Ten Little Chances to be Free (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tenlittlebullets) wrote2008-08-18 01:37 pm
tenlittlebullets) wrote2008-08-18 01:37 pm
GIANT PARIS RECAP.
Oh god. So, I am home from Paris and I totally neglected to update on the whole second half of the trip. This entry is going to be gargantuan--when did I leave off? Last Wednesday?
Okay, so Thursday we went to Versailles. It was very pretty and 18th-century and gilded and also packed with tourists, and despite my healthy appreciation for the pretty it really wasn't my kind of thing. We did get pocketwatches in the gift shop, though! With little fleurs-de-lis on them, probably put there just to make me feel like a filthy aristo for buying one. And then at some point on Friday or Saturday we went to the Petit-Palais, which was also ridiculously beautiful and kinda earns its status as the Quasi-Gay Museum. Lots of nudes, lots of women in positions of ecstasy, and generally more for ogling than appreciation of art. Then we went to the Musée d'Orsay, where I wandered around looking at the Art Nouveau section while![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mmejavert went off looking for her pre-Impressionists. Afterwards we hung out in the Tuileries gardens for a while and wandered over to the little amusement park at the north end. We rode the Ferris wheel--which gives the most perfect view of Montmartre of all the lookout points I've been to, high enough to see but not so much you lose the sense of the hill--and then, because we are little kids at heart, we went on the swing ride. And that just put us in a ridiculously good mood for the rest of the night, because honestly, who isn't in a good mood after whirling through the air giggling like a loon for ten minutes? And to cap off the good mood we found shinies at one of the bouquiniste stalls by the river (Les Mis in French for mmejavert, Sand and Balzac and Voltaire for me), and hung out on the Ile Saint-Louis eating Berthillon ice cream and reading aloud from LM. Berthillon is heavenly, you guys, omg. I got raspberry-rose and cherry sorbet, and the cherry had little chunks of dark chocolate in it.
Sunday we met up withmisatheredpanda again for the Victor Hugo museum. Which I went to last year but it was totally worth a revisit, since they change their exhibits every season. This time they had a bunch of engravings from an early theatrical version of Notre-Dame de Paris, which were alternately gorgeous and hilarious. And we took silly pictures of ourselves putting bunny ears on a bust of Hugo. Lunch was at this place called the Café Hugo which had incredibly good-looking waitstaff, and then we wandered. Past Carnavalet which we saved for a later date, past a fragment of the wall of La Force, into L'Occitane en Provence (the French stores are always cooler and more tempting than the American outposts), and then into the Jewish section of the Marais. This was freaking heaven for one such as I who is violently allergic to milk, because there are kosher bakeries. I finally got to eat French pastries! Om nom nom. More wandering, through streets that became increasingly rainbow-tinted, and then we found Mariage Frères. For those not familiar, Mariage Frères is one of the best gourmet tea companies in existence, and we left the store with €22 worth of tea each--staying far, far away from the tearoom and the Museum of Tea, as we would've emerged flat broke. Eventually we made it to Saint-Merry for a concert at 4:00, which turned out to be a boy soprano singing classic art song rep. He had iffy breath control and muddy pitch, but gorgeous, full, beautiful tone, none of that reedy sound you sometimes get with boy sopranos. After the concert we geeked out at Saint-Merry for a while, managing to find exactly one reference to June 1832 in the whole literature on the history of the church, and headed off to Procope again.
Procope... oh my god. XD They had absinthe, not the real stuff but the closest they can get that's legal to sell in France, and they made a whole show of serving it the traditional way, with the slotted spoon and the sugar cube and, I kid you not, an ice-water fountain with tiny little spigots to let you drip the water down onto the ice cube. And the dessert was, fittingly, utterly decadent--crème brûlée and a plate of fruit smothered in black cherry sorbet to rival Berthillon's. Absinthe led to talk of Verlaine and Rimbaud, which I think led to Oscar Wilde via a bond of common buttsex, at which point our neighbor at the next table broke in with "Did you just say Oscar Wilde?" It turned out he was Irish. XD So we talked politics for a while, and he and his wife tried to figure out where in Ireland my family was from based solely on my mother's maiden name, and we finally left after swearing up and down that we would read James Joyce and visit Dublin someday. It was slightly surreal, the more so because I think I drank too much absinthe.
Monday was the Conciergerie and the Panthéon, Tuesday we went up the Eiffel Tower. (I have no idea why I did this, as heights make my knees turn to jelly.) After that we made the mistake of walking to the rue Oudinot, formerly the rue Plumet, because "it looks like such a short distance on the map!" Ha, not really. But when we finally got there I found, I swear to god, a secret garden at the end of the street, all boarded-up and abandoned looking, and through one of the tiny cracks in the gate I saw the garden and a house. It was on the wrong side of the street to be Valjean's house, but it still made me ridiculously happy. Then Tuesday afternoon was Carnavalet, aka the history of Paris museum. Oh, it was sheer joy, I tell you. The 17th- and 18th-century rooms were honestly kinda boring, mostly furniture and portraits of people I didn't know, with the notable exception of a clock that depicted Rousseau and Voltaire about to get into a fistfight. The Revolution collection, however, was so happy-making. They had a model of the Bastille carved out of one of the stones of the actual fortress, and a wall-sized placard of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and decimal-time pocketwatches, and all these personal possessions of the revolutionaries. (Including! Danton's shaving kit, Camille Desmoulins' inkwell, a lock of Robespierre's hair, and a pistol that belonged to Saint-Just.) The 19th century collections weren't quite as awesome, but they did have a giant diorama of a street scene on the last day of the 1830 revolution.
Wednesday we went to the Sewer Museum in the morning, and then the Palais Garnier which I actually didn't like as much as I thought I would. I mean, it was pretty but jesus, there's such a thing as too much gold. Excessive much? Afternoon was a sadly short visit to the Louvre; we basically saw some of the 19th century paintings, some of the Greek sculpture, and the hall of Great Big Famous Paintings where we took each other's pictures next to Liberty Leading the People. Yes, we're geeks. Then we metmisatheredpanda in the Latin quarter and went book shopping. We ended up on the top floor of Gilbert Jeune ogling the Bibliothèque de la Pléïade collection (whence comes my annotated Brick) and the prettily bound old hardcovers, with the result that mmejavert walked out with a Pléïade edition of the complete works of Dante and I got George Sand's Consuelo. Somehow after dinner we ended up in front of Notre-Dame, huddled under a scavenged airline blanket because it was cold and windy, saying our goodbyes because it was Laurel's last day in Paris.
Thursday was our last day in Paris, and surprisingly there wasn't a ten-mile-long list of stuff we still hadn't done. We went to the Musée de la Vie Romantique, which is in the former house of this painter called Ary Scheffer and full of George Sand's old belongings. The museum itself was cute but not utterly fascinating, but the house and the garden are just gorgeous, and part of the garden is a tea salon. So we had a nice leisurely morning admiring the garden and drinking tea, then we took the Métro back to the Marais and got more kosher pastries. (Mmmm, croissants. And apple tart.) And we did some more wandering for old time's sake, past the rue de la Verrerie (the wine bar at No. 16 is closed "for technical reasons," but there was a cat hanging around in the doorway and we stopped to pet it) and Saint-Merry and back to the site of the barricade. There are a lot of cheap shops between Châtelet and les Halles, so we took the opportunity to spend some of our remaining euros. Then we split:mmejavert went back to the apartment to pack and relax, and I took the RER out to Montfermeil.
Since Montfermeil doesn't have its own RER stop, you have to get off at a neighboring town and take the bus. Last year I got off at le Raincy/Villemobile and the bus took me through some pretty skeevy neighborhoods, so this time I went all the way to Chelles. The bus ride was shorter and comparatively pleasant--more cottages and gardens, fewer housing projects--but the Fontaine Jean Valjean stop is actually a ten-minute walk uphill to the fountain. Sigh. But I didn't get lost this time and the fountain is in much better repair now; last year it was a scummy trickle at the end of a scrubby yard full of weeds and tall grass. This time it was much cleaner, the grass was freshly mowed, and there were some straggly wildflowers near the edge of the fountain. Still, I swear I have the weirdest timing on my Montfermeil trips. Last year I was looking for the Parc and Fontaine Jean Valjean, right when the whole area got renovated and changed around to make room for a new arboretum. This year I was looking for the Place de la Halle, since the Thénardier inn would've been off on a side street, and the whole thing was a walled-off construction site. I did get some nice pictures of old condemned buildings that could well have been there since the early 19th century, but still, what weird luck. And on my way back to the bus some fellow goth chicks recognized one of their own and tried to bum cigarettes off me. Heh.
Friday, our return day, was just hell on wheels. The guy who was supposed to pick up the key to the apartment never showed up (when we finally got through to him on his cell phone, he turned out to be stuck in traffic outside Paris), and even though he told us to just leave the key in the letterbox, by that time we were so hideously late that our transport-to-CDG plans were shot to hell and we had to pay €50 for a taxi straight to the airport. Even so, we skidded into the gate at final boarding call, only to endure a nine-hour flight with uncomfortable seats, inedible food, no legroom, and two screaming babies in the next row over. A nine-hour flight that sat on the runway for an hour and then flew a route that took us somewhere over Greenland, thus arriving so late as to utterly destroy our cushy two-hour layover in Philadelphia. We had forty-five minutes to deplane, clear immigration, collect our checked baggage, clear customs, re-check our baggage and pray it wouldn't get sent to Denver by mistake, go through security again, and once more skid into the gate at final boarding call. Ugh. And as it turned out, the plane we were on for our half-hour hop from Philly to DC was several orders of magnitude more comfortable than the transatlantic sardine can. There was even legroom!
One amusing aspect of the return voyage, though: I had bought so many books in Paris that there was literally no room in my suitcase for most of my clothes. As a result I had to wear most of it in layers on the flight home. The French airport-security screeners, seeing me approach in three layers of flouncy black skirts, ruffly black tops, a (non-steel-boned) corset, and a top hat, immediately asked me if I was an actress. XD American TSA just sort of glares at you no matter how you're dressed.
And now I am back home, eating junk food and reading a biography of Condorcet and recovering from jetlag. Also, omg, I have to be packed for Smith by Friday. And hopefully get in a trip to Québec during the week. This is going to be insane.
Okay, so Thursday we went to Versailles. It was very pretty and 18th-century and gilded and also packed with tourists, and despite my healthy appreciation for the pretty it really wasn't my kind of thing. We did get pocketwatches in the gift shop, though! With little fleurs-de-lis on them, probably put there just to make me feel like a filthy aristo for buying one. And then at some point on Friday or Saturday we went to the Petit-Palais, which was also ridiculously beautiful and kinda earns its status as the Quasi-Gay Museum. Lots of nudes, lots of women in positions of ecstasy, and generally more for ogling than appreciation of art. Then we went to the Musée d'Orsay, where I wandered around looking at the Art Nouveau section while
mmejavert went off looking for her pre-Impressionists. Afterwards we hung out in the Tuileries gardens for a while and wandered over to the little amusement park at the north end. We rode the Ferris wheel--which gives the most perfect view of Montmartre of all the lookout points I've been to, high enough to see but not so much you lose the sense of the hill--and then, because we are little kids at heart, we went on the swing ride. And that just put us in a ridiculously good mood for the rest of the night, because honestly, who isn't in a good mood after whirling through the air giggling like a loon for ten minutes? And to cap off the good mood we found shinies at one of the bouquiniste stalls by the river (Les Mis in French for mmejavert, Sand and Balzac and Voltaire for me), and hung out on the Ile Saint-Louis eating Berthillon ice cream and reading aloud from LM. Berthillon is heavenly, you guys, omg. I got raspberry-rose and cherry sorbet, and the cherry had little chunks of dark chocolate in it.Sunday we met up with
misatheredpanda again for the Victor Hugo museum. Which I went to last year but it was totally worth a revisit, since they change their exhibits every season. This time they had a bunch of engravings from an early theatrical version of Notre-Dame de Paris, which were alternately gorgeous and hilarious. And we took silly pictures of ourselves putting bunny ears on a bust of Hugo. Lunch was at this place called the Café Hugo which had incredibly good-looking waitstaff, and then we wandered. Past Carnavalet which we saved for a later date, past a fragment of the wall of La Force, into L'Occitane en Provence (the French stores are always cooler and more tempting than the American outposts), and then into the Jewish section of the Marais. This was freaking heaven for one such as I who is violently allergic to milk, because there are kosher bakeries. I finally got to eat French pastries! Om nom nom. More wandering, through streets that became increasingly rainbow-tinted, and then we found Mariage Frères. For those not familiar, Mariage Frères is one of the best gourmet tea companies in existence, and we left the store with €22 worth of tea each--staying far, far away from the tearoom and the Museum of Tea, as we would've emerged flat broke. Eventually we made it to Saint-Merry for a concert at 4:00, which turned out to be a boy soprano singing classic art song rep. He had iffy breath control and muddy pitch, but gorgeous, full, beautiful tone, none of that reedy sound you sometimes get with boy sopranos. After the concert we geeked out at Saint-Merry for a while, managing to find exactly one reference to June 1832 in the whole literature on the history of the church, and headed off to Procope again.Procope... oh my god. XD They had absinthe, not the real stuff but the closest they can get that's legal to sell in France, and they made a whole show of serving it the traditional way, with the slotted spoon and the sugar cube and, I kid you not, an ice-water fountain with tiny little spigots to let you drip the water down onto the ice cube. And the dessert was, fittingly, utterly decadent--crème brûlée and a plate of fruit smothered in black cherry sorbet to rival Berthillon's. Absinthe led to talk of Verlaine and Rimbaud, which I think led to Oscar Wilde via a bond of common buttsex, at which point our neighbor at the next table broke in with "Did you just say Oscar Wilde?" It turned out he was Irish. XD So we talked politics for a while, and he and his wife tried to figure out where in Ireland my family was from based solely on my mother's maiden name, and we finally left after swearing up and down that we would read James Joyce and visit Dublin someday. It was slightly surreal, the more so because I think I drank too much absinthe.
Monday was the Conciergerie and the Panthéon, Tuesday we went up the Eiffel Tower. (I have no idea why I did this, as heights make my knees turn to jelly.) After that we made the mistake of walking to the rue Oudinot, formerly the rue Plumet, because "it looks like such a short distance on the map!" Ha, not really. But when we finally got there I found, I swear to god, a secret garden at the end of the street, all boarded-up and abandoned looking, and through one of the tiny cracks in the gate I saw the garden and a house. It was on the wrong side of the street to be Valjean's house, but it still made me ridiculously happy. Then Tuesday afternoon was Carnavalet, aka the history of Paris museum. Oh, it was sheer joy, I tell you. The 17th- and 18th-century rooms were honestly kinda boring, mostly furniture and portraits of people I didn't know, with the notable exception of a clock that depicted Rousseau and Voltaire about to get into a fistfight. The Revolution collection, however, was so happy-making. They had a model of the Bastille carved out of one of the stones of the actual fortress, and a wall-sized placard of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and decimal-time pocketwatches, and all these personal possessions of the revolutionaries. (Including! Danton's shaving kit, Camille Desmoulins' inkwell, a lock of Robespierre's hair, and a pistol that belonged to Saint-Just.) The 19th century collections weren't quite as awesome, but they did have a giant diorama of a street scene on the last day of the 1830 revolution.
Wednesday we went to the Sewer Museum in the morning, and then the Palais Garnier which I actually didn't like as much as I thought I would. I mean, it was pretty but jesus, there's such a thing as too much gold. Excessive much? Afternoon was a sadly short visit to the Louvre; we basically saw some of the 19th century paintings, some of the Greek sculpture, and the hall of Great Big Famous Paintings where we took each other's pictures next to Liberty Leading the People. Yes, we're geeks. Then we met
misatheredpanda in the Latin quarter and went book shopping. We ended up on the top floor of Gilbert Jeune ogling the Bibliothèque de la Pléïade collection (whence comes my annotated Brick) and the prettily bound old hardcovers, with the result that mmejavert walked out with a Pléïade edition of the complete works of Dante and I got George Sand's Consuelo. Somehow after dinner we ended up in front of Notre-Dame, huddled under a scavenged airline blanket because it was cold and windy, saying our goodbyes because it was Laurel's last day in Paris.Thursday was our last day in Paris, and surprisingly there wasn't a ten-mile-long list of stuff we still hadn't done. We went to the Musée de la Vie Romantique, which is in the former house of this painter called Ary Scheffer and full of George Sand's old belongings. The museum itself was cute but not utterly fascinating, but the house and the garden are just gorgeous, and part of the garden is a tea salon. So we had a nice leisurely morning admiring the garden and drinking tea, then we took the Métro back to the Marais and got more kosher pastries. (Mmmm, croissants. And apple tart.) And we did some more wandering for old time's sake, past the rue de la Verrerie (the wine bar at No. 16 is closed "for technical reasons," but there was a cat hanging around in the doorway and we stopped to pet it) and Saint-Merry and back to the site of the barricade. There are a lot of cheap shops between Châtelet and les Halles, so we took the opportunity to spend some of our remaining euros. Then we split:
mmejavert went back to the apartment to pack and relax, and I took the RER out to Montfermeil.Since Montfermeil doesn't have its own RER stop, you have to get off at a neighboring town and take the bus. Last year I got off at le Raincy/Villemobile and the bus took me through some pretty skeevy neighborhoods, so this time I went all the way to Chelles. The bus ride was shorter and comparatively pleasant--more cottages and gardens, fewer housing projects--but the Fontaine Jean Valjean stop is actually a ten-minute walk uphill to the fountain. Sigh. But I didn't get lost this time and the fountain is in much better repair now; last year it was a scummy trickle at the end of a scrubby yard full of weeds and tall grass. This time it was much cleaner, the grass was freshly mowed, and there were some straggly wildflowers near the edge of the fountain. Still, I swear I have the weirdest timing on my Montfermeil trips. Last year I was looking for the Parc and Fontaine Jean Valjean, right when the whole area got renovated and changed around to make room for a new arboretum. This year I was looking for the Place de la Halle, since the Thénardier inn would've been off on a side street, and the whole thing was a walled-off construction site. I did get some nice pictures of old condemned buildings that could well have been there since the early 19th century, but still, what weird luck. And on my way back to the bus some fellow goth chicks recognized one of their own and tried to bum cigarettes off me. Heh.
Friday, our return day, was just hell on wheels. The guy who was supposed to pick up the key to the apartment never showed up (when we finally got through to him on his cell phone, he turned out to be stuck in traffic outside Paris), and even though he told us to just leave the key in the letterbox, by that time we were so hideously late that our transport-to-CDG plans were shot to hell and we had to pay €50 for a taxi straight to the airport. Even so, we skidded into the gate at final boarding call, only to endure a nine-hour flight with uncomfortable seats, inedible food, no legroom, and two screaming babies in the next row over. A nine-hour flight that sat on the runway for an hour and then flew a route that took us somewhere over Greenland, thus arriving so late as to utterly destroy our cushy two-hour layover in Philadelphia. We had forty-five minutes to deplane, clear immigration, collect our checked baggage, clear customs, re-check our baggage and pray it wouldn't get sent to Denver by mistake, go through security again, and once more skid into the gate at final boarding call. Ugh. And as it turned out, the plane we were on for our half-hour hop from Philly to DC was several orders of magnitude more comfortable than the transatlantic sardine can. There was even legroom!
One amusing aspect of the return voyage, though: I had bought so many books in Paris that there was literally no room in my suitcase for most of my clothes. As a result I had to wear most of it in layers on the flight home. The French airport-security screeners, seeing me approach in three layers of flouncy black skirts, ruffly black tops, a (non-steel-boned) corset, and a top hat, immediately asked me if I was an actress. XD American TSA just sort of glares at you no matter how you're dressed.
And now I am back home, eating junk food and reading a biography of Condorcet and recovering from jetlag. Also, omg, I have to be packed for Smith by Friday. And hopefully get in a trip to Québec during the week. This is going to be insane.