The Jardin des Tuileries is a garden located between the Louvre Museum & the Place de la Concorde. It was created by Catherine de Medicis as the garden of the Tuileries Palace. In the 19th and 20th century, it was the place where Parisians celebrated, met, promenaded & relaxed

Our first contact with the Musée du Louvre was actually kinda funny: we were walking in our first day in Paris looking for some place to have a picnic, saw that huge palace & had no idea what it was. We just came in, sat in a bench taking a look at the crows & when we were finished, we looked back to find a trash can & OH MY GOTH IS THAT THE PYRAMIDE DU LOUVRE? Yes, it was. We didn’t plan to visit the Musée that day, so we decided to take walk through the garden instead. When I was taking a picture of the Jardin du Carrousel I had my first sight of the Eiffel Tower {yes, Paris is that small}. I was so excited that day, I can remember everything perfectly.

Most of these pictures are from outside the Musée du Louvre, but the Jardin goes until the Place de la Concorde. Tuileries is beautiful, the fact we traveled in Autumn made it even more amazing; those red & orange leaves falling down the trees, the cold wind in my face, drinking hot cocoa looking at the Gran Roue, all those adorable crows flying over us. Awn, it sure melted my goth girl’s heart.

Still in the Jardin des Tuileries there is the Musée de l’Orangerie, an art gallery of impressionist & post-impressionist paintings, famous for being the permanent home for the Nymphéas by Claude Monet. The eight famous paintings are displayed in two oval rooms all along the walls {they were featured in Woody Allen’s film Midnight in Paris, I know you remember them}, but since we weren’t allowed to take pictures in that Musée I’ll have to share a pic I found online to show you the perfection of those rooms. The Museum also contains works by Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri Rousseau, among others.

I must confess: the most amazing surprise for me was the Art In Fusion exhibition devoted to the legendary couple Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo. I was already familiarized with Kahlo’s work but it never had a real impact on me, but it drastically changed when I saw it live. Her paintings are gut wrenching & really impressive, not for the technique but for all the symbolisms & her own history; a cycle of life & death, revolution & religion, realism & mysticism. I confess I couldn’t hold the tears in front of that amazing collection; looking at Frida Kahlo with new eyes was definitively the best gift I got that day.