Parisian Paradise - Part VII: Pompidou Museum

After church, we ventured a mere block to the Pompidou Museum, which is basically a modern art museum. That's right, we went straight from church to the museum with the provocative image displayed on the outside poster:

That tubing on the outside of the building with what looks like red pads underneath - that's the escalator, not a fun-house slide, unfortunately.

Because it was freezing in Paris, we didn't see many street/sidewalk performers, so we had to document it when we saw this bubble guy:

After entering the museum, we decided to take the escalator all the way to the top and work down from there. Brian and I were having all sorts of fun on the ride up:

Once we got to the top, we looked out over the foggy/polluted/cloudy/overcast city. Hey, look, it's that Eiffel Tower again:

We were turned away from the special exhibit on the top floor, since our museum pass is only good for the permanent exhibits. So we went down a floor and walked through a lot of exhibits that just didn't seem as cool as the old school art. There were some paintings and sculptures from Picasso and Salvador Dali, and I read about some of the other paintings, photography, film and sculptures from Rick Steves, but nothing was too memorable. We quickly made it through two floors of modern art in just a couple of hours. Since we all went through at our own pace, I couldn't tell you what everybody else thought was interesting. But I can tell you that - after the two museums on Saturday, and this one on Sunday - we had all seen more of the human anatomy than is advisable in such a short time frame.

We went to the dining area of the museum and very quickly ate our packed meat and cheese baguettes for lunch (since the sign said that the eating area was only for food purchased at the museum). We must have felt a little guilty and eager to get out of there quickly, because as we were riding the down escalator from the eating area, a lady started waving and calling to us from above. She was speaking in French, but it seemed like she wanted us to come back up. I was wondering if we had been caught and were in trouble, and thought about making a mad dash for the door, but I rode the escalator back up instead to see what the lady wanted.  Turns out that we had left Deidra's sunglasses on our table and the lady had noticed them when we left. So thank you, random French lady!

Before we left, Deidra got a little fancy and took our self portrait (all four of us) in this far-away mirror:

It's like Where's Waldo. Can you find us?