Strikes & Floods

Sooo, the plan was to go to Giverny (Monet's gardens) after work today. I even left work a little early to make sure we could go. But because of the strikes a lot of trains were cancelled...including the one we wanted. We could have taken at 4:20pm train. But the train is about 50m. Then you have to take a shuttle to the gardens and they stop accepting people at 5:30pm because they close at 6pm. So even if we had JUST made it into the gardens, we would have only had a half hour. Really frustrating since we arrived at the train station at 1pm, and the original train had been for 2pm. But we can't control the strikes so we just have to make do. They had a cool clock statue outside. We left the train station and had lunch at a little café before heading back down to the Tuileries. We hit the Place de Concord first with a view of the Eiffel Tower in the distance. The goal was to get into the Musée d'Orangerie because it was closed when we went on Tuesday and then my mom tried this morning but she was too late and the line was over 45m wait just to get in. Well, for reasons unbeknownst to us, they were closing an hour early today and we just barely didn't make the cut-off for the security line, which closes 45m before the museum closes. We are having pretty bad luck so far with that place. 3x and nothing. So we wandered along the Seine, eastward and checked out how bad the waters are. It has been raining almost every day since I arrived here and the river has risen so much that there are some metro stops near the river that are closed, and today the Louvre was closed so they could move their artifacts in the basement up to safer levels. On our way back we decided to go into the Saint Chappelle and, surprisingly, made it inside. We've both been before, but it was nice to actually make it inside. We crossed to the Rive Gauche (south side of the Seine) and wandered through the streets, coming across this cute little church, the Eglise St Julien le Pauvre. We stopped at a little café a block from the hotel for a little nibble and then headed back in. Even if we weren't fully successful today, it was still fun to just wander around Paris with my mom. I guess I'll have to go on my own and take pics for the both of us.