Montmartre

In the afternoon after lunch(we just had a baguette in a cafe--it was really yummy and filled with gorgeous ham and cheese and salad--plus a sort of donut thing they call a beignet, filled with apricot, delicious!)we went to Montmartre and climbed up the hill and then about a million steps to the Sacre Coeur church which is huge and all white like a wedding cake. It's not as old as Notre-Dame and churches like that, but it's pretty impressive. It was lovely there with the sun shining and people playing music down at the bottom of the steps, and 'living statues' also, including a really weird Egyptian mummy one, which I took a picture of.

Montmartre used to be a really dodgy area in the past(it still is in places) but it was also a big place for artists, like Picasso and Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec. Grandmere says artists still go there but I don't think any of them are as famous as those guys were! These are some of the pictures they painted there--the Harlequin is by Picasso; the scene is by Van Gogh; and the dancers by Touloise-Lautrec. It was amazing being there in the place they'd painted their famous pictures, and weird to think they probably had no idea when they were painting them how famous they'd get! Dad told us this story of how Picasso once didn't have enough money for a meal, so he paid for it with a painting! These days, that painting is worth about 22 million euros!!