Free the first Sunday of the month or not!

After last evening's failed attempt at finding where the action was, today we embarked on taking advantage of "free Sunday" where the monuments and museums are free to the public the first Sunday of the month.

After a great breakfast of our favorite cereal, Jordan's Country Crisp with whole nuts of every kind imagneable, we took off for a couple of monuments and museums; the Arc de Triomphe and the Marmotten Museum.

But first we had to walk through our favorite area, the market, to get to the Metro. On Sunday we discovered that though the market is closed, all the stalls are filled with artists and their art pieces. So we slowly walked and looked at the many diverse artististic hoping to find something that we could like. However most of this art is not the kind we collect (ie. naked women, etc) so we didn't buy. But it was interesting to say the least.

We got to the Arc de Triomphe easily and decided to bypass the 300 stairs to the top. Even though it would have been free the chance and risk on my knee was too much so we just stayed down at the bottom looking around and people and car watching. This is the place where it branches out into a star and many avenues all flow into one big traffic jam. There are rules to the road and it looks like people know the rules but every once in awhile you see someone stopped and not knowing how to get across the mad chaos.

From there we Metroed over to the Marmotten Museum, my favorite museum of all time. This is the one where we happened on last time and discovered all of Monet's works; from his sighted happy time to his dark, going blind time. Of all the places I wanted to see again this would have been my choice. And free no less!

To get to the Museum we have to walk quite a distance from the Metro. Fortunately it wasn't raining like last time and we got to see children in the park playing. So the distance wasn't a problem. Once at the museum we went in and lo and behold, the Marmotten Museum is privately owned and doesn't fall under the "free on the first Sunday of the Month" rule! Darn! It isn't worth the 10 euros to see it again so we just turned around and left.

But it turned out that the best part of the day was seeing an old-fashioned merry go round which is hand cranked and watching the children enjoy it. The children went round and round using a stick and trying to get it through a ring. They were having so much fun and the older man in charge of keeping the merry go round going would help out the younger kids who didn't get a ring.  I told Jim that we should do this when we get older! Maybe there is an old fashioned merry go round in the US that we could set up and see kids have fun. It was very fun to watch.

We then headed home having felt that we didn't accomplish all that we had set out to do but had fun doing all the other things that we got to do instead. And the most fun of the day was free after all! Print this post