Holy Crepe!

Another morning run in the freezing cold wind! This time better prepared!! It’s not so bad though if you are in the sun and out of the wind.

This morning I went to the lovely Champs-Elysees. What wasn’t so lovely was seeing an older chap go to the toilet right then and there in the middle of the busy Champs-Elysees footpath beside a Metro entrance!! What the!

In the afternoon I ate my own weight in crepes including a nutella one, a dark chocolate one and a lemon and sugar one! So satisfying!!! They were great!

Later in the afternoon I visited Musée D’Orsay. It’s actually quite small in comparison to the Louvre. Inside I saw works by Paul Gauguin, Cézanne, Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edouard Manet, Emile Lévy, Vincent van Gogh and Glaude Monet. Photographs are not permitted to be taken in D’Orsay, however there are a couple of pieces of work that warrant a mention. There was the very well known van Gogh ‘Portrait de l’artiste’, 1889 and another piece by Manet called ‘le déjeuner sur l’herbe’, 1863. It depicts four people in a nature setting. A lady in the background wears a sheer white sleeveless dress and stands knee deep in the creek. In the foreground there are two men and a woman sitting on the ground with a picnic spread out in front of them. The men are dressed in suits (of the day) with ties. They have longish hair (by a man's standard) and bushy beards. The woman however sits there with them completely naked!!

A third piece I discovered is by Gustave Courbet. As you walk into the room of the gallery you are surrounded by Courbet paintings including sweet scenes of deers in the wood and men sitting around in groups. Then you walk into the next room adjacent and wham! There on the wall straight in front of you, you are confronted by a rather large life like depiction of a woman’s anatomy! I wasn’t bothered by it, but it was certainly unexpected! You see the view from the women’s knees perspective as she reclines on her back. You can see up to her breast with one being covered by some material draped over her body. She has no face and no identity and I’d wished that I’d written the name of the piece down now!! It seemed quite out of place because yeah sure there were loads of painting with breasts and naked women, but none quite so graphic and centred on only that part of the body! See there really isn’t anything that you can’t get in Paris!!