Friday, 09 June 2017

Adam got up at 5:00 a.m. and escorted John and Elaine to the airport this morning.

Today turned out to be a big disappointment.  It felt weird not to have John and Elaine along, and everything we planned to do ended up not working out for one reason or another.

The kids wanted to go up to the bell tower in Notre Dame Cathedral, so we took a couple of trains over there first thing, only to find the line so daunting we had to give up.  With our morning activity scratched, we were at loose ends and didn’t know what to do with ourselves.  The second thing we’d planned was to visit an artists’ squat, but that didn’t open until 1:00 p.m.

So, we walked around aimlessly hoping to run into something interesting.  We found one thing: near the Seine, they have stationary bikes set up for public use.  Pedaling the bike produces an electrical current that will charge your phone.  People were actually using them, and it seems like such a good idea.  I’d love to see things like this in the United States. (It reminds me of the novel Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. I loved that book.)

We meandered until restaurants started opening up for lunch.  We chose a cool-looking Italian place and went in.  It turned out to be the worst meal we’ve had on the whole trip.  Adam and I both ordered Provincial roasted chicken and it was awful.  If I’d cooked chicken like that at home, we would have thrown it out and ordered a pizza instead.

Below: wonderful atmosphere, terrible restaurant.

But the day is not yet lost!  We still have the artists’ squat to visit.  People on the internet say that anyone interested in authentic art, being sold directly by the artists that created it, should go to 59 Rivoli and schedule yourself at least an hour to go through it all.

From their website:

We showed up slightly before 1:00 p.m. and stood around waiting.  By 1:15 p.m. it was still closed and Adam was getting impatient.  Long story short, there was a handwritten sign on the front door that said, in French, that they were closed due to unforeseen circumstances and would re-open on Sunday. We didn’t understand the sign until Adam finally thought to use the translator on his phone … as you can see in the picture below, the entire building is covered in handwritten signs, graffiti-type art, etc. and we assumed the little sign stuck to the door was part of the decoration.  I am super bummed.

Disappointed and defeated, we went back to the apartment and called it a day.  We’ll try again tomorrow. Here is a picture of Holden finally enjoying himself today:  plugged into his computer and eating tiny pickles straight from the jar.

10 June 2017, Saturday

Today was a much better day.  We had a couple of things on our itinerary, but our schedule was pretty loose and had a lot of built-in room for improvisation.

Our first destination was Victor Hugo’s house.  For those who may not know, he’s the guy who wrote Notre-Dame de Paris (in English translated to The Hunchback of Notre Dame) and Les Misérables, both of which have been made into movies that our kids love.  We took a train to that area of town, which is also known for a high concentration of small art galleries, and walked the rest of the way to see what we could stumble onto.  The weather is absolutely gorgeous and perfect for wandering around outside, admiring the atmosphere.

We liked the name of this place.  The kids were surprised the French allowed such a “racist” sign, which triggered a too-loud sidewalk conversation on our part about the difference between racism and culturism (which probably isn’t even a real word.)

Cool piece of street art.  The English translation is The Dream to the Wolves.  

I spent some time looking up what this might mean in French, which took a lot longer than was probably warranted because I don’t understand French and had to run everything through a translator.  This is what I eventually found, although I’m still not sure it’s quite accurate; there is a book by Jordan Diowe with that title. The one review it had gave it 5 stars and provided this word salad synopsis:

Portrait in the vitriol of a motley generation. Counterculture, there is something magical in the fulgurence of your verb and in your freedom of tone and thought: road-book …

So … yeah.  It may also be a musical album by the same guy.

On to more street shots of Paris.

Window shopping, art and antiques.

Victor Hugo’s house.  His apartment was on the second floor.  This is the staircase.

The apartment was very much worth seeing, but visually busy and fairly dark, which doesn’t lead to good photographs.  I spent way more time in there than the kids (or Adam, for that matter) wanted.  They ended up hanging out in the staircase waiting on me.  Here they are bored …

… here is Isabella “ruining the picture so you can’t post it.”  It didn’t work out like she thought it would.

Nearby, we ran into a rather nondescript doorway that lead into The Hotel de Sully’s courtyard.

Us (below) entering the side door that leads into a town square near Victor Hugo’s apartment.  The hotel is a little hidden gem, at least from this side.  You can tour through it at specified times during the day but the next tour was at 2:30 p.m. and we didn’t want to wait that long.  We had to be satisfied wandering around the outside gardens.

More bored kids waiting on me to read all the historic markers.

In Village St. Paul – founded in 630 (now part of Paris). It is full of small quaint streets with hidden away cafes and antique shops. More art window shopping — none of these places were open.

Kids playing ball at recess in one of Paris’s schools.

This place had a little bronze bird sculpture I wanted, but it didn’t have a price on it.  Usually when something in an antique or art shop doesn’t have a visible price tag, it’s way too expensive.  I had to be satisfied just admiring it through the window.

More walking around.

The art stalls selling mass-produced-in-China souvenirs to tourists — Notre Dame in the background.

Searching in my purse for fingernail clippers. For some reason it’s really interesting to all three kids.

We found a tiny, hole-in-the-wall restaurant for lunch.  After yesterday’s fiasco, we weren’t very confident about this place but decided to give it a chance anyway.  We were the only customers in there — did we discover a hidden gem or was it empty for a reason?  It turned out to be delicious.  Adam ordered beef bourguignon and it was fantastic.  Onion soup for me (equally good) and duck confit for Holden and Josie.  Isabella had pasta with mushroom sauce.  Everyone loved their meal.

The streets are starting to get busy.

Charlie Hebdo is still doing their thing.  Theresa May just had a political upset in England’s election last week.  That’s her, beheaded in the picture, with a caption in English that reads “Too much is too much!”

Looking over the art for sale alongside the Church of Saint Germain des Prés. The tall guy in the white suit was the artist. His stuff was good and he had several newspaper articles featuring himself posted on the wall, but he was only selling prints here.

11 June 2017, Sunday

The Marché Parisien de la Création (open-air art market) was our first destination today.  They only gather on Sundays.  The quality of the art on exhibit was delightfully good.  We bought two oil paintings by the same artist, Sultana Dimopoulou.  One of them was large so we had to take the trains back to our apartment to drop them off before heading out for our next stop, the Catacombs.

Below: we purchased the yellow painting of Provence, right, behind the artist’s head, plus another oil depicting the Arc de Triomphe.

More of the artist stalls.

First, lunch

We made our way to the Catacombs, but the line was well over 2 hours long.  We will go back on Tuesday first thing.

Our last stop, and one I’ve been looking forward to for days, was the artists squat at 59 Rivoli.  It was finally open!  It was a cool, young space that was fun to see, but none of the art was our cup of tea.  We toured through it pretty quickly and left empty-handed.  It made me even happier about the paintings I bought this morning.

The artists at the open-air market were, on average, quite a bit older and their work was a little more … mmmmm, developed, is perhaps a good word.  The works of each artist were consistent and they’d all found their groove/vibe/voice/whatever. I admired the exuberance of the younger artists, but most of them still had the “art student” look to their work, as though they were still working through who they wanted to be.  Some of them may eventually mature into something good but they just weren’t there yet (in my layman’s opinion.)  Adam didn’t take any pictures because it didn’t seem polite.

12 June 2017, Monday

We headed out early today, determined to make Take 3 (or it is Take 4?) of the Notre Dame bell tower part of our Paris experience.  They open the upper levels at 10:00 a.m. so we showed up at 9:30, expecting to be first ones there.  We were not.

We ended up standing in line for more than an hour (half of that waiting for it to open, and another 30 minutes because people in tour groups kept getting higher priority) but we finally got our turn.

Below:  a dad taking his daughter on a tour with a private tour guide.  The little girl was so cute in her Parisian outfit!  (They were Americans, judging by their accents.)  We figured it was some single dad sticking it to his ex-wife big-time.  How can anyone compete with private guided tour of Paris??

We finally got our turn to hike up the punishing staircase to the first of the upper levels.  It’s full of gargoyles.

Oh, and you’re in a cage (below).  Nobody is falling off this thing.  I couldn’t help but giggle when I overheard another family talking about how this was actually a lot better than the trip to the top of the Eiffel Tower they’d done the day before, where the cage issue is seriously claustrophobic.  We did the Eiffel Tour thing in 2012 and hated it.  Apparently it hasn’t gotten any better.  The people who did it yesterday hated it, too.

More gargoyles.

Low-light photo of Isabella in front of the bells … they have two big ones …

… the smaller is named Marie and was installed in 2013 (weighing 6.2 tons)…

 … and the larger is called Emmanuel which dates dates from the 17th century and weighs 13 tons.

These two are only rung on major Catholic feast days, whereas eight other bells in the north tower peal out several times a day.  The kids tell me that in the Hunchback story, Quasimodo is nearly deaf from ringing those enormous bells.

Below: on the way back down the steep, winding staircase.

View of the cage.

View of Paris from the upper level. Looking down on the “roof” and transept of Notre Dame.

Staircase.  This thing was treacherous.  The stairs aren’t mathematically perfect, so you have to hold onto the railing to avoid tripping yourself up.  There are a total of 400 steps; no toilet facilities, no lifts. “Not recommended for pregnant women, or people suffering from vertigo or a cardiac complaint.”

Back outside, having survived the staircases.  (It was slightly easier than the St. Paul’s Cathedral in England.  That cathedral was a doozy.)

Below: a photo of some cops.  Every police officer in Paris (about half of them are women) look like they could compete in back-to-back Iron Man marathons without breaking a sweat.  No Chief Wiggums here.  They all look like super heroes and there are a lot of them patrolling and protecting Paris.

Next up was Cimetière du Père-Lachaise (Père Llachaise Cemetery) where Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde are buried. So are Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Edith Piaf, Chopin, Honoré de Balzac, Sarah Bernhardt, René Lalique, Modigliani, Molière, Camille Pissarro, Seurat , and at least one of the Stroganoffs (Russian aristocrats.) 

The cemetery is enormous at 110 acres.  The cobblestone roadways are ankle-twisters, so step carefully.

Marcel Proust’s gravesite.

Oscar Wilde’s gravesite.  They had to enclose this one in plexiglass to keep people from defacing it with their tributes.  There were signs all over the thing asking people to please be respectful and not leave marks on the stone since the family has to pay for the cleaning, but even so people didn’t obey.  They stood on the gravestone next to it to reach over the plexiglass wall to put lipstick kiss prints on Wilde’s marker (you can see the red marks to the right of the statue’s face.)  Jerks.

This graveyard is truly huge.  We’ve been wandering around for a long time.

On to Jim Morrison’s grave.  They had to erect a fence around it to keep people from defacing not only his stone but all the stones around his.  Instead, now idiots are sticking their disgusting chewed gum to the tree in front of it.  WHY????  What does gum have to do with Jim Morrison?  These people are no better than dogs peeing on fence posts … they can’t resist the urge to mark territory “I was here.”  So gross.

Jim Morrison’s gravestone.

The fence around it and the disgusting vandalized gum tree.

The kids don’t know who Jim Morrison is.  Adam and I, plus two other older couples, were paying our respects while our kids sat on the curb and waited for us to be done already.  They didn’t get it.  At all.

Now for lunch.  Our beautiful Josie.

Finally, we went to the Marché aux puces de Saint-Ouen, known locally as “Clignancourt.” This is a huge flea market that is open on weekends and Mondays. There are hundreds of small stores and stalls that sell all varieties of items. Much of this stuff is junk …

… and a lot of this stuff is definitely NOT junk. You could deck out your new apartment here in town complete with 18th or 19th century treasures, but only if you’re seriously wealthy.  The apartment listings we saw started around $1 million and went up from there,  and all these antiques carry hefty price tags, too. But boy are they gorgeous!

The orange pod (partially pictured here) was the weirdest thing in the whole market.  We had to guess what it was for … retro-futuristic backyard parties?  The inside of the pod had built-in chairs that looked like they came out of the Starship Enterprise and the staircase folded up to make it completely enclosed.

Edit: Jean-Baptiste in the comments identified the orange pod (thank you!!): it was created by Finnish designer Matti Suuronen.  Called the Futuro House and designed in 1968, Suuronen was “commissioned to design a ski lodge for a slope in Finland, Suuronen produced what he and many others believed was the prefabricated home of the future. An 8m-diametre “rotating ellipsoid” – geometry jargon for “like a 1950s Hollywood flying saucer” – the Futuro remains an emblematic image of the 1960s, despite having been a total sideshow as far as architectural historiography is concerned. Though they went into production in both Finland and America, only around 60 were ever produced (no one knows exact numbers). (Quote from article in attached link.)

Kids getting a gelato treat near our apartment.

Display in the Office Depot.  Looks weird to us, but “recharges tampons encreurs” means “ink cartridge refills” in French.

13 June 2017, Tuesday

Our last day.  We’re heading out early to hopefully be first in line for the Catacombs.  The other day, the line was well over two hours long.  They open at 10:00 a.m., so we plan to be there no later than 9:30 to get a spot.

The kids sunscreening up.  We may be standing in the sun awhile.

We arrived at the Catacombs line at 9:20 and there were already around 150 people ahead of us.  An FYI for anyone planning to do this:  there are no pubic bathrooms, the lines are always long, and there are no facilities in the catacombs until you get to the very end.  You’ve been warned.  People in line — including me — started to get desperate for a potty.  I finally found one in a McDonalds down another street.  (They have locks on the bathroom door and want €1 to use their facilities, but at least they give you the chance.)

After waiting in line for more than an hour and a half, we got our turn.  The reason the line moves so slowly is that they only allow 200 people in the catacombs at a time, and it takes around 45 minutes to walk the whole thing.  It’s 1.5 km, has over 200 stairs, and very uneven ground in poorly-lit conditions.  It takes awhile to go through it.  (From their brochure: “The Catacombs are not accessible for persons with reduced mobility.” They aren’t kidding.)

Having said that … it’s cool!  We were really glad we endured the line.

Limiting the number of people down there at one time means you can go through at your own pace and it’s not at all crowded.

Over 6 million people are entombed here.  The short history version:  During the late 1700s, the city was undergoing a lot of growth and the cemeteries located throughout central Paris were causing concern for public safety.  Also, the Catacombs (as we know them now) were actually abandoned 15th century limestone quarry tunnels that were beginning to collapse and causing a lot of trouble above-ground.  Something needed to be done, so they solved both problems by shoring up the tunnels and repurposing them as an ossuary.  They dug up most of the cemeteries in the city and moved the remains into the tunnels.  They’ve been a tourist attraction since the early 19th century when the Catacombs were opened to the public.

Each section is labeled with which cemetery the remains came from, as well as the date they were moved to the ossuary.

It’s weird to know that these used to be people.  These particular people died long before the United States even became a country.

From the brochure: The first bones were thrown here haphazardly into an abandoned quarry shaft.  It was only around the year 1810 that Hericart de Thury, Inspector General of the Quarries, developed this area.  The long bones and skulls were arranged decoratively to form a back wall behind which the other bones are piled.  These bone walls are called hagues, making reference to the walls built in the quarries using the stones remaining from the quarry operations.

Sign indicating from which Parisian cemetery the bones originated, and the date they were moved here — September 1850.

Back up in the world of the living.  We took a train to the Arc de Triomphe.  Below:  guy playing a harp in the metro station tunnel.  He was really good.

The Arc de Triomphe.  You can stand in line and pay to up (you can see people standing around the railings at the very top if you look closely) but we’re tired of going up things.  We admired it from the ground.

We ate an OK-but-not-great lunch at an Italian restaurant — we’ve had bad luck with Italian food in Paris.  Paris seems to be utterly fantastic for French food, and real spotty with any other type of cuisine.

The rest of the afternoon we walked and walked and walked down the Champs-Élysées.

Kids with Eiffel Tower and the Seine in the background.

I love these guys so much!!!

Cool old apartment building.

We’re back in the apartment now, pretty much done with our last day in Paris.  Adam has some work he has to do at 4:00 p.m. Paris time so we needed to be in this afternoon.  The kids and I are getting all packed up for tomorrow.  We plan to go downstairs to the restaurant below our apartment for one last dinner since we’re mostly out of groceries, but that will be it.

So long, Paris!