David speaks Latin so between us we were able to work out the meaning of almost all of them.

We then walked around the area, stopping into another church.  I thought it had -- arguably -- even lovelier stained glass.

Here is me in front of the church, resting my leg.  I hurt it badly on Saturday -- I have no idea how -- and there was a lot of limping for the next few days. (Because of me, I should clarify: David was happy to take taxis/walk less but it was so very lovely out that I wanted to keep going...)

We then walked down to two major department stores: Galeries Lafayette and Printemps.  David was on the hunt for a linen coat, so we spent some time looking around. Maybe we had some fancy hot beverages as well. Here's a view from the roof.

We then decided to walk over to the Palais de Tokyo, where there was an exhibit I wanted to see. As usual, we saw some interesting stuff on the way.

We got down to the Grand Palais, which was on the way (too late to go in, but the building is interesting to look at). At that point, 1) my leg was hurting quite a bit and 2) we were hungry.  Decided that Paris is small and trains exist, so we should go back to the Marais and eat at a recommended falafel place.

We then took the train back to the Palais de Tokyo, where we missed (by 7 minutes...) the tour of the basement that I wanted to take. But! that turned out to be for the best, because the art was excellent and we ran out of time to see it all as it was.  And that was the last day for the exhibitions. 

There were a lot of pieces that were good, but I loved the work by Angelica Mesiti. She does video installations that deal with cultural differences and sound.  Here is a still from a four-screen piece. This woman is using the pool as a drum. Another screen had someone throat singing and playing a stringed instrument; one had someone whistling; the last had a singer with an old Casio keyboard.

These photos are from a multi-room (at least 5) installation by Theaster Gates. We were being sort of herded out by this point (the Palais de Tokyo is open until midnight and we got kicked out because it was closing), so I didn't get to spend as long looking at it as I'd like.  

Here is the view from just outside the Palais.