Every year during a weekend of September, Le Patrimoine takes place in France. Le Patrimoine is a cultural weekend during which museums are free, and exhibits and areas that normally wouldn’t be open to the public are opened up. My friends and I decided to “profiter”, and woke up at the early hour of ten on a Sunday morning to wait in line to walk through the palace that houses the Assemblé Nationale.
The two hours of waiting in line in the sun turned out to be worth it. The Assemblé Nationale is made up of deputies, and it is one half of the French parliament (the other half is the “Sénat”). We wandered through gold paneled rooms, each with numerous chandeliers and biblical and mythological paintings covering the walls and ceilings. We got to see the hemicycle, where the meetings of the deputies take place, and the massive, Harry Potter-esque library, with ladders to reach the top shelves and an elaborately painted ceiling.
After a lunch of falafel and gelato, it seemed only fitting to check out the “Sénat”. Luckily the wait was less than an hour, despite the aggressive grannies that kept cutting us in line. The Sénat boasted rooms in a similarly elaborate style to the Assemblé National. We also got to check out the offices of the Vice Presidents of the senate. At the end of the day we felt extremely cultured and proud of ourselves