This weekend I went to Paris with Shane and Kirsten. Saturday was a crazy day with something like 16 hours of sightseeing. Sunday was more relaxed, but we didn’t get to do everything we wanted to do. Oh well. Going armed with a guidebook and ideas for stuff to do and getting a map definitely made it a better weekend than the first one.
We arrived on Friday night. Getting there was a little bit of fun. There was a guy at the ticket office who was a complete asshole. They have this weird automatic system for people waiting in line but the sign aren’t clear about how it works. He came by and basically treated everyone in line like a bunch of children instead of just saying “Yeah, the sign doesn’t say it, but you need to stand behind this line for the system to work”. Anyway, he was a complete asshole to Shane (who speaks a little bit of French, but not enough to always communicate fully) and basically got him thinking there was a strike and then sent him away. So when I got there we went to buy tickets stopping in Nancy. The woman looked at us like we were a bunch of morons and said “The strike was yesterday”. Ahhh, civil servants. Anyway, Friday night was pretty uneventful. We checked into the hotel (which turned out to have a double bed and one single instead of three singles… oh well), got a late dinner, and went to bed.
Van Gogh’s House: The highlight of the trip.
We came around a corner near Sacré Coeur to this view. The weird-looking building straight ahead in the distance is the Centre Pompidou.
Saturday started early. Our hotel was in Montmartre, so we started by walking around the area. We saw Van Gogh’s house, which was pretty unimpressive, especially given that it was more of a flat than a house, it actually belonged to his brother, he only lived there for two years, and all we saw was a plaque on the building. The next stop was the Moulin de la Galette, site of what’s probably Renoir’s most famous painting. I think the area’s changed a lot since then, but being at the site of such a famous painting was pretty cool. We walked through Place du Tertre, ignored all the hawkers, and turned the corner to an awesome view of Paris spread out below us. A block later and we were at Sacre-Coeur, which is a pretty neat church with an awesome view. After a while checking out the view and the church, we took the little train down the hill (just because we could with our metro passes), and walked down through all the tourist traps to the main drag. Kirsten, who absolutely relishes being a tourist, bought herself two Eiffel Tower statues. We walked along the Montmartre main drag (which changes names constantly like all French streets), checked out Place Pigalle and all the sex shops along the way (from the outside, I swear!) and hopped on the Metro.
Marshal Foch’s Tomb
Our first stop was Les Invalides, home to a veteran’s hospital, Napoleon’s tomb, and a bunch of military museums. I actually walked to Les Invalides while waiting for the train at the Gare de Montparnasse last weekend, not realizing that it was such a famous site. I think it was closed then. Anyway, we discovered what an awesome investment our 18 euro museum day pass was, because we skipped the line and went right into Napoleon’s tomb. The tomb was pretty awe-inspiring. There were also a bunch of side chapels for different heroes of the Republic. My favorite was that of Marshal Foch, commander of the Allied armies in World War I. Apparently poppies are a symbol of rememberance for WWI in France as in Canada, because he had a wreath of poppies at the foot of his tomb. It turns out at least some Americans aren’t aware of In Flanders Fields. Anyway, we apparently missed an awesome WWI museum at Les Invalides, but that’s life.
The next stop was the Rodin museum, which is just down the street from Les Invalides. It’s definitely worth a visit, especially if you have a museum pass. It was neat because it had a whole bunch of famous Rodin statues in a garden setting, on the same grounds where he lived when he created many of them. At the Musee d’Orsay they have the plaster moulds used to cast a lot of the bronze statues in the Rodin museum, so it was neat to get to see the statues in both forms. The Thinker, the Gates of Hell, The Burghers of Calais, Balzac, and a whole bunch of other ones were there.
After Rodin, we walked over to the Musée d’Orsay, with a quick pit stop along the way for lunch. On the way, we walked by Hôtel Matignon which is the official residence of the Prime Minister of France. The Musée d’Orsay was cool: tons and tons of impressionist paintings. Once again, the museum pass saved us something like a half hour of waiting in line. I think we spent over 3 hours at the museum. We even ran into some other people from GTL. The only bad thing about the museum was that it was absolutely clogged with Americans.
After Orsay, we did a sort of quick walking tour of downtown Paris. We walked to the Conciergerie (former French court, used as a prison during the Revolution most famously to hold Marie Antoinnette). Then we went next door to the Sainte Chappelle which has the neatest interior of any church I’ve seen so far this summer. After that we walked to Notre Dame and decided not to wait for an hour to get into the towers or 20-30 minutes to get into the church.
Box
The next big stop was the Centre Pampidou, a super cool modern art museum. Unfortunately, the fifth floor was closed, so we didn’t get to see much early 20th century art (like Picasso). The fourth floor had some pretty cool comtemporary stuff. I really liked the sculpture at the entrance called “Box” which looked nothing like a box. There was also a cool room that you looked into with tinted windows that looked different depending on how far and from which angle you looked at it.
The statues weren’t the only ones getting it on.
After Pompidou, we went to a nearby restaurant in the Marais neighbourhood, where I once again discovered that I know almost nothing about food in French. I know the names of the basic meats and some of the vegetables, but beyond that I’m almost completely useless. It’s really strange that I speak French so well but am so hopeless in French restaurants. We spent a while at the restaurant and then hopped onto the metro (for only the second time that day) and went to the Jardin du Luxembourg (the Luxembourg garden). The Luxembourg garden is apparently the place where French people go to enjoy chilling on the lawn, probably because they don’t have lawns of their own. There were some snazzy statues donated by Catherine de Medici, including one that we were told at our GTL seminar was a statue of Zeus watching “two lovers getting it on”. There were chair conveniently placed near the fountain for people who wanted to immitate the statue. It being France, there was naturally a couple getting in on in one of the chairs.
After hanging out in the garden for a bit, we headed off in a whirlwind tour of Paris. We rushed over to the Jardin des Tuileries on the metro, dashed through the gardens to the looted Egyptian Obelisk at Place de la Concorde, looked at the Eiffel Tower in the distance, hopped back onto the metro to the Champ des Mars (which, by the way, looks like an excellent place to have a picnic… nice lush green lawn with a great view of the Eiffel Tower) arriving just in time to see the Eiffel Tower’s hourly sparkling at night. Then we dashed over to another metro station and went to the Arc de Triomphe, trying to get there before 10:30 pm so that we could use our museum passes to climb to the top for free. Unfortunately, we failed, so we ended up just checking out the bottom. After that, we walked along the Champs Elysées, shuddering at the inflated prices at the cafés along the way. We also got to check out their preparations for the 2012 Olympic bids. They’d closed down the Champs and were installing facilities for a mini-Olympics type thing. When we got to the end of the touristy part of the Champs, we got back on the Metro and headed back to Montmartre.
When we got back to Montmartre, we set out along the main drag again to check out the Moulin Rouge at night, try to find a late night crêperie (it was almost 1 AM by this time), and just look at the night-life in general. The Moulin Rouge looked much cooler at night, the only places that were selling crêpes looked really sketchy, and I didn’t see any of the working girls the guidebook claimed we would see. We ended up grabbing pastries from a 24hr Viennoisserie and heading back to our hotel. By that time it was nearly 2 AM, which meant we had been touring around Paris for 17 hours straight.
One of the fountains we didn’t get to see working.
On Sunday, we were originally going to go see Versailles, go back into Paris to check out the catacombs, and then head back to Metz. That was the plan anyway. The first wrinkle was that the Gare de l’Est (from which the train to Metz leaves) doesn’t have luggage lockers. So we had to go to the Gare du Nord to put our luggage away. Then there was a long line to get RER tickets. Then we just barely missed the train to Versailles and had to wait a half hour for the next one. Once we got to Versailles, the lines were super long (the first Sunday of every month is free), so we just went around back to the gardens. They jack up the prices for the gardens on the weekends because they run the fountains, which are supposed to be pretty impressive. We missed the first showing and we couldn’t stay late enough for the second showing, so we ended up walking around the gardens a bit and then chilling near the fake canal Louis XIV created for his village of imported Venetian gondoliers.
That was pretty much everything. The last bit of excitement was Shane getting fined 8 euros for using the Blue discount during the White period on the train back to Metz.