PARIS: May 13-19, 2009-Part I

Part I: Days 1-2

After I had visited Paris for three days in March 2007, what had been a very pleasant introduction to the city, I knew some day I would return. Having visited at the end of winter, I wanted to return in the springtime when I hoped the gardens would be in bloom, and I also wanted to stay a little longer. For this trip, I scheduled five days “on the ground” in mid-May.

I think that due to the recession I was able to obtain a very good airfare for May. I flew on Aer Lingus, the Irish airline. I had flown with them before and had a positive experience so decided to fly with them again. I wasn’t disappointed. Their economy cabin is pretty comfortable as far as economy class goes. I think their seats are a little bit bigger and they have a little more leg room than the American airlines or Alitalia. The plane was clean, the staff pleasant, the food not bad, the entertainment system and headphones all worked. So no complaints here. We left from Boston fairly close to on time and, other than having to stop in Shannon (for what had been booked as a direct Boston to Dublin flight) to let some people off and pick up new passengers, things went as scheduled. Not unexpectedly per usual, I was surrounded by crying babies, one in my row and one in the row behind me. I didn’t watch any movies going over. I did manage to sleep, with my sleep mask and classical music on the iPod. Later I listened to French lessons and Rick Steeves’ travel podcast of his Louvre and D’Orsay museum tours and historic Paris walk. Listening to the D’Orsay tour actually paid off when I visited and saw most of the art works he talked about. I had a couple of hours to wait in Dublin before being off to Paris.

Once arriving in Paris, I got my bag and then used the public phone to call the Paris Shuttle service (http://www.parishuttle.com/). This actually worked out exactly as planned. I had bought vouchers online on Expedia for $50 round trip. That is $25 each way door to door from Charles de Gaulle airport to my hotel and back. I thought this was a pretty good deal, given the euro exchange rate, what the cost of a taxi would be, and that in the past I have paid over $30 each way for the same type of service. I didn’t want to take the Metro while schlepping my luggage. And, as I spent a lot of time in the Metro over the next five days, this ended up being a good choice since I would not have been able to manage carrying the large bag up the stairs. While a couple of stations I went through had escalators, most of them didn’t. Unlike in London where you can get a direct airport train which is very convenient, I wasn’t aware of such a train in Paris. So, with Paris Shuttle, I was supposed to call an 800 number from a pay phone once I was at the airport and the shuttle would pick me up. When I called, they told me to go to Departures Door #12. There I met a woman from New York and a man from Ireland who were also going on the shuttle. The shuttle did show up within about 15 minutes and off we went. Charles de Gaulle airport is very large and, on the way out, we passed the Concorde, the supersonic jet, just permanently parked. I chatted quite a bit with the Irish guy. He was staying in Paris for six days and enjoyed traveling quite a bit. In the US, he said he had been to Boston, Chicago and northern California.

Flying over to Europe is usually on a red eye flight and so my flight had left Boston on Wednesday at about 5:30 p.m. I arrived at my hotel in Paris on Thursday at about 3:00 p.m. Paris time (which would have been 9:00 a.m. back home). I was staying at the Hotel Chopin which is on the Boulevard Montmartre. It is at the end of an enclosed passageway called the Passage Jouffroy, which has shops on each side. This ended up being very nice because the hotel is actually very quiet, being removed from the street noise. The people working the desk over the length of my stay were all very nice and pleasant. The hotel reminded me of the “Kitty Hotel”, the Hotel della Stella Pina in Venice, not high end, small, old and maybe a little bit musty, with thin walls. But it was clean and certainly affordable at 84 euro a night right in the heart of Paris. This equates to about $107 a night. During my entire stay, I never found a bug in my room. The maid came every day and left the room clean. Nothing was stolen. The hotel had a 7 euro breakfast buffet (all you can eat) until 10:30 every morning. It is about a minute to walk to he nearest Metro stop (Grands Boulevards on line 8). I had my own bathroom in my room. This hotel was totally acceptable and affordable and I would recommend it to anyone looking for affordability and convenience.

Thurs., May 14, 2009: After spending all that time just getting to Paris, I was somewhat tired but didn’t want to totally waste my first day so I went to the Musee Grevin which was about two steps away from my hotel. This is a wax museum. It is full of French celebrities and sports figures, most of whom I didn’t know. But I did recognize a few others, such as soccer player Zinedine Zidane, opera diva Maria Callas, Formula 1 race car driver Michael Schumacher, and American basketball player Tony Parker. After you pay for your ticket, you enter a staircase that is quite elaborate. It is decorated like a palace, very ornate, with a big chandelier. There were some political figures, including French president Sarkozy, German Chancellor Andrea Merkel, Russian dictator (er, Prime Minister) Vladimir Putin, the King of Morocco – hey, there’s no American president. Not Bush or Obama. Interesting. There was surrealist artist Salvador Dali, artist Auguste Rodin, artist-inventor and general renaissance man Leonardo Da Vinci. There was Renoir sketching “Dance in the City” with Degas watching.

What I was most interested in seeing here were the historical figures. Of course, there was King Louis XVI, looking out the window of his prison cell, perhaps down at the square where the guillotine awaited him. He was the king deposed during the French Revolution. There was Queen Marie Antoinette on trial, the shadow of the guillotine behind her. Of course, there were plenty of the French revolutionaries. And probably the greatest and most famous Frenchman of all time, the little general, the man who became emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte. At its height, Napoleon’s French Empire covered most of Western Europe.


Napoleon and family, in wax

After the Musee Grevin, I explored the neighborhood a little. There were lots of little cafes, sandwich shops, the Hard Rock Café, McDonald’s and Starbucks (is this Paris or home?), and then I went down to the Metro to buy a five day pass for 28 euro. Good deal. I could use the Metro as much as I wanted for five days (they only sell 1-2-3 and 5 days or else I would have bought 4). This is called the Paris Visite pass. Had I bought it before I went to Grevin, I would have gotten 30% off my admission, so buy it first because it comes with coupons that you might be able to use on your sightseeing. I had checked the internet before my trip to see if I could buy it cheaper in dollars off Expedia or other travel sites, but they were selling it for $50 and the 28 euro translated to $39 so I decided to just wait and buy it in a Metro station. It’s a little ticket that you feed into the turnstile, and then wait for it to spit the ticket back out and take it with you so you can continue to use it. After buying the Metro pass, I went and had some dinner in a restaurant near the hotel, and then headed back to the hotel. I was tired, but noticed right away that it doesn’t start to get dark in Paris at this time of year until about 10:00 p.m.! I was going to have to pull the curtains to fake myself into thinking it was nighttime. As when I had visited Paris before, the hotel TV had only French TV stations (no satellite with English) so I had come prepared with “The Sopranos” to watch on my portable DVD player. But that first night, I did fall asleep pretty easily.

Fri., May 15, 2009: I had slept really soundly due to exhaustion. Now it was time to begin some serious Paris sightseeing. I headed downstairs to check out the Hotel Chopin’s breakfast. They had various cereals, fruit, yogurts, croissants and jellies, a machine that made fresh squeezed orange juice, coffee. That first morning there was a guy having breakfast who looked just like G. Gordon Liddy. What would G. Gordon Liddy be doing at the Hotel Chopin? Taking a day off from nefarious deeds?

My first stop, the Musee D’Orsay. It is in an old train station and you can tell when you enter. The ceiling is high and arched and you can see the sky through it. In this long gallery are many ancient statues. I bought a combined ticket, 12 euro for the D’Orsay and also the Musee Rodin if you see both in the same day. After my tour of the D’Orsay, I thought that was a more than reasonable price to see all these masterpieces in just the one museum, let alone a second museum.

The D’Orsay - what a feast if you like impressionists, and I do. Whenever the Portland Museum of Art brings an Impressionists show to town, I am there. There were works by Monet, Manet, Pisarro, Degas, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Latrec, Renoir. I am no art expert, just an amateur viewer, but I have found that I always like most anything I see by Monet. Here, my favorite was his series of paintings of the Rouen Cathedral. He did over 30 paintings of the same cathedral, with the daylight being the only thing to change. This was how he showed the reality of the same object was ever changing depending on the light it was viewed in. This is really what Impressionist painting is all about – light and color. It’s very intriguing to me that he never grew tired of it, looking at and painting it over and over because it looked entirely different to him. Confirms that creative types and artists have a brain that works differently from mine. Manet – the D’Orsay has the famous painting “Luncheon on the Grass”. It caused quite the uproar because there are two men in suits having lunch on the grass with a naked woman. There were beautiful scenes by Pisarro; dancers by Degas. I particularly like Renoir because of the way he paints light. I simply do not understand how one can paint light onto a canvas. I like some of Toulouse-Latrec’s paintings; they are intriguing. He did many posters for the Moulin Rouge dance hall, which appear different to my eye than his paintings. There is just some weirdness to me about his paintings, almost like he was hiding in the corner spying on his subjects. He painted dancers and whores, like he identified with the outcasts of society. He spent a lot of his time in the Montmartre section of Paris which was full of the artists and bohemians. And then there is Van Gogh. Even my inexperienced artistic eye can tell that Van Gogh saw the world differently than the rest of us. And it appears to me that his paintings are not all the same style, that he evolved and didn’t always see things the same way. I liked his self-portrait that is in the D’Orsay, which was the last self-portrait that he painted. He managed to convey life and sadness in the eyes, maybe torment that had exhausted him. The background that surrounds him is all swirls, like a tempest all around or in his head that he could not escape. After seeing the rest of the museum and even stopping to have something to eat, I walked all the way back to see it again.

Van Gogh's Irises

Van Gogh church

Above the first floor’s sculptures are the second floor balconies and here there were many sculptures by Rodin. Here there is a giant marble version of the Gates of Hell doors. These call to mind for me the Ghiberti doors in Florence. They depict scenes in Hell from Dante’s Inferno. Above it all, looking down, is Rodin’s famous The Thinker, contemplating Hell. The Thinker was also made into a large standalone statue. When you see him this way, without Hell below him, you must imagine what he is thinking about. Also in Hell is Ugolino eating his sons. Apparently Ugolino was a political traitor which is why he ended up in Hell, imprisoned with his sons who he finally cannibalized. Many figures from the Gates of Hell were also made into large independent statues which I saw at the Musee Rodin later in the day.

Also at the D’Orsay – Whistler’s Mother, which is an American painting. I must admit, I don’t understand why it is so famous or a masterpiece. It is actually called “Arrangement in Grey and Black” and, knowing that, it makes sense. It is basically all grey and black, with a little bit of white in her hat and the brown floor. So if the point was to just use two colors, which are really the least colorful of colors, then ok, it does that. Maybe Peggy the art major can explain it to me.

Then I wandered into a room where the lights were low and what was in the center of this room but a painting of, basically, a woman’s business. And I guess it is from the viewpoint of a guy who is about to get personal with her, so to speak. I was rather struck by this, that it is a masterpiece with its own room in the D’Orsay, but I rather appreciate that I think. It’s just totally in your face, not painted in soft veiled tones or romanticized. It’s totally realistic. Some would just see this as filth but it is actually kind of attractive in its straightforwardness. Sort of like the artist just thought women are beautiful and he was going to paint them just the way they are and fuck you if you don’t like it. Cool. The name of the artist is Gustav Courbet and the painting is called “The Origin of the World.”

Also at the D’Orsay is a miniature model of the city of Paris, which you must look through a glass floor to see. And there is the Salle des Fetes, which is a large and very ornate ballroom full of mirrors and chandeliers. There were also rooms exhibiting Art Nouveau furniture and decorations. I like the Art Nouveau style, along with Art Deco, so I enjoyed walking through these rooms imagining that I had been rich living in the 1920s in a house where the rooms looked like this.

After the D’Orsay, I went over to Bateaux-Mouches, by the Pont de L’Alma, to take a cruise on the Seine. The cruise was about an hour long and cost 10 euro. They leave about every 45 minutes. While I was waiting for the cruise to leave, a lot of tour buses showed up full of tourists. One was full of children (so I went outside) and one was full of Japanese (or maybe Chinese) tourists. It is like you are invisible to them. They only see each other. I was standing in front of the boat store window when suddenly a bunch of them wanted to look at the stuff in the window. They all just crowded around me, closing in. It was like they were going to engulf me. Crazy. Then two gay Italians got on the boat. One had his gelled hair in a bun, tight red pants, a jacket with big red flowers on it, pointy boots, and big designer sunglasses. He was kind of snobby actually, talking constantly on his cell phone, which I thought was rather rude to his companion. The ride was nice, but it rained, so I was getting enough use of the umbrella I brought with me. The Japanese/Chinese tourists kept running around screaming at each other. Then some French people were smoking right next to me. There is still a lot of smoking on the streets in Paris, but not so much inside the restaurants anymore. The cruise was a nice rest for an hour after being on my feet for a while at the D’Orsay.

After the cruise, I then went to visit the Musee Rodin. By the time I arrived, it was sunny again, which was nice because the large Rodin statues are in a very lovely garden at the museum. There are beautiful trees and roses with the statues throughout. Very, very nice. Here The Thinker is in bronze in the middle of the rose garden. Rodin made molds so that more than one copy of his works could be made. So also in the garden are the Gates of Hell, in bronze. Here, in the garden, is the work Balzac. I read that the critics hated this statue, but I liked his face. Inside the museum was a marble version of Rodin’s The Kiss. Originally, this was supposed to be part of the Gates of Hell, but then Rodin didn’t think it fit in with the other scenes. These were two people who were married to others but fell in love, had an affair and, of course, paid for it by being damned to Hell. I never looked closely at this statue until seeing it in person and, actually, it is the woman who is all passionate. The man is rather blasé. Look at his hands.

The Kiss

At the Musee Rodin there was also a room dedicated to Camille Claudel. She was a student and lover of Rodin’s, but he had another woman that he wouldn’t leave, either his wife or longtime companion. Claudel created a piece called “The Age of Maturity”. I wish I had taken a photo of it because the Claudel room had two versions of it, an early version and the final version. Online, I can only find pictures of the final version. It was very interesting how this piece evolved. I found the earlier version more powerful, emotional and desperate, maybe because it seemed to depict an actual painful event from the artist’s life. The later version was perhaps how the artist used that event to create a piece that was more universal, but less personal, more conceptual. The later one appears to represent a man leaving life. He is being pulled away by an old woman and a younger woman is kneeling behind him and her body is thrust forward and she is reaching for him with both hands. So maybe this is youth trying to bring the man back from Death? But in the earlier one, the young woman is kneeling back and the man is turned away from her, but one of his arms is reaching back and literally pushing her away as her two hands try and hang onto his arm. And the man is not so much being pulled away by an old woman as he is walking into the outstretched arm of the other woman and appears to be willingly going with her as she is sort of welcoming and cradling him. It’s an entirely different feel between the first and second versions. In the first, he is definitely and willingly leaving her and she is destroyed and pathetic trying to hold onto him. In the later one, he is being taken from her, being pulled away by the thing, and he is just sort of resigned to it. I found the first one to be more painful and emotional to view. I liked it better.

After the Rodin museum I returned back to the hotel. On the way, I picked up a baguette sandwich at a shop nearby. These little places have specials they call “formulae”, I think, which is sort of like what we’d call a value meal. You get a sandwich, drink and dessert. I got a “salad” sandwich (lettuce, mozzarella cheese, little tomatoes), a fruit punch and an éclair. The baguettes there are better than here, perfectly crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside. So I took that back to my room to eat. I didn’t sleep quite as well the second night, it just stays light too long.

(to be continued. . .)