Top-ups, Art and Fireworks

It was pouring torrential rain Wednesday morning and missing the parades and unable to find anyone, I found myself sheltering at the Louvre. (This was not due to lack of credit - oh no! It turns out the woman was asking me to press hash and THEN there were a million options of what kind of top-up I wanted! I had no idea of the differences but went with classic as it sounded like it'd give me both minutes and texts. I looked them up later and found it ridiculous, so many different combinations which lasted for different amounts of time -why?)

There was an amazing cloudscape with different colours and textures here but this picture does not do it justice:

This was the rain:
I remembered seeing signs for Anselm Kiefer and so went on a very long journey to try and find him, meeting many museum assistants who sent me in various vague directions before finding this in a stairwell:
I love it. It's called "Athanor" and it's absolutely huge; I kept walking back and forth to examine it closely and see it from a distance. I love how Kiefer uses so much texture in his work (something which inspired some of my GCSE work) and it's probably a good thing that we were separated by a staircase as I REALLY wanted to touch it! He uses cracked clay at the bottom but then in between the cracks you get glimpses of shiny bronze, like there's something beneath, I could rant about it for ages but this blog says most of it!

Then I found Degas:

I found this tapestry whilst looking for Anselm and I loved it, especially all the details and patterns

So I went and bought a little sketchbook and sat and sketched for the first time in AGES

Then this ceiling was done by C. Y. Twombly I think and it is very very different to all the other ceilings:

I liked it.

Then I found this view on the third floor in a tiny little room off the main gallery and sat on the windowsill (which was huge) and began to sketch but then got bored...
I found a painting of cows! It reminded me of our holidays in Cornwall
By the end of the afternoon it was really sunny outside, so I went home
I bought some sweeties at the shop round the corner but it cost 2€! I thought the man was ripping me off because I was a tourist but Diana later assured me that it was in fact a good price! Either way, he threw in a free sweetie:
It was strange and I think I liked it, it was like a treacle toffee gone different but it had jokes inside! I got the second one (Toto comes home and says to his mother "I was the only one in the class not to get a zero in Maths! The teacher said "Pierre, zero. Robert, zero. Toto, ditto.") but the first one was a little odd and it doesn't really translate across; it was something like "Why does one put straps on trousers? Because they can't put them on themselves!" Stupid French.

Then I went to see the fireworks at the Eiffel Tower with Diana and her boyfriend. She is from Mexico and he is Venezuelan so we spoke Spanish all evening and it made me so very happy indeed because Diana's voice reminds me SO much of Paty and her family.
I'd post beautiful pictures of the show but most of them came out like this:

However, it was spectacular. The music was great and it was all very clever, though I did expect a little bit of a bigger finish! It all felt like it was over too quickly! It lasted half an hour but felt like ten minutes!

It was PACKED trying to get home so we got on the metro going back one way a few stops before the Eiffel Tower stops and then got on going back the right way. I got back very late and very tired indeed!