Last Sunday, we went to the Louvre, taking advantage of free admissions to most museums on the first Sunday of the month. We saw the apartments of Napoleon III. The grand salon is perhaps the most impressive room, if only due to its size and extravagance, I’ve seen of all the palaces that we’ve visited. Looking upon the lavish excesses of the royalty is perhaps a good way to remind oneself why the revolution took place. There is still ground left for us to cover in the Louvre, but I think we’ve now gone over a good satisfactory portion of it.
This Sunday (today) we saw a free concert at a church (a modern church, quite uncharacteristic and rare in France). My wife already blogged about this on her blog (in French and Japanese), so I don’t have to go into detail. 
I’ll just say a few things in English: The feature was an impressive 14 year old violin soloist. He played Sarasate’s Carmen Fantasy perfectly, though he broke one of his strings midway through the performance (so it seemed). The concert was temporarily stopped while he went offstage to replace the string. He of course returned to finish flawlessly. I find it remarkable that this is something which I could never have seen where I grew up in the states, yet that here it is not all that uncommon. What a priviledge to be in such a city!
We had planned to go to the Conciergerie and neighboring Sainte Chapelle. However, the weather started out cloudy and rainy, so we decided against it since we wanted to take advantage of a sunny day to view the famous stained glass windows of Sainte Chapelle. We went to the concert instead. Afterwards, the weather eventually turned a bit nicer and we went for a stroll in Le Jardin du Luxembourg. There weren’t yet any flowers in bloom (of course it is still too early in the year, despite the unusually warm weather this winter) but now that the sun is setting later and parks are staying open until reasonable hours (i.e. instead of closing before 5pm!), it’s still nice to take advantage of the increasing daylight hours.
Sundays are the best time for us to hang out together. And we are quite lucky to be able to do so. I shouldn’t take it for granted!
