Week of March 14th 2011: Les Invalides (Paris)

I didn’t really know what Les Invalides was before this trip to Paris. On my first trip, I had seen it on a map and gone past it but I just thought it was a big park a few blocks away from the Eiffel Tower. This is what you get when your tour guide tries to distract you so that you can have an epic moment of realizing you are right underneath the famous landmark.

So – after seeing Musee Rodin, we knew we would pass it on our way to have lunch near the Eiffel Tower (something we knew was incredibly cheesy but so is riding a Cable Car and I try to do that every now and then because I live in San Francisco and I can). Once we found a map, we saw that Les Invalides was made up of several buildings containing such things as World War museum, the church of St. Louis, and Napoleon’s Tomb.

Napoleon’s Tomb was the first thing we decided to see as it is clearly marked by a grand entrance with large gold doors. In fact, the doors are so large that they have smaller, more reasonable doors cut out of them. When you go through the doors, you are actually on the second floor of the tomb where you can look down onto it from above. Now, if you’ve never heard the term “Napoleon Complex,” just seeing a picture of his casket should explain everything for you.

After the Tomb, we went to go see the military museum. It was a really cool collection of military armor and weapons ranging from several different countries. It was definitely cool to see the progression of several tools and weapons. I probably took about 20 cannon pictures yet for some reason I didn't upload any of them to Picassa...

 From there, Kevin and I split ways. Since we were both really hungry, we decided he would go see the World War museum (because guys love war and stuff) and I went to check out the church of St. Louis since he is the namesake of the high school I attended. The church was very beautiful but there were a lot of signs discouraging visitors and photography so I decided to be respectful. I figured Kevin wasn’t done with the museum so I went to go meet up with him.

Not surprisingly, he wasn't too far into the World War museum so I looked at the end of WWI and then we moved onto the WWII exhibit. The exhibit was really well done and I thought it gave a very unbiased and detailed  history on the war. As someone who didn't pay enough attention to history in high school, it was interesting to see more about what actually happened.