Paris

Paris has to be my favourite city. It is amazing to simply walk around, with wide roads which you can look down and see a famous monument in the distance. A welcome difference from Rome is that it has a lot of trees and grass, things that cannot be found in Rome wherever you look. My favourite area is the Champs-Elysees and Arc de Triumph. This road is a direct line through the middle of the Louvre, through an arch outside it, an obelisk in the Concorde square, through the Arc de Triumph, and finally through the staggering monument La Defense, which is a colossal modern arch doubling as an office building. The shops along the Champs-Elysees are only the most elite, with the rent reaching 1,100,000 per annum for some shops. I was fortunate enough not to be bounced as I queued to get into Louis-Vuitton, where the cheapest item was a key ring for 200 euros.

Highlights were the Louvre, Notre Dame and Chartres Cathedrals, the Eiffel tower, the Arc de Triumph, Versailles and the Musee d'Orsay which housed most of the impressionist paintings which marked the beginning of modern art. Versailles was incredible; the opulence of the small part of the palace that we saw was mind blowing, as was the extent of the palace gardens with over 1000 fountains. Sam, Bernie, Dennis and I hired bikes which were a great way to get around the grounds and explore, while others took dinghies out on the grand canal, stretching from the steps in front of the palace into the distance. A nice touch was the classical music emanating from speakers hidden among the shrubbery.

It is hard to write about the Louvre, which houses most of my favourite artworks I saw on the tour. Even though we spent almost 6 hours in the museum, we kept up a very fast pace and had to skip over works that would have been the centrepiece of other collections. Mona Lisa was all it was reputed to be, but more amazing to me were the giant, incredibly realistic epic paintings by the likes of David, depicting scenes from myths or other events.

The Musee d'Orsay is less famous, but still definitely worth a visit. Although the more extreme impressionist paintings did not appeal to me, they were certainly striking and I saw some amazing pieces in there as well.

In Paris we saw a different variant of the highly decorated, opulent and almost garish churches of Rome. The Gothic style, exemplified most prominently in Notre Dame and Chartres Cathedral, is far barer, with little decoration inside, but makes up for it in incredible architecture. Inside, the walls extend up and up, far higher than those in Rome, with amazing stained glass between the thin pillars. The secret that allows such high walls to remain thin and to have space for the windows is the flying buttress: an arch that transfers the weight of the roof out away from the main wall to huge, heavy towers which in turn transfer it to the ground. These allow the architect to make the walls very thin without the whole structure collapsing outwards. Other elements of gothic style are gargoyles, high bell towers flanking each side of the main entrance, and crockets which give the building an almost spiky look.

—Ben McArthur