Its the stuff you don't plan that can be really fun

So, our plan for today was to see the spot the Bastille was on, to see the Victor Hugo House, and to see the Opera. We did all three of those. However, we got some neat surprises.

First, we stopped at the train station to make reservations for our travel to Normandy on Saturday. The line was long (as the woman behind us said, you know its not a good sign when they put chairs in the line), but we passed some of the time talking to a pair of young people in line behind us. She was a student at UMass Amherst (we had a little academic advising session in line - these students and their double degrees, yeesh). He was in the Air Force at 'weather school' in Germany. It made the time pass (and I think we got a better explanation of the weather, to boot).

In the end it was good that it took so long at the train station because as we were walking down the street on our way between the Bastille and the Victor Hugo house, we bumped into a mounted band (as in a marching-type band on horses). So cool.

Finally, we saw the neatest Metro station between the Pompidou Center and the Opera House - it had walls that made it look like you were inside a copper chamber, and there were neat little portholes with replicas of, among other things, a sattelite.

As a side note - the Opera House is spectacular. Its easy to see how someone (like a Phantom of the Opera) could live there and not be noticed, it is HUGE. We were not able to see the actual auditorium, but we still spent an hour there. Magnificent ceilings, sculptures of famous composers and performers, and grand spaces.

We didn't really spend too much time in the Pompidou Center (too many of us were tired, grumpy, or uninterested in modern art), but the fountain outside was really quite neat. It is whimsical and fun and shows a cool part of modern art, if you ask me - conveying a spirit and feeling in a unique way.

We are now off to the Monmarte section - the highest part of the city - to get a view of the city at night...