Rodin Museum and the Arches

We continued our museum tour by going to the Rodin Museum next. I only knew that he sculpted the famous "Thinker" statue, but he had a lot of other interesting sculptures. The museum was at his residence and throughout his gardens, which was a nice change of pace from the Louvre, which was pretty sterile. We walked around the gardens and looked at all the figures. Turns out, I like sculpted art.

These were 3 variations of the same figure.

Another one of his apparently famous and radical creations, The Gates of Hell, was there in the gardens. It had a lot going on, and we stood there for quite a while looking at it.

Do not touch! Ne pas toucher!

 Inside the house were some smaller sculptures that he and some of his students/acquaintances did.

This one was called "Tenderness". Aww

There were some by his girlfriend that were cool. We didn't get a picture of my favorite one, called The Wave. It was carved out of onyx, so it was a dark green color and had bronze figurines inside the wave. Here are a couple others of hers

Carved in plaster, then into onyx

This was her "breakup" piece, when Rodin broke up with her to go back to his wife. It shows a young girl reaching for an older man, who is in the arms of an old hag. Ha ha

Enjoying the museum

Our next adventure was unintended...  We were going to go back to the Arc de Triomphe to go up to the top.  So we got on the Metro, and only half paying attention, got off at the stop that said "Grand Arch". We walked out of the Metro and saw this

Oh, THAT grand arch. Whoops! This is clear at the far end of Paris where they have brand new skyscrapers and shopping malls, etc. So we walked around the very American-feeling square and headed back to the Metro to go to our intended destination. 

Can't even see the top of the stairs from here

Brannan dying. The illustrations shows "you are here" at the top of the long column. They had a huge bench for people to stop and sit on to catch your breath after all those stairs before you continued up.

 We got to the top and saw our old friend, the other Grand Arch

See it down there, at the end of the long street?

View of the Eiffel Tower from the top

We stayed up at the top for probably an hour or more and did Brannan's favorite thing to do in Paris: watch the traffic below.  It's one big roundabout that goes around the arch, and there are no lanes. The only rule is you are supposed to yield to the traffic coming into the roundabout, but there were always a couple cars who would try to sneak through and get stuck cross-ways in the flow of traffic. We didn't see any accidents, but saw plenty of near misses. Fun times!

What a mess

We walked around Notre Dame and played our favorite people-watching game "American or Not?". Pretty entertaining to pick people out and decide if they are American or just plain dorky.

That area of town is great. The Latin Quarter is right there, which has a variety of cheap food. We have found some delicious gyros and crepes in that neighborhood. 
We also get to enjoy some good street performers in that area in the evening, and great sunsets over the Seine River.

From our apartment building