J's day out - Part Deux

Another day... another adventure... a bunch more pictures. Yesterday was my second visa interview at the UK embassy (they sent me off at the first one because I was smiling in my photograph - grrrrrrrrrrrr) and the embassy is located just off the famed Champs Elysées. The appointment was for 4:15 and so when I was done, it was the wee hours of the evening and the sky was melting into a riot of colors. I was going to meet hubby dearest at one of the Metro stations in well over an hour. So that meant I had the hour to kill. Judiciously, I had lugged along his smaller Canon camera for the ease of carrying. After some of the sights I saw, I really wished I had brought my own bulky one... The pics in this weren't half bad but nevertheless.. And off I started walking down Champs Elysées, famed as the most beautiful road in the world.. I don't know about beautiful.. but it sure is long and its dotted with some of the most famous structures in Paris. Of course its ends are flanked by the famous Arc de Triomphe on one end and the Musee du Louvre at the other.. Along the way, comes the Place de la Concorde - the seat of the French revolution - more precisely the location of the guillotine that ended the lives of amongst others, King Louis Philippe XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette. Surprisingly, the concorde monument bore no reference to any of this but was instead just dedicated to the King.

Further ahead lay the Louvre. The temptation was unsurmountable. As a photography geek, I have always wanted to capture the glass pyramids in twilight.. And it was just turning pink in the sky.. I wanted to hang around there till dark and get whatever shots I wanted. I called the husband and made a change of plan to directly meet him at home. Though he insisted that the Louvre lay farther than it seemed and that I should probably take a train to it, I stressed that it was a stone's throw away and that I could see it rise just beyond the gates. It had to be a stone shot by a canon I suppose... he was as right as I was wrong. What lay behind the gates was merely a very large garden of sorts and what might've been a brisk 10 minute walk into the Louvre grounds seemed far more for my already tired legs. Having made the decision, I stuck by it and the sky turned purple by the time I got the first glimpse of the pyramid. The lighting was just perfect.. And the photos saw a lot more than my eyes did.

At the end of my day, I was tired, content, hungry and happy. It was time to head back home to the husband.