Paris-Army Museum, Paris Illumination

Army Museum

It was a beautiful, warm, sunny day and we went to the Army Museum, which is very large museum with many sections to see. There is a large gold dome, which is over Napoleon’s tomb. Napoleon’s remains were removed from Saint Helen to Paris in 1861 and is encased in 5 successive coffins-tin, mahogany, 2 lead ones, and ebony set inside a majestic single block of Finnish red porphyry wood. The coffin was impressive and the room it was in was round and surrounded by beautiful statues.

Napolean's Tomb

Other sections of the museum contain exhibits of armour and military weapons of the 13th, 14th, 15th, 16th, and 17th century. This museum also covers military history extensively right through 1800’s, WW I, and WWII.

One of the things I thought interesting was that the Allies had a machine that looks like a typewriter that could decode messages from the Germans and which they also used to supply false information to the Germans. This machine actually saved thousands of lives.

Paris Illumination
After going back to the hotel for a rest we went downtown and took a bus tour of the buildings of Paris in evening starting just before dark and stopping in front of the Eiffel tower after sunset.

The Eiffel tower is even more impressive at night with it being lit up. On the hour for 10 minutes the whole Eiffel tower twinkles with thousands of blue lights, it something like a big Christmas tree, it was very beautiful but hard to get a good picture. It was a nice tour there are so many beautiful, historic unique buildings in Paris.

Paris-park and pack

Another sunny warm day and we just planned to relax. In the afternoon we went for a walk and went a block farther than we usually went to go to the bus and grocery store and saw a park (Champs de Mars). As we turned into the park there was the Eiffel tower. We knew the hotel was not very far from the Eiffel tower but had not walked that way before. We enjoyed sitting in the park and watching the people and I took more pictures of the Eiffel tower. When we got back our new bank card had come so we felt better when we used our bank card to have a back up card. We packed to get ready to leave the next day for Bruges.

Paris-Bruges Belguim

We took the subway to the train station and took the train for 2 hours to Brussels and then 30 minutes to Bruges. It was sunny and we enjoyed the train ride and watching the changing scenery from the city buildings in Paris to farms and country with pastures, crops, and lots of dairy cattle interspersed with little villages.

We took a 10-minute taxi ride to Hotel Heritage. The hotel did not look that impressive outside but when we went inside we found a beautiful hotel, it reminded me of Pan Pacific hotel in Vancouver on a smaller scale.












We settled into the hotel then went for a walk and found a beautiful clean town full of historic buildings. Bruges was a trading center in the 14th century with a population on 35,000 people (in a league with London) and the most important cloth market in northern Europe. By the 16th century, silt clogged the harbor and killed the economy. Because the economy went bad people in the town did not tear down buildings and put up new ones so now it is uniquely well preserved with tourism an important industry.













There is a beautiful church in the market square with a bell tower that dates back to 1300 which plays different tunes with it’s 47 bells on the quarter of the hour. We could hear the bells from our hotel. We looked at a church of Our Lady, which had a statue of Madonna and child by Michelangelo. I wish I had planned more time in Bruges. We went back to the hotel and just enjoyed being in such a nice hotel.

Michelangelo statue

We took a boat ride on the canals and enjoyed the ride and listening to the history of Bruges. We had Belgium waffles (of course you have to have belgium waffles in Belgium), which they do not eat for breakfast but lunch and supper.

smallest window

Bruges-Ypres tour about WWI

A nice warm sunny day and we took a tour of WW I cemeteries and monuments. It was a small tour with 14 people and the tour guide was excellent and made the history come alive. She stopped frequently and explained what the countryside looked like in WW I so you that you saw what it was like then instead of the beautiful lush farms with dairy cattle that is there now. You felt like you were back in time in mud, with no trees or vegetation left and the shooting between the Germans at the British, Belgiums, New Zealanders, Canadians, and other allies.

There are many cemeteries and they are kept in pristine shape. There are thousands of crosses in each cemetery some with multiple names and many without names.

We went to several cemetaries and they were all pristine

We stopped at a farm of a friend of the tour guide and she showed us some of the artefacts that had been found when the owners had plowed new fields, which included many bombs. There is constant risk of bombs for farmers when they work on the fields and they have to use metal detectors before plowing new fields. The bomb squad is huge and removes thousands of bombs every year and some of them explode and wound and kill people every year.

We went to the Memorial Museum on Passechendaele, which is small but had diorama’s of the war and a lot of artefacts. There are 35,000 names of missing soldiers on the names on the walls of Passchendaele cemetery. We went to the Menin Gate with 55,000 names, which was erected on the spot where the soldiers left the city for the front line. We saw the medieval restored town of Ypres.









One of the facts we found fascinating was that Hitler and Churchill both served in Ypres in WW I within a mile of each other. Hitler was a messenger that delivered messages to the front lines and most people doing this job were killed within 4 months and Hitler lasted 4 years, he was shot twice too bad one of them was not fatal and millions of lives would have been saved. Poison gas was first used in this war and thousands died a horrible death before there were gas masks and Hitler after seeing first hand what chemical warfare was like refused to use it in WW II.

We went to an area called Polygon Wood that has been preserved the way it was in WW I with huge craters from bombs and bunkers at that had been German and then British.

Bunkers

We went to a dressing station beside a cemetery. Medicine was fairly primitive in early 1900’s and supplies were very limited so what the doctors could do was very limited and the mortality rate from injuries was very high.

Infirmary

Then we went to an industrial area where there some dugouts /trenches have been saved. They are very narrow, small, and wet in the bottom. It is sad to think of the thousands of lives lost in 4 years of fighting back and forth to hold a few miles of land. It was a very fascinating and informative day, probably the best tour we have ever been on.