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Other entries in Paris

Reflections on a theme: Paris

Paris, je t'aime! Paris is sooo cool, I love it!

(Caveat emptor: this entry will probably take several edits to complete. So come back!)

OK, where do I start? Well, the beginning's as good a place as any, I s'pose... I came over here from London Waterloo last week, and the train ride was breathtaking! It was exhilarating to be travelling along at 300+ km/hr, one minute you're in England, barely 15 minutes later you're in France, scooting along as if nothing's happened! Although one thing has happened: a change of time zone, oddly enough. France is on GMT+2 (remember it's summer at the moment so Daylight Saving applies), one hour ahead of England, even though it's more or less south. Crazy huh? 2 things I am really glad I did back at Waterloo: find and internet cafe to work out where in Paris my hostel is (since these European capitals have a habit of being fractionally larger than our antipodean ones), and the other thing was to get a 6 day Paris Visite card, which gave me a Metro pass, a Museum pass, and a book of sundry attractions to get into. I totally cannot comprehend how on earth anyone can 'do' Paris in anything less than a week (without spontaneously combusting or doing a half-assed job) - there's just so much to check out!

Towers:

• Tour Montparnasse: a very cool 200m high tower that gives a marvellous 360 view of Paris, especially of the Tour Eiffel... well worth a visit! Also had interesting maps showing the growth of Paris over the last few hundred years
• Arc de Triomphe: Napoleon's Triumphal arch at the top of the Champs-Elysées. A great view down the famous street, also good to see out to La Défense in the other direction. I managed to go up as dusk fell, and saw the lights of the Tour Eiffel do their sparkling thing - really impressive!
• Grande Arche de la Défense: this is worth going up too, simply for the vertigo-inducing glass lift that takes you up to the top! I certainly wasn't too keen on looking down... the arch is basically a 110m cube, with the middle cut out. Good view back down towards the Arc de Triomphe, but sadly the tower is too far away from the other main monuments to really see them.
• Notre Dame towers: again, a really good view of Paris this time from the centre of town... worth a visit, if nothing else, for seeing the bell 'Emmanuelle' which is at the top of the south tower and weighs 13 tons!
• Tour Eiffel: No I never bothered going up, mostly because of the crowd for the queue... not really too worried to be honest. I took this Tour Bus trip around the city one day and the guide said a couple of interesting things about the tower: a) that Hitler once went up, although the day he was due to ascend, the lift 'mysteriously' broke down, so he was forced to climb up... and b) the guy who invented the parachute tested his invention by jumping off the top of the tower: the chute failed to open, and the coroner's report said that the poor guy actually died of shock on the way down... anyway, happy thoughts...

Churches:

• Notre Dame, of course! Grand old church, which toook nearly 200 years to build, back in the 1200s. While I was inside the church itself, they started a service, which was quite cool, especially hearing that magnificent organ! What wasn't so cool was the other bloody tourists who persisted in taking photos (with flash) while the service was on... show a little respect guys!!!
• Sacré-Coeur: the basilique at the top of the Montmartre hill. I didn't bother taking any photos of the view for 2 reasons a) its crap, I mean you can't even see the Tour Eiffel, and b) the view can be seen in the film 'Emilie', which I highly recommend to anyone who hasn't seen it. One thing that struck me as a little ... oxymoronic maybe? was this family of Hindus who went into the church, red spot on the forehead and all. Not that I have any problem with this in the least, I just thought it a little odd that's all
• (Semi-church) Panthéon: This used to be a church back in the day, until Victor Hugo died, when they finally decided to make the building into a mausoleum for French "Grandes Personnes" who have died, such as Mr Hugo, Emile Zola, and Voltaire. This is also the place where Foucault demonstrated the turning of the earth using a pendulum, which is still hanging there to this day. Great view from the top, once again. One thing I thought was quite cool was an inscription to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who was a French equivalent of Buddy Holly, as he went missing during a WW2 mission in 1944. Now this Saint-Exupéry wrote a book called "Le Petit Prince", or "The Little Prince" (as there is also an English version), which is a delightfully charming book of just 80 or so pages including full-page illustrations by the author. I highly recommend the story to one and all - if you want a French version I can lend it to you! And if that doesn't take your fancy, then have a go at reading Les Misérables. It is the most amazing story and is far and away the best on my list of good books! I'm now the proud owner of a 2-volume French copy of Les Mis

Museums:

• Louvre: Pretty good, although a little over-hyped in publicity, no thanks to Mr Daniel Brown. Its a pretty massive building though, and certainly draws the camera-carrying crowds. By the end of my couple of hours there, I was heartily sick of having flashes go off in my face - I mean if you want decent photos, buy a book! I hope their photos all come out black. The Moaning Lisa was the worst, and I was surprised by how small it was... but her eyes certainly follow you around the room, which is pretty neat of old Mr da Vinci! To be honest I preferred the painting at the other end of the room, called Les noces de Cana, by Véronèse: it was huge, and I'm talking several metres on each side here. Probably my favourite painting in the Louvre would have been La liberté guidant le peuple, by Delacroix, an absolutely massive painting that, if the painter had put a young man instead of a woman at the top of the barricade holding the French flag, it would be exactly as I had imagined Marius in the barricade scene in Les Misérables!
• Musée d'Orsay: Much better than the Louvre... I mean, its smaller (and therefore fractionally quieter) for a start. I've decided I like the early and mid- Impressionist paintings the best. Here's something that few English-speakers would have found: old Monet had a pretty cool sense of humour - here's why: In French, the phrase for a still life painting is nature morte (that is, dead nature). So Monet has this nature morte painting of a hunk of meat on a plate!!! Dunno what its title was though sorry... The artist that I really liked and hadn't heard of before was Mr Alfred Sisley - born, lived and died in France, although you wouldn't know it with a name like that. His impressionist paintings of the countryside left an impression on me...
• Musée de l'Art Moderne: is on the 4th and 5th floor of the Centre Pompidou, a very funny-looking building that doesn't really belong in Paris I reckon... anyway, the museum is crap. Either that or I don't get modern art (ie anything since about 1910). I mean, how on earth can you justify a bloody Micros**t Wheel Mouse as being a piece of art? Or a 3-metre enlargement of a 1969 Astrophysics science journal? Or a canvas painted entirely blue? Hmmm, it's kinda like Victoria Uni's stupid slogan: it makes you think. Yes, just not in the way the author intended...
• Musée de l'Orangerie: According to Bill Bryson, this museum is better even than the Orsay one. However, I didn't go, mostly because I didn't see the point of going to a museum dedicated to oranges...
• Musée de l'Air et de l'Espace: This is a rather old-looking museum dedicated to the history of aviation and space flight. It has an old Concorde and a Boeing 747 both of which you can go inside and look around, and it also has a 1:1 model of an Ariane-5 space rocket, which is pretty cool! The WW2 area has a Spitfire and a Fokker Wulf (no Messerschmitts tho), as well as the military equivalent of the DC-3 (I've forgotten its name). And the bit that I liked the most was a section dedicated to old mate Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who used to fly the mail planes to North Africa and later on, to South America, in a Caudron Simoun plane. And y'know how kids hang model airplanes from the ceiling? Well at this museum, they hang the real thing from the ceiling, and at all sorts of odd angles! I had a photo of it but sadly my camera's memory stick died and I randomly lost a couple of days worth of photos, including these ones...
• Hotel des Invalides: isn't a hotel, its actually the place where the army treated their wounded, and is also the place where Napolean is buried, in a massive great big marble casket thing under an impressive dome. There is also a museum here, called the Musée de l'Armée, that contains on one floor, a whole bunch of implements with which people have killed each other since the beginning of time, and on the second floor is a very impressive exhibition covering military history from the 1870-71 France-Prussian war to the end of WWII. I spent a fascinated 3 hours here, it was really good, especially to get an insight into why the metro stations often have bizarre names, such as Bir Hakeim (WW2 site of French resistance in North Africa), or Stalingrad, or Charles De Gaulle - Etoile...

Gardens

• Jardin de Luxembourg is a rather famous garden on the Left Bank of Paris. Has a funky lake and lots of trees to read a book under... this garden was the place where Marius met Cosette in Les Misérables, another reason for my interest in going there!
• Bois de Boulogne is a massive wood on the outskirts of central Paris, near the La Defense area. For some reason I've always wanted to go there, but now having seen it, I can't for the life of me figure out why! And the French idea of 'bush' is vastly different to ours, I mean, you can see for at least 10 metres through French bush!

Metro - is rather different to the London Underground... for a start, its much more varied! You never know whether a random accordion player will come onto the train and play for money till the next stop, or maybe a beggar will come on and tell you his sob story while asking for money... there was even a drunk guy trying to sing for money once!!! And each station is a bit different too... some are all done up and some are all crapped out. The best example is the line 1 that goes down the Champs-Elysées: it's all new, automatic doors, well-lit stations, etc - and then if you take the 12 line to Notre-Dame des Champs, it's the crappest station I have ever seen, with plaster falling off off the station walls, badly lit, etc - quite a contrast! It is possible to travel the metro forever with a single one-day ticket, I know cos that's what Ive been doing. However, if you get caught with an invalid ticket, there's a 40 Euro fine, which again I know from experience. So what I suggest you do is buy 2 one-day tickets and only use one of them. That way if you get caught, you can show them the valid one! Ahem... I'm told that this doesn't work either because you have to composter votre billet for it to be valid, meaning that it needs to be time-stamped... so there's no real escape if you get caught. The trick then is not to get caught! Either that or be honest and buy a ticket. They're not actually that expensive!

Beggars - most of them just sit on the ground holding a cup or or a card with some broken English telling you they need money... although some can be rather annoying. I had this one lady, in the older generation, who accosted me at the Gare St Lazaire bus stop. Her opening line was "Do you speak English?", and then at my nod, she gave me this piece of paper explaining in aforementioned broken English that she was from Bosnia, her father had been killed, her sister was dead, she had a daughter in hospital and needed money for some heart operation, and of course she was destitute: "Just one Euro, that's all"... well the first thing that came into my mind was "Bugger". Silly me then decided to give her a Euro. No big deal, her turn to sod off. Actually, that's not how it works. Her turn to ask for more money, without even saying thanks for what she's already got. "Just a little bit more, pleeeese?". Ok, silly me, gives her a 50 centime piece, this time expecting her to definitely sod off. No such luck... at this stage I was out of patience and started saying "No". Either she was hard of hearing or only learnt selected words at her English classes - either way the concept of "No" didn't seem to exist for her. I finally managed to get the message through when she said "Just one more, then that's the end. One more, I go". Bingo... so I took from her hand the one Euro that I had already given her, said "Here, one more - goodbye" and at this, her face fell, but at least she got the message! I've decided that I don't speak English now....

Ahem... I'm currently having a spot of bother with my photos - I do hope they will come out, but the first CD containing most of my Paris photos may not have been written properly and I possibly may not have many shots of Paris      I wrote a CD and then a few days later my friggin memory card had issues... on my second to last day in Paris I had a magnificent day, and here at least are some photos taken that day - bon appétit!

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