Sundays

One of the biggest challenges I think I have faced so far is having only 5 days that are available to do things. It is extremely common in Paris for almost everything to be closed on Sundays and often Mondays.

Sundays I can sort of understand. Everyone needs a break and a lot of people would be working 7 days a week if it wasn't for sundays. I would also attribute this to the large religious contingent in Europe. Churches are impossible to miss and you would be very hard pressed to walk for more than 10 minutes and not come across some sort of religious building.

This "day of rest" brings havoc to the traveler. For a person who is not use to taking a full day off, or the worst case scenario, for someone who only has a few days in a city and one happens to be Sunday; they are in trouble. I was very hard pressed to find something interesting to do today.

I have seen a lot of museums, seen a lot of art, wandered a lot of neighbourhoods and streets.
Today, I set out for a park, and an art exhibit called "Le reve americain." for you anglophones, that is "THE AMERICAN DREAM". All the pieces were done by an american artist Duane Hanson. They were life size humans created out of bronze, plaster, etc and painted and designed to depict real life working class individuals.

Unfortunately you weren't able to take pictures because the art was so realistic(click here to see pictures i found online), I felt like I was in the USA because it was scary how true to the stereotypes the art was. It is meant to be realist art but this freaked me out. Some of them I thought were real people when I was looking through the window.

Not much else to say, the park was very interesting. It was called La Villette, their specialty is an open air movie showing most nights, the museum of music and kids play area. Some very interesting sculptures and pathways, more of an amusement park than a lets have a pic nik but it was interesting nonetheless.

"The Manny"