Girish's Blog

The museum which holds most of the masterpieces from Impressionism, the greatest revolution in painting since the Renaissance, started life as a railway station. In 1900, when the Gare d'Orsay was inaugurated, it was the first electrified urban terminal station in the world. It included a luxurious hotel and a grand reception room. By 1939 it was too small for accommodating the long-distance trains that were in operation and was closed. It was then used as a collection point for the dispatch of parcels to prisoners of war, and in 1945, the station was used as a reception centre for liberated French prisoners of war on their return to France, and for shooting movies according to Wikipedia. In the 1960s, there were plans to demolish the Gare d'Orsay and replace it with a new building, but wiser counsel prevailed and the railway station Gare d'Orsay became the museum, Musée d'Orsay in 1986. The museum has a grand entrance which befits its history as one of the most technic...

"A walk about Paris will provide lessons in history, beauty, and in the point of life." - Thomas Jefferson Paris is a city that easy on the eyes and the feet with most of the city being flat and no slopes or stairs to challenge you at the end of the day. However, we did a LOT of walking - my Fitbit regularly clocking over 20,000 steps daily with a peak of 34,000 steps.  The city is divided into twenty arrondissements and the River Seine dividing the city into the Left Bank, to the south of the river and the Right Bank to the north of the river.  My first impression of Paris was that it was like walking through a never-ending movie set - the boulevards, the buildings, the balconies all looking like it came from the mind of an art director who wanted to make sure that the viewers saw a consistent background throughout the movie. Reading about the history of Paris's urban architecture, I found that it was completely redesigned by Georges-Eugène Haussmann, between 1853 and 18...