PARIS: May 13-19, 2009-Part II

Part II: Day 3

Sat., May 16, 2009: Breakfast this morning was crowded because I got up later. A lot of Germans, and one German guy with long, blond hair who was making sure he got his 7 euros worth of food. He kept going back to buffet table again and again. . .

Riding the Metro in the morning, sitting opposite me and also across the aisle were two Italian women with two little girls, looking to be about ages 4 and 7 or 8 maybe. I guess I have been to Italy enough that some Italian words I can recognize. The smaller girl was complaining that she had a headache and, as soon as she said that, the other one said, “Me too.” They were both slouching down in their chairs, looking none too happy. Since the day was just beginning, I thought these mothers have a long day ahead of them if their little girls are already whining with headaches and don’t want to be here. Good luck.

I had some disappointments on this day. First up was the Musee Carnavalet Histoire. This is a museum all about the history of Paris. I love history and was looking forward to learning all about the city. Well, everything was in French. There were no audioguides in various languages or even a map in English. The guy at the front desk spoke very little English, and when he shook his head that there was no English map, he did offer me a Spanish one instead, apparently thinking the languages are similar and Spanish would do just as well? This museum had free admission so must be subsidized by the government, I assume. But since all the written exhibit materials were in French only and there were no translations, it was not conducive at all to visits from tourists. Therefore, it was empty of people, except for the staff. There were three people at the front desk to handle the hordes of visitors, and one or two people per room. But no visitors. So the staff basically only has themselves to keep each other company. I was starting to chuckle to myself about the French way of making employment for its citizens. At the D’Orsay, there had been two people to take your tickets – one who takes the ticket and one who apparently just keeps that guy company all day. Here at the history museum, there were many more employees than visitors and they were unable to interact with any visitor who didn’t speak French. It was unfortunate, because I took a walk through the museum and the exhibits looked like they would have been very interesting to me, and I think I would have learned a lot of history. I am always interested in the French Revolution and Napoleon and the monarchy but, alas, I could not learn anything here.

So I left the history museum a bit disappointed. Going back up the street, next to St. Paul’s Cathedral were a row of Paris rental bikes, all lined up. These were all what my brother used to call “dry machines” – that is, like his old bike, they have back fenders to keep road dirt and water from splashing up onto your back and clothes. They also have headlights and wire baskets. You can rent the bike at one station and return it to any other station in the city. I saw a family riding some of these bikes later at the Tuileries.


Dry machines

As I walked by the bikes at St. Paul’s on my way back to the Metro, I heard a little kid crying and, after looking around, saw a little boy about 4 years old standing in the corner up against St. Paul’s. His father was a few feet away, waiting him out. But the kid hadn’t yet given in and was continuing to cry into the corner. I guess people the world over put their kids in the corner.

Since the history museum was a bust and it was only 10:30 in the morning, I decided to go to the Musee des Arts Decoratifs. I wanted to see furniture and textiles and also wanted to see the Museum of Advertising that was supposed to be here. It was over near the Louvre so I headed off to the Tuileries gardens. I enjoyed the museum. It had a lot of furniture from the 1700s to very modern pieces which look like art more than furniture, because I questioned whether you would really be able to use some of it as furniture. In my opinion, you haven’t made furniture if you make a chair that is too uncomfortable to sit on. Maybe you’ve made art, but not furniture. But then again, I love looking at Frank Lloyd Wright’s furniture, but I have read that it is incredibly uncomfortable to sit on. There were lots of beautiful armoires, some very gorgeous and artistic, with inlays and other decoration. Now there is a piece of furniture that is no longer really popular in America, with all the closets we build into our houses instead. I think that illustrates the American ideal of function and economy over beauty. Peggy has a large armoire in her bedroom, and I noticed in the houses of her friends in Italy that storage is in cabinets, drawers and armoires. Peggy basically has one closet in her house.

There was one gallery that was very good, all red – clothing, furniture, linens, etc. My favorite here was the Red = Communism room. There was one wall with French political posters for Socialiste, and the other wall had posters of happy Chinese communists – a man with a gun, a woman with a bayonet, smiling, equal, in their Mao suits. Of course, there was also Lenin, and Che Guevara.

But along came the day’s second disappointment – the exhibition on Advertising had closed the week before. Denied again. Just seemed like it was going to be that kind of day. I hoped in the back of my mind my plan to visit the Catacombs would not go awry.

After the museum of decorative arts, I decided to get some lunch and took a walk through the Tuileries. A woman was walking towards me asking, “Do you speak English?” I recognized from her clothing she was a gypsy (long grubby dress, kerchief around her head, quilty winter coat on) and knew enough to stay away, hold onto my purse, just keep walking like I did not understand her cause I don’t speak English and I’m not a tourist. A couple of days later, I saw more of this scam at the Eiffel Tower. They have a card, like a religious card, that is in English that they want you to translate for them and when you stop to do that, while you’re helping her your pocket gets picked by her partner.

Adventures on Line 4 of the Metro: After lunch, I took a long ride on the Metro to get to the Catacombs. It was far along line 4, at the Denfert-Rochereau stop. I could tell riding this line I was probably getting to where Parisians actually live in the city, maybe less affluent Parisians. The train began to fill with Africans and Muslims. At one stop, two kids got on, probably one 10 year old boy and the other younger. Once the doors to the car closed, the little one began to yell in French, giving a speech, I think sort of telling a story. I guessed maybe it went something like, “I haven’t eaten in three days. . .” When he was done, he walked over to the lady next to me and held his hand out. She shook her head, so he put his hand out to me and I shook my head (I never, ever, ever give money to beggars, no matter what). He didn’t beg from the men in the car. At the next stop, they got off, as this car was not paying off. I assume they are gypsies and their parents have sent them out on the street to work on Saturday. They obviously don’t view their children the way we do. We take care of our children, provide for them. We don’t send 9 or 10 year olds out to beg. Later, on the way back, another guy got on the train. He reeked of booze and urine. He held his hand out to the woman next to me, she shook her head, held his hand out to me, shook my head too. He didn’t bother with any story like the kid did. Just need to smell him and you know his story. He did try to beg from a bunch of teenage boys on the train but nobody was willing to give him any money. After he got off, then a crazy guy got on the train. He had on a suitcoat and had a computer laptop bag and he looked at people and spoke in French which, of course, I didn’t understand. I don’t know, is he about to tell a story for money? He put down the seat next to me and spent an inordinate amount of time brushing it off before he finally sat down. That’s when I started thinking ok, maybe he is a little crazy. He put each hand into his suitcoat pockets, then took his hands out and in each hand he had little matchboxes. He started talking and started to wave his arms and hands all around, shaking the matchboxes like maracas and talking. Since I didn’t know what he was saying, I wondered – is he a performer, like a magician or something? Like he’s going to make the boxes disappear? Then I remembered a magazine article I just recently read by Teller (of Penn & Teller) and other magicians, one of whom began his career basically as a pickpocket. They said that when magicians do sleight of hand, this is based upon the way the human brain works. The eye watches the hand and the magician moves the hands in an arc because the way the brain works, when the person is watching the hand moving in an arc, they can’t register the other hand picking the pocket. Apparently, if the distracting hand moves in a straight line, the brain can see the other hand and what it’s doing. So as long as you move the distracting hand in an arc, the eyes and brain will be fooled. When that thought popped into my head, I decided to hold my bag and stop watching his hands waiving around. Well, he kept up with this waving and shaking the matchboxes and talking and now I could tell from the way the other people on the train were looking at him (because I figured they understand what he’s saying) that really he’s just a nut-job. He finally got off. My ride on line 4 was full of all kinds of interesting people.

Walking through the Metro tunnels on this day, I could hear Pachelbel’s Canon in D being played on the violin. Now I could tell, it wasn’t Met orchestra quality but it sounded good. She wasn’t playing any bad notes. How can you have so much talent, yet be playing in the subway with your violin case open, hoping for 50 cent euro pieces? I remember when I went to London the first time and we stayed with Peggy’s friend, Suzan, and one of her daughters played some violin music for us one night after dinner. She was just a young girl, I think around 15 at the time, and she hit a few bad notes, some not so smooth patches, and she had been studying violin for seven years. So I think it must be an incredibly difficult instrument to play and master, so how many years of study did this woman have to be able to play like this? (Yes, you know Pachelbel’s Canon in D. Everybody does. Enjoy this “Pachelbel Rant” on You Tube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdxkVQy7QLM)

Well, I did reach the Catacombs in time to get a ticket. It cost 8 euro. There is a sign before you go in, translated into other languages including English, which warns, “The catacombs make a big impression on children and people with nervous disposition.” And if that doesn’t work, there is a sign warning there is no coat check and no toilet and it takes 45 minutes. Do you still want to go? Ok, go ahead then. First, a lady at the window sells you your ticket. Then you take a step to the right where there are two guys, one who checks your ticket and another guy who is just keeping him company. Then you go down a spiral cement staircase that seems to go on forever, is very small, and I was trying hard not to get dizzy going round and round.

Finally, once I got to the bottom, there is a small room with some pictures and historical information to read. It seems that some years ago, in the late 18th century, the cemeteries were teeming with too many dead and were blamed for causing rampant disease in the city. Paris decided to empty the cemeteries and mass graves that were within the city limits and relocate all the bodies to the underground quarries, which became the Catacombs. They would dig them up and move them at night. I cannot imagine doing that job. Just think about it.

After the history room is a staircase with a sign in front of it that says the Catacombs are over 500 meters and if you have a problem while going through, call for help on the nearest call box. I went up the stairs and looked down a long, dark, narrow tunnel, low ceiling, dirt and stone floors, with just a few lamps up along the walls to give a little light. Too scary to go alone, so I decided to wait for a few other people to go in too. It turns out that there is no guide to walk you through or give you facts and information about the Catacombs. You just go through them by yourself. Along the way, wherever there were openings to other passageways, they were blocked by iron bars, so you cannot go off the trail that has been set out for you and you can’t get lost. After walking for a long time, we began to see some interesting things – someone had built a sort of little castle, and then there were some altar-type places along the way. Then we arrived at a place where there were three guys sitting around on chairs, chatting with each other. They did not acknowledge us at all, so I don’t know why they were there. More French employees doing nothing. But next to them I saw that we were at the entrance to the “Ossuary”, which is a final resting place for human remains. A sign asks that you please not take flash photos.

From here, there are more tunnels but, once I went in, I realized the walls of these tunnels are made of skulls and bones, piled on top of each other from the floor up to the level of my head. They are packed in very tight, and arranged quite neatly, with rows of skulls separated by rows and rows of big bones, probably femurs, until the top is just loose bones. Some skulls have holes in their heads, and I wondered if the people were killed by these injuries or if this is damage from moving the bones. This atheist had the urge to bless myself as soon as I walked in – an automatic remnant of my Catholic school experience, a way to ward off evil as I hoped the dead were really gone and their spirits not hovering here getting angry at our intrusion, treating their final resting place like it’s some tourist trap, which is exactly what we were doing. These narrow, dark tunnels reminded me of the movie “Alien”, that it would be so scary to make a story about an unhappy spirit down here going into a visitor and living again and coming back out into the world all angry and evil. It was totally freaky to think how the walls surrounding me were made out of people, literally. I have never been surrounded by human skeletons. I wanted to be careful walking, and this got trickier the farther in we went. The ceilings began to drip water and make the floors slippery. I did not want to slip and grab the walls to keep from falling.


Catacombs of Paris

Some of the walls had signs identifying where these particular remains had come from and when. I could not read them since they were in French, except for one that said these people had died in fighting at the Tuileries in 1792. I think that was when Louis XVI was being held prisoner at the Tuileries Palace after the revolution. Wow. Lots of people died that day. I thought, we all end up like this, just skulls and bones are all that’s left. But these people, thousands of them, all nameless now, each one had a life, and I wonder about them, when I look at a skull in the wall, who were you? Makes me feel insignificant too. Someday, when the last person who has a memory of me is gone, then I will be gone too. Catacombs – very worth the 8 euro price of admission.

But then there are the spiral stairs to climb at the end, a long way up and exhausting. I had to rest on a bench before exiting. The guy there at the end didn’t search my bag, and I thought anybody could just take bones if they wanted to. There is no one to watch you in there. You exit in an entirely different place, about 45 minutes after entering. A truly unique experience. The sign was right – I think it would be difficult for children and people with “nervous disposition”, and is a weird and strange enough experience for the rest of us. I started to wonder how long it takes for bones to become dust. They used to tell us in church on Ash Wednesday “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” Some of these bones have been here for centuries, so how long does it take for our bones to turn to dust?

With all of the beggars and thieves and subway musicians and human remains I saw today, I actually feel pretty fortunate. I’m grateful for the life I have today.

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. . .)

London & Paris: March 2007-Part II

Monday, March 19, a long day for me. I got up at 3:00 a.m. to be ready for pick up by the shuttle taking me to the airport at 4:00. The driver was very nice for so early in the morning, and said the driving is easy at that time of day, of course. It is interesting to drive around the city in the dark at that time because most people are all asleep, all the windows in the houses and apartments dark. It's a little eerie to be up and about when everyone is sleeping. But there are always a few people who are awake and functioning. We had to pick up several other people at different hotels and there were always hotel doormen or front desk people awake to open the doors. There were homeless people sleeping outside the train stations, and a few people walking around opening up businesses that open very early, like gas stations or convenience type stores. I was dropped off at Heathrow by 5:00 a.m. which was two hours before my flight and way too early for anything to be open yet, so it was rather boring. But my flight left on time and I even semi-dozed off despite it being a flight of less than an hour.

Upon arrival at De Gaulle airport, I got a little confused and ended up at the wrong baggage carousel, which turned out to be a much more complicated mistake than you'd think because I ended up having to go backwards through Customs to get to the right one. But eventually I did get my bag and started looking for where I was supposed to get my shuttle to the hotel. A girl at a British Airways desk directed me to Terminal 2F and I was on my way there when a guy chased me down and showed me a printout sheet that was for the shuttle company and had my name on it. I guess because he was a quick thinker, he figured out that I was the person he was there to pick up. He said it was because I was, in fact, holding a voucher in my hand, and I suspect he could also tell I was American. He was on the phone quite a bit on the ride, as these guys always are, and I could tell he was another person with an eastern European accent. I had noticed the previous three days while walking around London that on the street, I really didn't hear around me British accents but mostly eastern European languages. This was a change from when I was in London in 2002 and 2003, and seemed like maybe it would also be the case in Paris, though I did still hear a lot of French on the streets. So maybe the French still live in Paris but the Brits don't live in London?

Anyway, I was dropped off at my hotel, called Hotel de Castiglione on Rue Fauborg St. Honore. The front desk clerk was nice enough, but the hotel is a dump so avoid it, despite how beautiful it looks on their website. By the time I checked into the room, it was almost 1:00 p.m. so I decided to head right off to the Louvre. It was about maybe a 15-20 minute walk from the hotel, and what a zoo it was! Just full of people and school groups and other tourist group tours. It was so big and I don't know a lot about art so I decided to take the English guided tour at 2:00. Definitely worth the 5 euro it cost. We had a lady who obviously knew a lot about art give us the tour. It included headphones and she talks into a microphone that is picked up by the headphones, so we could hear her easily despite all the noise around us.

The guide first took us through the Medieval Louvre, where they had excavated the old moat walls. Then she took us to visit the major Louvre masterpieces. The first was the Winged Victory statue. It has no head and only the left wing is original, the right wing created as a mirror reverse of the left. It is an ancient Greek statue, and despite the missing pieces, there is a lot of movement it. She looks as if she would be standing high above a battle, the wind blowing, maybe a victory of angels.



Then we went to the Apollo Gallery, where the Louvre houses what is left of the French crown jewels. So much was lost during the French Revolution that it doesn't compare to what you can see of the English crown jewels in the Tower of London, but they do have Louis XV's Coronation crown, some tiaras with sapphires in one and emeralds in the other, with matching necklaces that are all very beautiful. Some think the Hope Diamond, now in the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, was once part of the French crown jewels, then known as the French Blue, and that it was stolen and re-cut during the Revolution. The guide said that one of the diamonds for the crown, which is displayed separately, is not the biggest diamond in the world but it is the most perfect. It is a white diamond.

Then we saw the Venus de Milo. Why so special? The guide said it is because there are very few real Greek sculptures left. Most are Roman reproductions. She said it is unusual because it has a classical style head but a more modern, realistic body. She said art experts think the head was an homage to the past. And it is unusual because she said Greek statues are usually either all naked or all clothed; she is half clothed. When she said that, I thought I know what her missing arms were doing! Holding a big jug of water and pouring a bath! It is a real mystery because both of the arms are gone, so what was she doing? It was here that the guide revealed her snobbery. She had earlier scolded people taking flash photos, but I didn't see a sign here prohibiting them, so I asked her if I could take one. She said I could, but went on a little tirade about how soon the Louvre will prohibit all photos and that would be better for viewing the masterpieces because people are so intent on taking photos she didn't think they appreciated what they were viewing. Whatever, I just took my photo. But I thought this lady is lucky enough to be able to see these beautiful masterpieces every day of her life. Most of the rest of us on the tour will only be lucky enough to see them with our own eyes once in a lifetime (and most people don't even manage once). A photo never conveys what you saw, but we can't help trying to prolong our experience. She should try once to view the world through someone else's eyes.

Of course, we also saw the Mona Lisa. I have seen pictures of it many times before and didn't know why it is a masterpiece, but like lots of masterpieces I have managed to see in my life, they are always so much more beautiful in person and this one was no exception. How Da Vinci manages to capture the essence of a person on canvas always amazes me. It took him 14 years to finish it. It has real depth and substance and subtleties of shades. Her eyes follow you (and I stood to the left, middle, and right) and she looks at you with a look that says she has found calmness and contentment. She is relaxed and satisfied with her life. She has found all the answers to achieve true happiness. It is an entrancing painting and makes you feel serene, like her, when you look at it.

On the opposite wall, there is "Wedding at Cana" by Veronese. It is huge, colorful and dynamic. It took him only one year to finish it. It is interesting that the Louvre displays these opposite each other in the same room, maybe to show the contrast between how each artist thought about his creation and what it represented. A job vs. painting the soul? The guide told us that the Mona Lisa was a real woman, the wife of a local governmental official, but that Da Vinci never got paid for the painting because he didn't deliver it in a timely manner and it didn't end up looking like the real woman.

We also visited the famous large painting "Coronation of Napoleon", in which he coronated himself (if that's a word). The Pope attended and is in the painting but he refused to crown Napoleon Emperor and so he did it himself. Over on the left side of the painting he hid the imperial crown as a message to the royalty supporters of "out with the old".

We saw the Gericault painting "Raft of the Medusa" which the guide said started the movement toward depiction of violence and realism. This is next to the Delacroix painting "Liberte". It is of the Revolution with the people, worker and bourgeoisie, being led by the woman Liberte, with her dress half down and carrying the French flag, as they step over the dead. This was also a very dynamic painting to see in person, beautiful but disturbing. I think it truly does represent the Revolution in one image, victory but at what cost?



That was the end of the guided tour. I then visited the French sculptures which are presented in two enclosed courtyards with plenty of daylight coming in, a very nice setting. Then I visited the Napoleon III Apartments, extremely ornate and way over the top with chandeliers and draperies and gold and red, very high ceilings, paintings, really opulent and gaudy.

Finally, I just could do no more. I had been up since 3:00 a.m. and had eaten only two Krispy Kreme donuts before I left London and a cookie and orange juice right before the Louvre tour. My feet and legs hurt and the time just flew – it was 4:30 already. So I went outside and it looked like it was going to rain, with dark clouds. Sure enough, it did rain but only briefly. I took some photos of the Tuileries garden, which is right outside the Louvre. There were some topiaries and the grass is green, with some flowers blooming, but really this will be much more beautiful in a month. You can see the Eiffel Tower in the distance from the Tuileries. I started back to the hotel but stopped to eat in a little café where I had spaghetti Bolognese (in France, right) and some chocolate mousse and cappuccino for dessert.

On the walk back, I realized that I would be needing a scarf in Paris. Even though I was wearing a spring coat and wasn't that uncomfortable, the weather was rather windy and around 47F, so my neck was cold. Having a scarf would make all the difference between feeling chilly and not. So I stopped in a store called D'Orly and bought a 9 euro viscose scarf that would do the trick. The girl working in there was very nice. She spoke English and said it was because she was French and Israeli and had studied in Israel. She had been to Boston which she liked very much and said she wanted to return. We talked about London and Paris. She said that the reason I heard so many eastern European accents is because the EU, European Union, has been expanding and has started to let in some countries to the east. The people there come west because they can make a better living in the western European countries. The EU is sort of like the states in the US. The countries of the EU allow people to easily pass between them. She said, much like Peggy has said before, that when they went to the euro it really wasn't an even change from the old currency to the new. She said that while prices seemed to go up with the change to the euro, salaries didn't and so it is expensive to live in Paris. (I actually thought Paris wasn't that expensive, especially compared to London. I mean, it cost 8.50 euro to get into the Louvre. I paid more than that, $15, to get into the NY Metropolitan Museum of Art. But maybe the salaries in Paris are lower than I would expect.) She said that there is hidden behind the haute couture stores and Paris on the surface a real problem with poor people and beggars. I let her pick the color of the scarf to match with my coat, and she told me if I found I needed any help with anything in the city, to come back. She really was very nice.

On Tuesday, I had a very busy day. It began with breakfast at the hotel, and then I walked up to this sightseeing company, Cityrama, where I had purchased a reservation for a sightseeing bus tour of the city. This was a double-decker bus and the audio tour was in various languages, you just chose the correct channel for your language. So I had a nice window seat on the top deck and we went by the Paris Opera House, Place Vendome, Place de Concorde, down the Champs-Elysees and by the Arch de Triomphe. This is really big when you're right on top of it. It is, again, a very large monument built by Napoleon to commemorate his greatness and battles he won. He seemed to never tire of building monuments to himself, the bigger the better. What I didn't know is that this is where the French have buried their Unknown Soldier, and there is an eternal flame that burns there. Then we went by the Eiffel Tower and Invalides, which was built for sick and disabled veterans. We also went by the Musee d'Orsay on the Seine, the Louvre, Notre Dame Cathedral, the Sorbonne school, the Luxembourg Garden, and the Pantheon.

When the bus ride was done, I had lunch in a café because it was about noon and about to rain again. I had a cheese, tomato and basil pannini which was very good, and some chocolate cake. I bought a two-day pass for the Metro. The girl who sold it to me wasn't as fun as the uber-clerk in London. She looked about 23 years old and talked on the phone the whole time. But the Metro here runs just like London and other cities I've been in. It is by colors and numbers (they don't name the lines like they do in London – like the Bakerloo line, the Jubilee line, the Northern line, etc.) The Concorde stop is the one that was closest to my hotel. So I figured it out pretty fast. Apparently, the French are quite proud of their train system. Their Metro isn't quite as nice as London's Tube – the trains are narrower and the stations/corridors older and kind of grubby. But it all seems to run well, and they also have the commuter rails, the Eurostar system that goes to other countries, and the "Chunnel" train that goes across the English Channel to London.

After lunch, I went over to the Conciergerie. This was the prison where people convicted as traitors during the French Revolution were sent. The Revolution got everyone, including the architects of the Revolution such as Robespierre, Danton, even the chief prosecutor eventually. It was a real bloodbath. Of course, also a prisoner for 76 days was Marie Antoinette. They have recreated her cell and made a chapel on the site. Imagine her praying here before going to the guillotine. There were also recreated cells for people of various means. That was what was kind of ironic here. Supposedly, the Revolution would equalize everyone. They destroyed the monarchy and were bringing power to the people. Yet even in the prison, there were classes of cells. The very poorest were crammed into cells and slept on straw. Those who could pay could have cots to sleep on. And some could have chairs and desks. Of course, Marie Antoinette, being the queen, had a chair, a desk, a window, a bed, and a rug. Outside there was a little courtyard where the women could go to walk around, wash their clothes in a fountain, and talk to the men behind bars in a corner of the courtyard. A very sad place when you think of how many poor souls passed through on the way to their deaths.

The Conciergerie

After the Conciergerie, I went next door to the Sainte Chapelle church, originally built to house relics but there are no relics there anymore. The highlight here is the truly spectacular stained glass windows. Those on the sides of the church are very, very tall, practically from floor to ceiling. The windows dominate the interior and are really beautiful when the light shines through them. There is also a gorgeous rose window.

Then I walked little more than a block away to Notre Dame. It really is elaborate on the outside, all kinds of carvings in the arches of the doors and statues above. Inside, it is very dark. It does have some nice rose windows of stained glass.



There are lots of little chapels and altars on each side. I paid 3 euro to go in and see the relics. This is actually where the Sainte Chapelle relics ended up. I have blogged before about relics, and so I couldn't resist going to visit them here. There were two really large bones, but the highlight here is relic #12 which is reportedly the True Cross of Christ. This, of course, would have put the church on the map as a destination for pilgrims. Of course, a relic of Jesus would be the pinnacle of relics.

Relic #12

After Notre Dame, I took a ride over to the Eiffel Tower. After passing it on the bus tour, I knew I wanted to go back and get a closer look and maybe even go up. It is painted brown. I think it is really pretty. It is all metal, but it has gentle curves and designs and crosses and arches. It is art nouveau style. When it was built, it replaced the Washington Monument as the tallest building in the world. Then it was replaced by the Chrysler Building in New York City, a monument to art deco style. The weather had become gray, dark and cloudy and windy, and so I ended up being too scared to go up. After all, the Tower really is all outside. It's not an enclosed building. I was lucky enough to be able to see the Eiffel Tower from several places in Paris during the whole time I was there, and I must say it was my favorite. I know, how cliche.

After the Eiffel Tower, I stopped by the Place de Concorde to take some photos of the place where the guillotine of the French Revolution killed so many people. I was exhausted, so ended up just eating at the hotel and going to sleep by about 9:30.

On Wednesday, the mission was to get to Versailles. I figured it out and did very well. Take the Metro to Invalides where you switch to the RER train which is the commuter rail. The C line goes to Versailles. A round trip ticket cost only 5.40 euro, and it was about a half hour ride. I arrived at Versailles at about 11:00 a.m. and began the tour. It costs only 13.50 euro and includes the audioguide. I went first into the Chapel, where Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were married. Of course, it is very ornate and beautiful. I visited the opera, which a lot of it is actually made of wood and so they built a reservoir next to it in case of fire. Then I went through the kings' and queens' apartments and reception rooms. Versailles really was expanded upon during the reign of Louis XIV, the "Sun King", and became a real example of what a palace for a king and his court should be. Royalty needed to be ornate and extravagant and elaborate, and the palace was not just a place to live but a place to live publicly. The French kings and queens really lived their lives on display all the time, eating their meals on public display. Marie Antoinette even gave birth to her first child before a room full of people.


Then there is the Hall of Mirrors, which is really something. It used to be a terrace, but was enclosed to become a corridor between the War Drawing Room and the Peace Drawing Room. The mirrors are huge, almost floor to ceiling, and mirrors were quite costly at the time of Louis XIV and so it was a demonstration of very high status to have so many as there are here. The mirrors are opposite identically shaped windows to the gardens and are meant to make the room big and full of light. And there are the great chandeliers down the entire length of the hallway. The treaty that ended WWI was signed here as well. I get excited when I am in such historical places myself, walking in the footsteps that all the larger than life historical personalities walked. Versailles is where the people stormed the palace and ended the reign of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. I also saw at Versailles another copy of the painting of the coronation of Napoleon. I also went through the Apartments of the Dauphin, who would have been the heir to the throne.

It was Louis XIV who had moved the court to Versailles, and I thought that a half hour by train today must have been quite far by horse and carriage back then. It really would have been out in the country. Of course, I also took a walk in the gardens. The grass and shrubbery is green and the flower beds are just waiting for the flowers to bloom. The trees do not yet have leaves. I can only imagine how beautiful the gardens will be by April. Versailles is so large and, now on day 7 of my trip, I didn't have the physical stamina to make the walk out to the Grand Trianon and the Petit Trianon or the little village built for Marie Antoinette. I was told they were about a half hour walk on foot from the palace.

I was back in Paris by 4:00 so decided to try and squeeze in one more thing. I decided to go to Tour Montparnasse, the second tallest structure in Paris after the Eiffel Tower. It is a skyscraper basically, and you can go up to the 56th floor and get a panoramic view of the city. I could see the Eiffel Tower, the Luxembourg Gardens, Invalides with its golden dome, Notre Dame, the Montparnasse cemetery. It was a nice view, and a nice way to end my stay in Paris. The lady who ran the elevator was very nice and chatted with me when she heard I was from Boston. Her son got his masters at Northeastern. I ate a delicious salad in the little café up there. Montparnasse at street level was very vibrant and busy. There was a ton of cafes and movie theatres and stores.

Thursday, it was time for the journey home. My final thoughts on Paris: it's very fast moving, a lot like New York City. The people there, men and women, dress very nice. They're quite stylish and like nice things, nice accessories – scarves, bags, shoes. The people were generally nice too, for such a big city. They didn't treat me badly, even knowing I was American. I always tried to be polite – say bonjour, si vous plait, merci – so I think they were nice in return. I feel very lucky to have been able to visit Paris and see the Mona Lisa, Versailles, the Eiffel Tower, with my own eyes. I never tire of traveling and seeing new places and people. I wish I could do it all the time, instead of just a few days a year. There's just not enough time for me to see all of the world I want to see.