Adventures in Northern and Western Paris

Bonjour!
I've had a lovely penultimate full day in Paris continuing my last-minute sightseeing.  I started out today with a visit to the Auber metro station, where I'd been told Ikea has a tiny house set up with five real people living in it to show how useful their products are at maximizing small spaces.  (It's a temporary display.)  They also had a second, identical, display set up which the public could enter and check out.  It was roughly on my way to my second stop of the day, and it was pretty interesting.

This is certainly bigger than most dorm rooms I've seen!

For my second event of the day, I headed over to the 16th arrondissement, in the west of the city, to visit le Musée Marmottan Monet, which, as their name suggests, has a large collection of Monet's paintings.  They also had a temporary exhibit on of Henri Edmund Cross and the neo-impressionists, which was really interesting as well.  On the whole, I like impressionism and neo-impressionism, so I enjoyed this collection a lot.  Additionally, this museum is housed in an old mansion, so the building was very pleasant as well.

Then, I hopped onto a bus for my last adventure of the day, a visit to the café featured in the movie Amélie, which is, oddly enough, actually a real-life café and not a soundstage!  Before I got there, though, I had what was undoubtedly the scariest experience I've had in Paris: being on a bus that was driving around the six-lane rotary that rings l'Arc de Triomphe.  I don't know if any of you have ever been in a bus that fearlessly cuts through six lanes of heavy, fast-paced traffic to get to the center of a rotary before cutting back out again, but I personally found the experience terrifying--luckily the whole maneuver didn't take very long.  Anyway, finally I arrived safe and sound at le Café des Deux Moulins (the Cafe of the Two Windmills), which is right near the Montmartre district of Paris, and also in the heart of the red-light district.  (It's only a block away from Moulin Rouge.)  I met up with one of my friends there for our final visit together for a while, which was sad, but at least I had a delicious hot chocolate and crème brulée to console me.  It was a lovely day!

The nearby Moulin Rouge!  (moulin rouge=red windmill)