Three-day weekend
Trip Start
Jun 25, 2008
1
6
11
Trip End
Aug 27, 2008
Chantilly,
Picardy,
France
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
I've been lucky enough to meet a lot of people on my travels. I met my friend John (who, by the way, I haven't spoken to in a long time) in a hostel in Prague where my friend April and I were staying. We all hung out together for several days, exploring the city's delights. The following year it just so happened that he was planning to travel in the Caucasus region and I was going to be in Armenia for two months doing an internship. He came to visit me in Yerevan and then we made plans for him to visit me in Madrid so we could take a trip to Morocco.
Last year , while I was visiting Milan and the surrounding region for a couple of days, I came up to a young woman and asked for directions to a church. She ended up walking with me to the church, helping me order coffee at a small coffee shop, showing me her university, having lunch with me and generally spending the whole day as my personal guide, in addition to teaching me a thing or two about Italian customs, politics and culture.
Just yesterday I was on the metro by myself going to the Champ de Mars to watch the Bastille Day fireworks.
What a couple!
The man sittinng next to me began talking to me and it turned out that he is a contributing editor and photojournalist for Harper's Magazine. He gave me advice about careers, getting a degree at the SciencePo and left me with his business card. It's not always easy to make lasting friendships, of course, because it's most likely that you live far away from whoever you meet. I was lucky enough to make several friends in Madrid, for instance, but two particularly good ones. One, Jacqueline, I stayed with in Madrid. The other , my former housemate Jeremie, came to visit me from Antibes this weekend. (Why didn't I visit him ?, you may ask . I just don't know!)
Thanks to my visitor, I had a wonderful weekend, despite the once again below par weather. Funny thing is, I was completely mortified to speak French with Jeremie last year because he found everything I said extremely funny and that quickly degraded the little self-esteem I had in speaking French. But since I consistently sound like a deaf-mute while speaking to my boss and the director of the museum where I work, somehow it didn't really matter what Jérémie thought this time around.
We had a very morbidly entertaining Saturday, full of dead people and their various remains. We started out with the catacombs early in the morning after a cup of espresso (which I am quickly becoming addicted to - I love especially when I can feel the caffeine flowing through my veins !). The wait was a modest hour and a half , but it was worth it.
The Parisian Catacombs
Inside, the French demonstrated their taste for black humor with interesting structures and artistic designs made out of the bones dug up from cemeteries around Paris. The catacombs were constructed because cemeteries were everywhere (thanks, of course, to the indiscretion of the French Revolution) and were quickly becoming a health hasard. So they dug up the bones and piled them in beautiful (pardon the anachronism) stacks in the catacombs. Dreary, but also fantastic.After a Parisian lunch of salad and goat cheese on toast, we continued to the Montparnasse Cemetery to look at the graves of the famous dead. We visited Charles Baudelaire, Sartre and Beauvoir, Serge Gainsbourg and Ionesco, but didn't have the energy to search for Maupassant or Alfred Dreyfus. The best part were the lovely notes people left for the writers such as : « Monsieur Sartre, Why do I exist ?».
After passing by the glass Cartier Foundation building and realizing that we saw everything we wanted to see without actually needing to enter, we made it just in time for happy hour in the Marais, where the mojito was rather ok. Sitting next to us, two British girls started arguing with the waitress over the bill. They had come in a few minutes after us, missed happy hour and were now astonished by the reality of having ot pay €13 for cocktails. Excuse me, it's not the pound that's drowning, ok ? They're from London, do they never go out there ? Or are £8 entrance fees to PUBS of all places after 11 p.m. plus the price of drinks really that much better ? If you want cheap, go to Prague or Budapest and order a beer.
A message to M. Sartre
It's cheaper than water. Jér and I spent Sunday in Chantilly, a former residence of a former count, who was the closest cousin of a former king. It was a really nice and peaceful way to spend the day. The château is not as lovely or as grand as Versailles, for example, but much less touristy and, therefore, that much better. We walked around the surrounding park and I noted how fond the French are of parks and nature. There are so many possible escapes from the city, all within 30 minutes to an hour away.
The Chantilly château also had a beautiful collection of art, including two Raphaels, Ingres and Boticellis. The library was small, but inspiring and the information our guide gave us about family coats of arms was enlightening . For instance, did you know that you can tell if someone was a legitimate child of the king or a bastard by noting in which direction a diagonal dash is slanting on the seal ? Or that if a wife came from a higher family than the husband's, the husband would have to negotiate with the wife's family to include the wife's insignia on his family's coat of arms ?
After all that, we headed to Montmartre where we had a little picnic on the steps in front of the Sacre Coeur. There was a huge crowd getting rowdy in preparation for Bastille Day. There was live music and, unfortunately, those firecrackers that sound like bombs and can easily either burn someone or make them go deaf. Whoever thought of making those things was a real idiot. People in many places of the world have to feign normalcy in the middle of wars and here people have to act as though bombs are going off when everything is actually fine.
Serge Gainsbourg
Why ?We finished at the very unerotic Museum of Eroticism. I think we both decided that a peep-show would have been more worthwhile. By the way, I heard that the Museum of Sex in New York is also very unsexy if you want to be nice and a complete waste of money if you're more to the point.
Bastille Day ! Actually the procession yesterday was impossible to see because of the number of people. After the parade, all the military tanks and other gadgets were placed all over the city so that people could look, touch, whatever, whatever. It's so French (in my humble opinion) to let people participate, learn, ask questions, but I just don't think military "anything" is interesting. And if we were in Berkeley, someone would definitely be protesting the presence and potential harmful influence of such machinary on children, or something similar.
At night there was complete chaos at the Champ de Mars. There was a concert, followed by gorgeous fireworks with an operatic background. It was truly beautiful, though there were so many people that a lot of what I saw was through my camera screen because I could hold it over everyone's heads. If you allowed yourself to forget that you were surrounded by 600,000 people, you could even imagine that you were in some old Hollywood film watching the fireworks around the Eiffel Tower.
Update on the pastries: I am not pleased. I tried two different ones and they were both disgusting. Then I had one today and since I chose to sit on the terrace, it cost me double: €7.50 for about five bites. I can't even say that it was great; tolerable is a better description. Also, I am planning to try some brasseries in the near future, with some real French cuisine.
P.S. Jérémie, thank you so much for coming to Paris, it was such a lovely weekend. I'm sorry you missed the fireworks.
Comments
Trois jours, trois Mots: Aime comme emblème!
Morbide, Monarchie, Militaire... Montparnasse, Marais, Montmartre... Beaucoup de Marches! Mais tellement Mémorable, Merveilleux, Magique !!!
Merci, Merci, Merci !!!
pastries?
Okay, you need to expand upon your pastry horizons. Maybe venture into buying a jelly donut which are key to change. I see the tan is setting in, although coming from San Diego wouldn't you already have one - or does the sun not shine there. Don't you distinctly remember lobster legs?
Wonderful pictures. MORE!!!