The Museum Challenge begins!

It may be September, but summer still has this city in her full embrace.

The vacationers have gone, but summer hasn't yet left the city. When walking through a park yesterday, I caught an open air concert complete with free cotton candy and organic sorbets offered by the mayor of my arrondissement. As a tax-paying resident, it was thus my duty to get a free cone and lie out in the grass to listen to the music and admire the blue, cloud-crossed skies.

The skies are blue, the Eiffel Tower (which sparkles on hours only after sundown) isn't sparkling before 9pm, and the temperatures are permitting me one more run through my sundress collection. But this past week, I hit an important marker: 6 months to go until my twenty-sixth birthday. In most places in the world, 26 is not terribly important, but in Paris the bell tolls for those who hit this milestone birthday.

Paris is an amazing city to be young and poor: everything, from the metro pass to concert admissions to train fares are offered at reduced prices. The problem is, this all stops when one turns 26. And the worst loss of them all is the museums. You see, in Paris (and much of France) all state-run (read: most) museums are completely, totally, 100% free for EU citizens and residents until they turn 26. Today I can walk up to the Louvre, to the Orsay, even to Versailles, present my visa, and walk in free of charge. But in six months, the doors of Paris's museums will close to me (except for the first Sunday of every month, when they're free to everyone... but let's not discuss the admission lines on those days). The clock is ticking, and so my challenge begins.

If you had six months to visit all the museums in Paris, where would you go?

I've compiled a list, assessed everywhere I haven't yet seen or could use to revist, and today my challenge began with the Towers of Notre Dame. As I suspect I'll say over and again during the next six months, I can't believe I didn't check this out sooner, but I'm so glad I got to see this first-hand.