
I've been to Paris about eighteen billion times by now but had never been inside the Palais Garnier, everyone's favorite opera house in the 9th arrondissement. If you've ever sat through an art history survey course -- or even better, a whole class dedicated to nineteenth century European painting -- you'll probably remember having to memorize a gazillion slides of Impressionist paintings, which at some point, more likely than not, featured the building in question:
Cassatt: La Loge (1882) / Lydia at the Theatre (1879); Renoir: The First Outing (1876) / La Loge (1874)
Unfortunately, I saw no young coquettes coyly fanning themselves in the box seats. Entry for the opera was only 4€ so obviously I went in, and thank god, because Napoleon III does not disappoint. Everything is made of marble, and what is not made of marble is covered in gold leaf. We snuck into a French tour group and learned that the marble for the staircase was imported from various countries; the green marble along the banister was imported from Sweden, whose très luxueux marble supply I was previously unprivvy to.
One of the rooms had this incredible night sky motif on its dome:

My friend and I spent Halloween watching Orphan illegally on the internet, thanks megavideo! It was horrible. We also made homemade popcorn and bought some pumpkins from the market ... and we never got around to carving them. But I did eat an entire bag of candy corn, and I don't even like candy corn.







