sacre coeur | Paris!!

Woke myself up at 8:30 so Lindsay and I could get to Sacre Coeur before the rest of Paris does. It was well worth the early morning wake-up. Inside the basilica we were not allowed to take pictures (again), but take my word for it, looking up at the underside of the dome was awesome. Then we hiked to the top of the dome for an amazing view of the city. An extra 2 euros got us access to the crypt of the basilica, but this was nothing special, just a half-underground ring around an alter. I could’ve gone without this, but no big deal; I’ve spent more on less interesting things before (read: textbooks, jk).

For a distance comparison, the tower is on the left, and the Arc de Triomphe is on the right (it’s tiny!)

By the time that we left around 11:15 we had already tackled, and I say this as a comfortable guess, at least 1200 stairs. (175 from the metro to the streets + 150ish to climb the hill + 300 to get to the top of the dome) * 2 to get back down again. Go, us!

Museum on the left, mirror ball (Chicago’s bean) on the right. Just there for shiggles? Sure!

We then headed to the biggest science museum in Europe, Cite des Sciences & de l’Industrie. This was well worth my afternoon and a few more euros. The exhibits we stopped by were, from least to most favorite:

The Ocean – a lot of “lecturing” at us as we walked around. Just lots of reading and not too many interactive things, just telling us how oceans work and what impact humans have had on them.
Earthwatch – a lot about satellite and space shuttles, but it had too few displays and too many were childish.
Universe – talked a lot about geology, so this would’ve been my roommates’ thing, but not mine. Eventually they talked about the physics of the universe, but this was also near the end of our trip and we were starving so we hustled through it.
Mathematics – a few really interesting displays, but also a lot more “lecturing” rather than interacting.
Sounds – almost all of this was interactive (so that helped a ton). There was an echo-proof hallway, a 3D sound room (close your eyes, it was intense), and a whispering parabola.
Images and Light Games – if you know me at all, then you also know that these were what drew me to the museum the most in the first place. There were some optical illusions dealing with the persistence of vision, but my absolute favorite was kind of a bizarre setup: a projector shining a white light on a quickly spinning disc, which cast a “black” shadow on the wall, but also did some sort of prism-like light splitting? The light on the left of the disc was reddish while the light on the right of the disc was bluish. So I took a picture.