Paris - Part Two

Note: There is a mysterious white space at the top of this post and I have no idea why. Curious.

Ah, procrastination...I know thee well. Thanks to the holidays, travel, and general uselessness on my part, I am just now getting to posting the second set of Paris pictures. With a little luck and a lot of shame, I should be able to get the London ones up with a bit less lag. One of the pleasant surprises of Paris was the day we spent at Versailles. I had almost no expectation for it (it was a lady's choice) but found myself quite entranced, particularly with the gardens. It's an hour or so train ride out of Paris, in a small town that grew up around the palace.

I mentioned when visiting Napoleon's tomb that the French nobles had it coming. There is no clearer evidence of this than the palace at Versailles. The walls are covered in marble or rich wallpapers, and everything you can imagine to gild is gilded. We had a fascinating room by room guide of it, which helped put each over the top room into perspective.

The French must have spent a lot of time looking at the ceiling (if you know what I mean, wink wink, nudge nudge.) Every one of the public rooms had elaborate scenes painted in panels that were framed by gilded base relief carvings. There were so many amazing details here that it really was a marvel. Not only does this shot show one pissed off cherub, but it also has a series of empty golden helmets lining the crown molding, awaiting being filled by future French war heroes. Neat! And a little creepy.

Everything for the French royalty involved public ceremony. Observe the ceremonial bed. The king would wake in his private bedroom, then come to his public bedroom, where lucky nobles would get to help 'wake' and prepare him for his day. Mary and I would do very poorly in this ceremony. Our niece plays a similar game with her Bubba, and when we attempted it we proved too adept at pretending to be asleep and freaked her out a little. Alas, but for that we could be kings.

As gorgeous as the inside of Versailles was, the real stunner for me was the gardens. Most of the rooms had views overlooking the many elaborate plantings and ponds (and puddles, sadly.) The palace sits right on the edge of the town, so from the front appears surrounded by civilization, but from within seems to be nestled into nature. It's pretty amazing to see.

The largest and most elaborate series of gardens was off the back of the building, overlooked by the public rooms. This picture gives a sense of the layout and scale. Behind the photographer (me) is a large courtyard with a shallow pool filled with fountains and scultures. Down the first bank is another large fountain, flanked by two smaller pools and several smaller fountains. In the middle distance you can see a long, rectangle of lawn stretching back. What appears to be woods on either side of that is, in fact, a series of square grottoes, each with elaborate plantings and garden structures. At the far end of that lawn is the Apollo fountain. Stretching back into the distance from there is the cruciform Grand Canal, where the royals would import gondolas from Venice for elaborate parties. The woods on either side of these were filled with more rustic structures, for when the royals had to get away from their hectic lives of pretending to wake up and staring at ceilings.

King Louis loved fountains, and Versailles reflects this. Even scenes that you might not think to immortalize in bronze can be found shooting water out of every orifice. Take, for example, this pair of scenes from the hunt. Particularly inspiring is the fact that the sculptor did not let the fact that he had never seen a bear or mountain lion stop him from creating a masterpiece.

The French are masters of turning everyday things into works of art. Observe the shrub. Throughout Paris, every shrub was seen as an opportunity to express ones inner Picasso. Nowhere was this more evident than in at Versailles. It was like walking through a Dr. Seuss book, in the best possible way.

We spent some time wandering through the grottoes mentioned above, though the rain and cold kept us from doing as much as I would have liked. Of all the ones we walked through, this grotto was probably our favorite (even though it was gated off and we could only look in from outside. Not only does it have the coolest sculpture/fountain around, but it also has the neat arbor all around it and shrubs shaped to look like vases. Well done, France.

The Apollo fountain was the biggest one there, which is sensible because it was modeled after King Louis (the Sun King.) It was visible from most places in the garden and the house, and thus was the only fountain that was always running. The others were turned as the king approached and then off again once he lost sight of them. This lead Mary and I on wild flights of fancy, imagining royal stalkers whose job it was to figure out when he was approaching a fountain and notify the engineers to turn them on. Best job ever. Our day at Versailles was quite amazing, but sadly a cold and rainy one. I can definitely see us returning on a sunny day, and just spending all our time in the gardens where hopefully the crowds are a bit lessened. We didn't get to see the replica of the rural village that Marie Antoinette had built to remind her of home, and that's an omission that just can't stand.

Back from Versailles, we spent the rest of the afternoon in the Orsay Museum. It is housed in an old train station, and even minus the art is a striking place to visit.

The Orsay houses art from an interesting transitional time. It has both very classical works and more modernist ones. With the guidance of our book, we saw art move from one period to the other, which made art history come alive in a way it hasn't for us in the past. There were also some pieces that were just interesting on their own, like this one of a sculptor shown working on a very classical sculpture of a gladiator.

Despite our hotel being a few blocks from the Eiffel Tower, we only managed to get up to it on the last night we were there. We took the elevator instead of the stairs, since we had walked a ton already that day. The tower sits at the head of the Champs du Mars, at the end of which is the Escola Militar. These huge green spaces really were very special, and I could definitely see us picnicking on the champs in the summer and people watching. Along with the millions of other sneaking into our postcard dreams.

Another artsy shot of the tower. At night it is quite brightly lit, and every so often a show is given where colored lights chase up and down and around the tower. It is tacky fun for the whole family; the French must hate it.

Even topiary has its dark side. These shrubs outside of Notre Dame are proof that shaping can't improve every bush.

Our last set of stairs in Paris! You can climb the towers of Notre Dame and get a gargoyle's eye view of the city. Looking down in the courtyard in front of the cathedral, you can see the lighter colored stone which indicates where the walls of the old buildings and roads used to lie. We think that the spire in the distance is St. Chappelle, but we could be lying.

The gallery midway up the Notre Dame climb puts you at the same level as the famous Gargoyles. I am a total sucker for them, and took a zillion pictures. The 'most photographed gargoyle in the world' was neat, but there were so many other ones that caught our eyes as well.

Have I mentioned that I love signs? Because I love signs. Take, for example, these fire exit indicators. They are so action packed! If you could distill a Michael Bay movie into one frame, I believe it would be one of these.

Overall, we had a fantastic visit to Paris. We loved the sights, the food, the pastries (mmm....the pastries) and the overall environment. We will definitely visit again. We may even make another half-hearted effort at learning French.

Paris - Part One

Looking back at the writeup of the Italy trip, I see that I managed to get that posted a week after returning and am quite impressed. For the latest trip to Paris and London, we took about twice as many pictures -- seven hundred and change -- almost as many as our memory card can hold. That's a lot of pictures to post and talk about, so I am going to break it up into parts and post them over time. As we did with previous trips like this, we planned our first day to be lots of walking so that we could fall into bed at 8:00 pm and reset our body clocks to the local time. In service of this, we planned a walk through the oldest part of the city and through several churches in that area. First we had to get there. The Metro stop closest to our hotel was disrupted because of some protesting, so we walked to the next one. Sadly, this one was packed with everyone else avoiding the closer one, and was so crowded with people that a confusing situation was made even more so. The fact that the ticket machines were only in French didn't help. Thankfully walking the next station resolved the issue, since it was much less busy and we didn't feel rushed to vacate the machine. We managed to figure out that the little metal bumper dealie at the base of the screen was actually a roller for moving the cursor. Very odd. Sort of a silver banana instead of a mouse.

The walk started at and around Notre Dame which was huge and gothic and impressive. As is typical of us, silly details tended to catch our eye more than the larger picture. The exposed buttresses on the side were both impressive to see and fun to say. Buttress! It's like female butter! We also enjoyed picking out odd sections from the statuary on the face of the building. Of particular interest were the statues of St. Dennis with his head on a platter in his hands and another of a dude who, for no reason we could gather, was standing on a sheep.

We tended to find some of the smaller, out of the way sites to be more enjoyable than the more popular ones. A good example of this was St. Chappelle. This is a church that was built somewhat in the courtyard of another building, but that had used buttresses (hee!) to make the walls in the chapel almost entirely stained glass. It was an amazing effect to see so many floor to ceiling windows in such bright colors, and we thankfully got a rare burst of sunlight to make it all the more special.

An unfortunate sight on our first day was finding things we wanted to see closed. This happened at two separate parks as well as a memorial to the Jews deported in world war two. I suppose that on a rainy off season Saturday we should have expected as much, but it still became an irritating pattern. Thankfully, after day one it passed.

Paris, like Rome (and London for that matter) straddles a river. Unlike the Tiber, however, the Seine (which I never really figured out how to pronounce, so I just mumbled something different every time) is actually displayed and used instead of ignored. There are dinner cruises, parks that overlook it, and pricey real estate lining it. It also was a very handy tool for figuring out where things were relative to each other.

A site that we enjoyed much more than we expected was the Rodin museum. Going in, we knew little of Rodin other than The Thinker. Seeing a large grouping of his work and reading about each in our guidebook really made it interesting. We also are suckers for gorgeous old buildings and gardens like the mansion he lived in, where the museum is set.

There were several Rodin sculptures that really caught our fancy, but none as much as the Gates of Hell. This was a huge set of doors carved with scenes from Dante's Inferno. It was an enormous piece of work, yet so full of details and personality. We were quite taken.

A theme that began to develop on day two was how much the French royalty loved the French royalty. By the end of the trip I had decided that they pretty much had it coming with the revolution. The beginning of this revelation was Napoleon's Tomb at Les Invalides (yes, I know that Napoleon came after the revolution.) The man was not modest. From the gilded dome and spire to the fourteen nested coffins surrounded by angels and scenes of Napoleon being awesome while dressed as an ancient Greek, the man knew how to brag -- even from the grave. Mary and I pointed out all the great ideas we were getting for each other's memorials, and determined which family members we would put in each of the many alcoves and chapels that Napoleon had put his relatives in.

One thing we really liked about Paris was that despite being ancient and very crowded, it still had a lot of green space set aside. Here is Place Vosges, which was a square that one of the Louises had created so he could be surrounded by the right kind of people. They so had it coming. It was a lovely park surrounded by cute shops and cafes. I can definitely imagine returning to Paris during the much busier summer season and spending our time picnicking in parks and people watching in cafes.

Another interesting theme from Paris was the juxtaposition of very modern elements with very traditional ones. In this case, it's the famed (and sometimes loathed) glass pyramids of the Louvre. We really liked them, and the inverted one in the underground entry area was particularly cool. Throughout the visit, we would see modern art installations in parks or at sites that had a much more classical feel. We saw the usual suspects in our visit, but it was a few less famous (but I am sure well known by those more cultured than us) works that we preferred. The Raft of the Medusa is a scene of despair and madness as the remaining crew of a sunken ship fight for life adrift on choppy waters. How can some smiling chick compare to that?

Paris was home to the impressionist movement, which neither of us cares for that much. Still, how could we not go to see the water lilies in the space they were painted for? Especially because it was on our way and covered by our museum pass? We ended up enjoying these quite a bit, and seeing them in person does make a huge difference. The scale is amazing (some were six feet by twenty or thirty feet.) In this case it was the lack of detail that was interesting. Being able to move in and see the brush strokes, then step back and see the images that they formed was very cool.

More recurring themes! This time, cramped stairwells. We ended up climbing up the inside of four different structures on the trip, the first being the Arc d' Triumph shown here.

The Arc grants some amazing views if you can stomach the many steps to get to the top. From here you could see the layout of the city and find that it actually had some method to its madness. Here we are looking down the Champs Elysee, which is the Magnificent Mile of Paris. This was a day of massive amounts of walking for us and in the distance, behind the partially constructed Ferris Wheel (take that, Eiffel!) you can see the Louvre where our trek had begun.

A rare picture with both of us! Rare for a reason, as I still haven't mastered the outstretched arm self photo. On top of this one with us blocking the arc, I also have several of us with the Eiffel Tower sticking out of each of our heads.

Another great, out of the way sight is the Sacre Coeur. It sits on a rare hill in the Monmarte district, and is worth the climb. The exterior is a striking white, with byzantine domes. It reminded us a lot of St. Mark's in Venice. It is also in a seedier part of town, so the normal vendors of light-up plastic Eiffel Towers were much more aggressive, and were joined by men selling beer. From a six pack. In a brown bag. Still, we enjoyed the church and found a fun restaurant nearby where we got excellent desserts and wine.

The Sacre Coeur was the second climb we did and it afforded some nice, nighttime views of the city. Part of the climb took us up over rooftops of various parts of the church and gave us some up close time with gargoyles and the domes themselves, which we quite enjoyed.

Finally, no trip would be complete without some entertaining miscellany that caught my eye. As great as the Metro system was (once we figured out the ticketing machines) I have to admit that the best part for me was the signage. There were several that I didn't get good shots of (a bunny getting his hand trapped in the door, what looked like the silhouette of Siamese twins,) but this was probably my favorite. It's so detailed! So lifelike! You can easily imagine the poor man flailing as he falls to his death. Also, it is very reminiscent of the credits for Mad Men, which both Mary and I love. Neat!