Wherein our protagonist visits the Petit Palais, takes a bike tour at dusk and a barge ride at night, and tries (unsuccessfully) to appreciate modern art. This is an account of Sunday and Monday.
My hotel was located just off Place de Clichy, which is right in the heart of the Montmartre district. Montmartre, by the way, isn’t the philosophers’ district as I expected. It’s more of an artist’s district. Anyway, the hotel was a bit seedy, but quite adequate for my needs. And, of course, the Halal place on the corner was a bonus and made my life quite a bit easier. I took my time getting up and getting ready on Sunday, wary of the sudden sickness I had experienced in Denmark. Consequently, it was after noon when I headed to the Place de Clichy tube station after a couple of burgers.
As in Denmark, the heat bordered on oppressive. Unlike Denmark, potable water wasn’t freely available, so for example I paid a ridiculous 3 euros at the Eiffel tower. For those working this out on paper, that’s about 4 dollars for a bottle of water. Over the course of the weekend, I think I bought 4 bottles of water, so that’s about 15 dollars I’m never seeing again.
My first stop was the Place de la Concorde, which marks the beginning of the Champs Elysees. There’s a massive Egyptian obelisk (with real gold inlay!) in the middle of the square (the fountain I witnessed the American girl assaulting — see earlier post — is also there). I snapped a few pictures, and then began the trek down the tree-lined sidewalk of the Champs Elysees, towards the Petit Palais. It’s a fairly pleasant walk, with the Louvre behind you, and the Arc de Triomphe ahead. As with London, I found distances on maps are more intimidating than they are in reality, so it didn’t take me long to get there.
The Petit Palais sits opposite the Grand Palais; both are museums, but the Petit Palais, as its name suggests, is the smaller and less highfalutin (and, while I was visiting, high tech — the Grand Palais had some exhibit about space) of the two. Since the Petit Palais seemed less busy, I decided to spend my time there and skip the Grand Palais. There was no ticket for entrance, but unlike the Louvre, bags had to be checked in. Since I obviously didn’t want to leave my laptop or my passport, I had to cram my pockets and walk around with my laptop under my arm :)
The museum was awesome. There were a couple of galleries decorated in a very baroque style with (I think) 17th-century French art that I wasn’t too hot on, but that was more than made up by the beauty of some other pieces. I wish, again, that I could post photos that would do the pieces justice, but that’s just not possible. I took what I thought was a great photo of an absolutely shockingly pretty painting, ridiculously simple in its composition and use of colours, but the glare from one of the windows ruined it. I also saw an OK Monet and a self-portrait by van Gogh. (By the way, you know you’re a complete ignoramus when you ask at the Louvre where the painting of the last supper is, and are told it’s in the Vatican — I forgot to mention that before.) A few other interesting things I saw there:
- A disturbing collection of what looked like toads and frogs cross-bred with rabbits.
- Women in shalwar qameezes. So now you know where they wear them after buying them in cartloads in Pakistan. Actually, I was on Oxford Street the other day and saw a fully decked out Caucasian woman in a sari, with the red blob on the forehead and everything. And last month in Copenhagen, I saw a Hari Krishna festival in the town square where all the chanters and the sari-wearers were gori women. Aack, the world’s shrinking! Honestly, you wonder how Sherlock Holmes would cope now that we’re all dressing the same and losing all cultural individuality.
- People just sitting and sketching. Actually, this is something I saw several times at the Louvre. And every time, I wondered what it would be like to have some artistic skill of my own.
I walked around the Palais’ courtyard for a few minutes and then walked on down the bank of the Seine. And on, and on, and on. I actually walked all the way to the Arc de Triomphe, where I tried again, in vain, to get a decent shot. I sort of got a semi-decent shot in the end, though obviously the traffic didn’t stop despite my best efforts. I was basically killing time till my bike tour, so I walked down the Champs Elysees (yes, back towards the Louvre), snacking on crepes and glaces along the way. I also stopped at a wonderful boulangerie for that most wonderful of French foods: tarts! This deserves its own paragraph…
The food in Paris was great. The halal burgers, obviously, were fairly standard fare, but the crepes and the glaces were outstanding. Escargot, etc., I don’t have the stomach for, but I truly enjoyed the basic stuff. The tarts, however…oh my god. They have all sorts of different tarts (strawberry! peach! chocolate-with-banana! blueberries! raspberries!), and they’re all finger-lickin’ good, not to mention absolutely gorgeous! If nothing else, the tarts will bring me back to Paris at some point. (On a related note, I discovered today that British-made Skittles are halal. Joy!)
After the snacking, I went down to the Eiffel Tower again, where the Fat Tire Bike Company’s tours begin from. The group was beginning to form at the south leg when I got there. After a few minutes, we walked over to their offices and picked out bikes. Thankfully, I was able to ditch my bag (and laptop) there — a 4-hour ride with that stuff on me would probably have killed me. The bikes were granny-style cruisers with really wide handle bars — think of the bikes from the Sound of Music, where the kids are do-re-mi-ing down the roads just before the Baroness arrives. I ended up with Mr. Bigglesworth. The group was mostly comprised of Americans (hardly surprising, it seems Americans outnumber natives in both Paris and London during the summer), as was our tour guide, Cotton. We started off in a cluster heading towards Notre Dame. As we went down the Rue St. Germain, we went by the oldest surviving church in Paris, one of Ernest Hemingway’s hangouts, and the flat that Mitterand (or Chirac, I forget) lived in during his presidency. The goal was to get to Notre Dame before dusk, so we didn’t stop at any of those places, but it seems the Rue St. Germain would be a cool place to explore on my next trip, IA.
We cycled along the Seine for a while and crossed over to the cathedral from the south, or the back. We parked our bikes in a beautiful row on the bridge and Cotton talked a little about the history of the cathedral. The Austin Powers “laser” jokes inevitably came up when he mentioned that the cathedral had been cleaned in the 90s with lasers. Apparently, the spire that’s still a little icky was left on purpose to remind people what poor condition the whole monument was in at one point. We crossed the bridge to Berthillion to have their ‘world-famous’ ice cream; didn’t taste special to me. (Then again, I picked boring flavours — maybe pairing strawberry and mocha would’ve been a better idea…)
After that, we biked around the Cite island, from where Cotton pointed out the Pompidou and the temporary beach that the government sets up for Parisians each year. Apparently, the theme this year was Polynesia. We went by St. Chapel, and then started biking back up the Seine. We crossed the Seine again near the Louvre, where we crossed the Pont des Arts, a pedestrian bridge that is often used for open-air art exhibitions; it was dusk when we were crossing, and several small groups were beginning to break out picnics (complete with aperitif, of course). Nice.
We rode through the Louvre’s rear courtyard, passing through two archways. There was a cellist sitting in the shadows of the second archway, so we were accompanied by strains of classical music when we rode into the main courtyard (with the pyramids) — dramatic stuff :) We rode through the courtyard to the miniature Arc that sits just before the Louvre’s gardens (where bushes have been arranged to form a maze, reminiscent of the one in The Labyrinth) and then made our way back to the Seine.
To be continued…y’alls gon’ lo’ da pictures, yo. (Trick lo’ da kids).
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