Creative Friday--Another Field Trip Edition

For last week's Creative Friday Michelle and I took a nod from blogging friend Natalie's Instagram post showing her at the Springville Art Museum; but of course that meant going to lunch at The Art City Trolley in town as well (both are rare treats for us).

 The restaurant is pretty cute.

The food is excellent!

Even the receipts are cute!

The museum itself is a very cool building.

Our self-portrait.

We both like to take pictures of flowers and were quite smitten by these anemones is various stages of bloom on the way into the museum.

I always like catching bees in action.

The windows inside the museum are beautiful too.

These paintings were so interesting, humorous, and full of texture.

This one cracked me up because the little boy is saying, "broth" and so is the dog and then up above (not in this picture) there is a painted picture in the scene with people saying broth as well.

This one was amusing to us because the woman is saying, "I love you most of the time" and the man is saying, "I love you sometimes too."

Our favorite part of the museum may have been having the outdoor sculpture garden all to ourselves on a perfectly cool, breezy day. We sat on the two closest chairs and savored the non-sweatyness of it. It's no small thing that we both share temperature woes and understand the euphoria of a cool day.

There was another exhibit of gorgeous floral paintings that we were quite smitten with. The painter (who is a local artist) happened to be at the museum that day and talked to us about her process a bit.

On the way home we stopped at Iceberg again (like last week) for shakes. Michelle got the Nutella shake again (which she said is fantstic) and I got a Caramel Praline shake. It was a hugely successful outing on all fronts!

Best Creative Friday Ever--Part I

After Thursday's day of Smotherhood, Michelle and I were very excited to have Friday Flanarizing to look forward to kid-free! We didn't want to waste any of our day so we made sure we were up and ready and out the door by 10:15am. As we walked down the stairs of the apartment building we did a little victory cheer.


We got our morning almond croissant and then took the Metro to the Musée d'Orsay. We were only able to squeeze in a really fast couple hours there on my last trip, so I really wanted to spend more time there this go around.


We passed a realtor's office with postings in the window and were surprised to see you can get a little place along The Seine for almost 3 million euros, oh is that all?!


I was amused to learn that the Musée d'Orsay actually costs a bit more than entrance to The Louvre, though it's still a bargain.


Michelle and I loved the first couple of rooms we visited and were particularly taken with this woman there painting. Painting is so beyond my skill set that the whole vision and process baffle me. I am definitely one who appreciates this art, but doesn't really understand how it's possible at all.


After walking through a disappointing and at times disturbing Art Nouveau exhibit (surely there were drugs involved with that movement) we wandered around enjoying some sculptures by Rodin and took this self-portrait with the museum's awesomeness behind us. I love that building!!


We wandered around oohing, ahhing and discussing various paintings and came across these. The woman in the painting on the right appeared to be looking into my soul while tapping her fingers together and asking me what I planned to do with this experience. She's diabolical and didn't look like a painting, but like a real person (a thin, pasty one, but still). I decided she's more Mona Lisa-esque than the Mona Lisa.


The rooms full of Impressionist paintings are the big draw for everyone, and really who can blame us hordes for wanting to see them?


It was a bit mind bending to be surrounded by so many amazing and famous works of art. I couldn't help feeling a little guilty for spending so little time admiring each one. I thought it was cool that this Degas was painted at Opéra, especially since we'd just seen that building the day before.


Oh how I love the detail of this painting with the writing supplies and books.


We took one short break to rest our feet, admire some paintings and take a scary self-portrait. It turns out that the lighting that works best for paintings, does NOT work well for pasty, white people!


This was one of the gorgeous views out one of the windows in the gallery, not too shabby eh?


We saw this adorable mother and daughter (and later grandmother as well) walking around and they literally brought tears to my eyes. Can you imagine being able to take your child out for an afternoon at such a place? (Admission to museums is free from kids under 18.)


We were struck by similar thoughts upon seeing multiple school field trips going on. There were all these little kids hopping around with no idea that they were in such a marvelous place seeing so many miracles--it must be nice not to feel any pressure to soak it all up while wandering there.


I commented to Michelle that this painting looks like a man in a dress, I'm sure of it, then we saw these two women bent over with laughter while looking at it and decided they must have come to the same conclusion.


We were so starving by this point and decided to try one of the restaurants in the museum. We were seated right next to one of the huge clocks that can be seen from the outside of the building.


I ordered the lasagna and Michelle ordered the Tartine and we both ended up not really liking the food. I was having some serious texture issues with the lasagna because the 5 layers of noodles and the cheese were so soft and plentiful. I could only make myself eat half of it for body fueling and headache prevention purposes.


We decided to get dessert to help fill us up and give us something tasty to eat, and were happy with that choice, thought the waffle could have been softer.

Our bill was a bit steep though! The servers in Paris get 15% plus whatever else you give them and they basically only take your order, bring your food and then bring your check (there's no, "How is everything tasting? or Can I get you anything else?" going on in Paris) and make a ton of money. It's no wonder you see mature men as professional waiters there, they must be living in an apartment on The Seine with all the money they're making!

We returned to our art appreciation wanderings and found lots more goodness to see. I loved the vignette in this painting.


It was fun to see this Toulouse-Lautrec in real life because we have a print of it on our bedroom wall. The real painting is much smaller than I thought it would be and appears to be done in chalk on a brown grocery bag type paper. A lot of his sketches appear to have been done on whatever paper was lying around.

We finally decided we'd had enough after 4.5 hours.

Upon heading outside there were groups of people everywhere smoking; being in the museum for a long time must have given them quite a hankering.

Here's the clock we ate lunch inside of!

We started walking over to Jardin des Tuileries, which was conveniently located right across the river, and provided a gorgeous walk along the way.


Isn't this sign kind of funny? How can so many amazing places be located so close together?


We stopped to rest on a bench on the bridge and took another self-portrait.


We took a self-portrait of our weary feet (which really should have some sort of pain radiation coming from them) on the bridge as well. Notice Michelle's very soft, cute polka-dotted socks which Jenn sent with me to give her.

**Can you believe this is only half our day?
Do you have any painting skills?
Do you like Impressionist art?
Can you imagine being able to take your kids
to a place like this for an afternoon?**

Comment Window Tidbit: Where is everyone? It's not even the weekend, yet hardly anyone is commenting. I'm going to get a complex about it.

Titleless Tuesday

This is now my favorite breakfast, I really need to do something like this at home even though it won't involve a real Parisian baguette. Seriously, hot chocolate with bread and butter, that's just good!


We just had to take a self-portrait at the beginning of the day before we look all worn and washed out.


While Michelle and I went downstairs to buy some more Metro tickets, Max entertained Eva by checking out the wide selection of animal postcards (what the?) at the stationery store next to the apartment. Oh how I'd love to live next to a stationery store in real life...of course, my studio houses an inventory that rivals most stationery stores so maybe I just need to work on displaying it better.


Everyone in Paris wears scarves, so they are for sale in every shop in the city. Max was modeling the most popular way to wear them, especially for men, and looked so grown up I had him pose for this picture. By the way, we have seen some men wearing pink scarves and floral scarves here! I may have to pick one up for Randy.


We love how the bus lulls Eva to sleep, we just wish she would stay asleep for awhile after we get off the bus. (Michelle knitted this darling scarf for Eva.)


I was so taken with the area we were in and the surrounding fall foliage I couldn't hide my happiness.


I think Utah could benefit from more landscape planning and planting; it's going to be hard to go home after seeing rows of trees like this all over the city.

I adore Metro signs like this.

Our destination for the day was a small museum housing many Monet paintings. We weren't allowed to take pictures in the museum so we checked our bags and coats into the coat check and were able to wander the museum unencumbered. I'd still rather be able to take pictures, but it was definitely nice not to be carrying such a load.


The museum is in this old "house" which was huge and beautiful inside. I could totally imagine ladies in their fancy ball gowns descending the long winding stair case as they came down to dine for the evening. I have seen so many Mr. Higglybottom movies and am completely smitten by them all.


Eva cooperated during our visit to the museum due to the promise of visiting a park afterward. They have such wonderful parks here (those this picture is no indication of that) surrounded by benches for wearing tourists like me.


Michelle read a book on her iTouch and I wrote 4 postcards during our very pleasant visit to the park.

Une petite self-portrait on the park bench.

As we walked back to the bus stop I was snapping pictures like crazy. Everything here looks like art to me, whether it's other people's dirty dishes or not, it's picturesque.


We had to replenish our bodies, so we stopped at a bakery. I opted for a regular croissant this time, but Max had a pastry and Michelle and Eva had a cookie.

This was the lovely view while we stood waiting for our bus.

I love this photo Michelle took while we were waiting for our bus. I had a whole rigmarole going on with my purse slung across my shoulder, my camera strap and my necklace.

We saw this crap-covered car along the way, good heavens what did this person do to the pigeons?? This looks like revenge to me! I haven't seen any car washes in Paris.


I love this picture of Max and Eva on the bus (Lucas didn't go with us this day) admiring the blue carousel across from The Eiffel Tower...she hasn't been on that one yet.

**Do you love it when trees are aligned like these?
Do you send postcards on trips?
What do you think of the pigeons' revenge?
Do you like wearing a scarf?**

Comment Window Tidbit: I've had a luxuriously long trip, but now the clock is ticking for Monday's early-morning departure and I'm not ready to go!