Um, yeah.

So Paris was wonderful.  The time with my mom was really great, and we saw some fabulous things.  I'll mention the highlights below.

Saint Chapelle was a spectacular sight.  It is a chapel that is built almost entirely of stained glass.  The windows extend to the ceiling, everything glows with this blue-tinged light.  During the occupation of France in WWII, the stained glass windows were removed and hidden in private homes for protection.  After the war, it was reassembled.

Another cool thing we saw was Versailles.  It was the royal residence during the reigns of Louis the XV and Louis the XVI (who was eventually subjected to the guillotine).  The opulance was really amazing.  There was a room for the dogs.  The dog room had a parquet floor, gilt carvings on the walls, a painted ceilings, and several painting featuring dogs.  That's just a small example of the excess.  It was beautiful, though.  Overwhelming, really.

After Versailles, we went to the Musee Marmatton (sp?), which is a museum in an old mansion.  It is mostly dedicated to the works of Monet, some of which are spectacularly beautiful.  I recommend it to anyone visiting Paris.  It was small enough that it was not overwhelming, and we were able to escape before museum fatigue set in.

This was not so with the Louvre, as anyone would expect.  We made a beeline for the Mona Lisa (which was pretty underwhelming) and then spent a great deal of time looking at the Egyptian Antiquities section.  That was unbelievable.  Napolean's soldiers brought back boatloads of artifacts when they invaded Egypt, and they now constitute the largest collection of Egyptian antiquities outside of Cairo.  They had entire columns from temples, and they even had an entire room with hieroglyphs.  It was almost like actually being there, which was spectacular.  Sad, in a way, though as well.

We also saw Notre Dame, of course, which I really enjoyed after seeing all the ruins of gothic architecture in Scotland and Ireland.  It was just amazing to think what those places would have been, had they remained intact. 

On our last night, we were supposed to go to the ballet.  My mom had bought tickets months in advance because the Opera Garnier (where the ballet was to be held) had been one of her favorite things when she lived in Paris.  It has a ceiling by Chagall, and she really wanted us to see it together.  On Thursday night, we got all dressed up and went to the Opera Garnier.  Mom handed them the tickets, and they said that the tickets were for the wrong night.  They were for Tuesday night instead.  Mom was so disappointed!  She started to cry.  I spoke to a guy who could speak English and asked if they had any seats left for that night.  He said they did not.  So we went to a cafe for a drink.  I briefly had the horror of imagining Mom getting completely drunk and forgetting all her French (leaving it up to me to get us home and communicate to a cab driver).  However, as we sat there at the cafe, she had the idea of going up in the Eiffel Tower.  We had planned only to drive by, but we decided that night to go up.  We took the Metro there and waited in the line for a long time.  Every hour, the whole tower would come to life in a glitter of randomly illuminated lights!  I count it among some of the prettiest things I have ever seen.  We took the elevator all the way to the top and looked out across the city.  We could see the Seine winding its way through the lights, like a black ribbon.  So the evening ended up being perfect, really.  I would rather have seen that than a topless (yes, really) modern ballet.  When we got home, we also found out that the ballet had been cancelled anyway due to the riots, so it all worked out perfectly in the end.

The last thing we did in Paris was on Friday morning before we left.  We went to the Cluny Museum, which is devoted to the middle ages.  It had lots of fascinating artifacts and ancient stained glass.  So many things were just beautifully preserved.  The best things there, though, were the famous tapestries, "The Lady and the Unicorn."  Mom and I had both read the Tracy Chevalier novel about them a few years ago, but they were even more amazing in person.  They were so full of complex allegory and intricate detail that you could look at them for hours without getting tired of it.  Another interesting thing about them is that they were restored with the wool dyed with chemical dyes.  The new parts (chemical dyes) actually faded rather quickly, leaving the original parts to stand out in all their bright, incredible beauty.

It was a great trip.  The best part, though, was just getting to spend the time with my mom.  We got along perfectly, and we both had a wonderful time.