May 21, 2011: Paris - Gare du Lyon, Airport, Cars Rouges, Aquarium, Notre Dame, Dinner, Montmartre

Today I traded traveling partners - Mark came in to Paris for the weekend, and Mom headed back home to Canada.

We started off by meeting Mark at Gare de Lyon, where he came in on the TGV (just over 3 hours - more than twice as fast as driving!). It's a huge station with more than one set of platforms, so I parked Mom on a bench and wandered about for quite some time, figuring out where he'd be coming in (and discovering the locations of the Left Luggage depot and the airport shuttle while I was at it).

When Mark arrived we got on the airport shuttle to drop Mom off. It's good that we had as much time as we did, as it was a long and convoluted walk from our bus drop-off to the actual departure desk in the terminal. But once we got there it was straightforward, and the woman at the desk had a strikingly familiar-sounding Toronto accent.

With Mom off in the air Mark and I headed back downtown. We rode about on the Cars Rouges, since I still had day 2 of the tickets available. It was hotter and sunnier than the day before, so we welcomed a chance to escape to cool darkness by visiting CinéAqua, the Paris aquarium. It's not the best aquarium we've ever visited, but it was fairly decent (and better than our disappointment with the aquarium in Washington DC).

We had time for a visit to the interior of Notre Dame Cathedral. It's such a popular site that the line-up to enter was quite long, and then visiting the inside was a fairly tedious experience of squeezing along between the crowds. But it was beautiful and dramatically huge - although I noticed that the windows were not as ornate or uniform in style as they were at Chartres. The nearby streets were fun to walk around - some of the few we'd seen in Paris with the small pedestrian-only character of other cities in Europe. Most of Paris is so grand and large that it can seem a bit alienating after a while - Mark and I agreed that it's nice to visit but not for us to live there.

We returned to our hotel where we were met by Clémence for dinner. She'd picked out a good French restaurant for us which was, happily, in another pedestrian-only neighbourhood. We ate a fantastic meal of rich French food: marrow, charcuterie, escargots, roast pork with honey, and veal. Sadly no room for desert - we were truly full.

After dinner we went for an ambitious walk across Paris up the hills of Montmartre (poor Clémence - she was wearing fabulous-looking heels, unlike me in my sensible sandals). Sacré-Coeur church was pretty amazing at night - gleaming white and lit up against the dark night sky. We had a drink at a café with a view of the church, then walked around it to take photographs. In front of the church people were drinking and partying on the steps, with a view of Paris spread out beneath them. It's one of the few places in France where permissive public drinking has backfired - there was broken glass underfoot everywhere. Ah well. We took the funicular train back down the hill (fun!) and the Metro back to our hotel.

 

Up close with a ray

 

Beautiful underwater colours

 

Shark nursery!

 

The gargoyles of Notre Dame de Paris seem particularly menacing

 

A coppery green spear amongst Notre Dame's statuary

 

Afternoon sunlight streams into Notre Dame (aided by some strategically placed spotlights)

 

The enormous interior of Notre Dame (note how the nave doesn't follow an entirely straight path; I learned at the National Cathedral in Washington DC that this is done to help create the illusion that it is longer than it really is)

 

Walking the pedestrian streets of the St Michel neighbourhood

 

One of the famous Metro entrances

 

Gargoyle of Sacré-Coeur springs out against the night sky

 

The tower, all in white, seems as intricate as lace in this lighting

 

Late night partiers on the steps of Sacré-Coeur

 

The view of Paris below

May 20, 2011: Paris - Chartres Small and Big, Cars Rouges, Seine Dinner

After a couple of busy days in the big city of Paris I thought we could use a little break, so I booked us train tickets to the town of Chartres, about an hour away. My friend Clémence, a Parisian native (who I got to know while she was doing chemistry research work last year in Toronto) joined us for the outing, which was great. We met at the Montparnasse train station and caught up on the news of the last half year since she moved back to France.

Our first destination in Chartres was not the famous cathedral - it was the lesser-known Maison Picasiette. This is a very quirky little house, decorated by its owner, Raymonde Isidore, with pottery shards over many decades. Who knows how he got started, but he never stopped - walls, furniture, kitchen appliances - everything is covered in a mosaic of scavenged pottery pieces. You can see that this obsession was deeply meaningful to him, and it is a very personal, touching experience to walk through the house's rooms and gardens. Unfortunately no photographs were allowed; it would have been fantastic to record some of the odd little discoveries within his creation.

After the Maison we visited Chartres' main attraction - its cathedral. It doesn't have the most awe-inspiring interior, as its medieval design doesn't soar as high or let in as much light as later cathedral designs permitted. What is amazing about it is its stained-glass windows - few cathedrals in Europe have such an extensive of original medieval windows left intact after the centuries of wars, vandalism and religious reformations. We really benefited from going on the guided tour led by Malcolm Miller, an art historian who has been at the cathedral for over 50 years, studying its windows and leading tours (as he pointed out, it is rare that he leads a tour these days that someone's parents or grandparents didn't attend). He was a very funny man, with quick-witted quips and insights into the cathedral's decoration. He took us in detail through just one of the many windows (teaching us that the decoration is read from bottom to top) and explaining the historical context for the window - what it meant to medieval audiences, who paid for the window and why. He also took us to one of the exterior portals and explained in detail some of the sculpture.

The cathedral is currently undergoing extensive renovation (which will take far longer to complete than it originally took the cathedral to be built - which was remarkably less than 30 years in the mid-thirteenth century), so we didn't have a view of the large rose window, but we did get to appreciate the dramatic difference in the recently cleaned gleaming white stone and bright windows, compared to the dark and gloomy dirty stone and soot-stained glass - you would actually think the cleaned portion of the cathedral was rebuilt from new material, rather than just cleaned up.

Then back to Paris! As a free benefit from our tour the day before of Versailles and Giverny we had two-day passes to Les Cars Rouges, an open-top double-decker bus tour of Paris. It was a great way to see the city - English audio guide of the sights passing by, and good weather for sitting up top (a bit overcast so not too hot). We rode along for over an hour until we got to the Eiffel Tower, then hopped off to walk up close for some photographs. We were also hungry, so got a snack from the limited food options available there. I thought we were going to be able to get some French fries, but they were sold out - we had to settle for a hot dog. Doesn't it seem ironic to eat such a typically American food as a hot dog under the Eiffel Tower? Although it wasn't a fully Americanized hot dog - it was a wiener with a thin coating of ketchup inside a hollowed-out baguette.

Then we continued our tour, hopping off again for a quick admiring look at the exterior of Notre Dame Cathedral, then walking down the river to our evening's activity - a dinner cruise on the Seine. The food wasn't that great (just a cut above airline food) but the view was fantastic - sitting in big comfy leather chairs facing out onto the water, as we passed under bridge after bridge.

 

Chartres old and new - uncleaned to the left and newly restored to the right

 

Not the large rose window, but impressive nonetheless

 

The window that our guide explained - the stories of the Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, and the Good Samaritan

 

A trace of green paint remains on this dragon  (the sculptures would have originally been brightly painted polychrome)

 

Mary's soul ascends to heaven (see the tiny torso being lifted up by angels in the upper right?)

 

Mom keenly photographs the sights of Paris from atop Les Cars Rouges

 

A fountain (this is the problem with photographing from a moving vehicle - no opportunity to photograph an accompanying sign to record which fountain it is)

 

A view down the Champs Élysées to the Arc de Triomphe

 

Gold statue (atop the Opera House I think)

 

Strange "bubbles" in this plaza - they look like they might be some kind of art performance tents?

 

Don't remember what this one was - must do some research...

 

Alarmingly spiky projections separating balconies on a typical Parisian residence

 

An obelisk

 

A view along the Seine

 

Tourists atop the Arc de Triomphe (their tiny size shows how large the Arc really is)

 

Rounding about the Arc in the insane traffic of the roundabout at Place d'Étoile

 

No explanation needed

 

One of the few interesting examples of contemporary architecture in the city centre

 

Odd to see a British mini here

 

The Eiffel tower, fading into the distance

 

The elevator ascending the tower

 

Directly underneath - it is enormous

 

Another great building seen on the tour, but I don't know what it is...

 

Lover's locks on a bridge (couples mark them with their initials and lock them on) - apparently they were all cut off a year ago, but have since reappeared

 

One of the Seine's many beautiful bridges

 

Notre Dame

 

Flood marker on the embankment along the Seine

 

Couples picnicking along the Seine

 

Inside our cruise boat

 

Many people waved to our passing boat

 

A nice car on a moored boat - it looks like many of the boats are full-time dwellings

 

We didn't get to see the Eiffel Tower lit up at night (sorry Mom) but with the magic of Photoshop you might almost think we did!

May 19, 2011: Paris - Versailles, Giverny, Musée d'Orsay

Today was our big tour day - fitting in both Versailles and Giverny. Sure, it seemed crazy, but I figured we could only handle so much of a grand palace like Versailles, and that the smaller scale of Monet's gardens at Giverny would be a good contrast. Plus, the extra time on the bus would give us a chance to rest up and conserve our energy for a late night visit to the Musée d'Orsay, the only museum open late on a Thursday evening.

So we started off at 8am. We had scouted out our departure point the night before, so had no problem finding the bus. At Versailles we entered quickly, with little time spent in line (a bonus in going with a tour). We were given audio guide headsets in English, and left to our own devices for the next four hours. We preferred this to the guided tours we saw, where all the participants had to keep pace with their guide. Many of the rooms were crowded, so it was nice to speed through those and spend more time in the less crowded rooms, catching up on what we'd sped through by listening to the information on the audio guide. As we moved on to the less grand (but still impressive) Dauphin's apartments the space emptied out considerably, and we enjoyed listening to the details of what life was like living in the palace.

After visiting the palace we went outside and took the Petit Train around the grounds. The gardens are truly enormous, and it would have taken forever to walk the distance that we covered by train. In addition to the picnic lunch that we brought with us we also ate a delicious baked potato from a baked potato stand. Then we hopped back on the train to see some of the fountains (only turned on Saturdays - unfortunate) and then returned to the front to await our bus. We met some of our fellow tour participants (who recognized me by my red dress) - Americans on their second visit to Paris.

The bus was late arriving, which was unfortunate, as it cut into our time to visit Giverny. Also unfortunate was that the air conditioning on the bus had stopped working, making for a hot ride whenever traffic slowed down the wind. But Giverny was lovely - it was quite surreal to walk around in the setting of so many familiar paintings. And the garden was in full bloom - it is marvellous that this place that Monet worked so long on creating has been preserved and opened to the public. It's also a real contrast to Versailles, which was all trimmed and regimented greenery - Giverny is unbridled colour spilling over everywhere. There's a long underground tunnel to reach it from the parking lot; in the past there were problems with tourists dashing across the train tracks. I was also able to impress our new American friends with my ability to order ice cream in French.

In the evening we had another quick dinner at a brasserie, then a short visit to the Musée d'Orsay. Although we had less than half the time that we had at the Louvre, it was a better visit - the museum wasn't as exhaustingly large, and Mom enjoyed the more modern art collection. I also managed to sneak a surreptitious photo - they aren't allowed, but the beautiful interior (a former railway station, converted into the gallery) really deserved to be remembered.

 

The famous Hall of Mirrors at Versailles

 

Mom poses in front of one of the mirrors

 

A statue of Napoleon I

 

I love the checkerboard flooring - it emphasizes the immense distances

 

An enormous hall of paintings

 

Politicians' chairs (not thrones, although they're not far off)

 

A ceiling painting under restoration ends up with a pixelated effect

 

An amazing globe, with an exterior map of the world, interior map of the heavens, and a topographical relief representation of the world on an inner globe

 

A study with beautiful lacquer decoration on the walls

 

 

A view of the Palace of Versailles from across the enormous lawns

 

A fountain, beautiful even without the water in action

 

A swan had made itself a nest on one of the docks

 

A view through one of the ornate gates

 Rooftop decoration

 

A majestic alley of trees

 

A sheep herd huddles under a tree - Versailles still has aspects of a country farming estate 

 

Monet's house at Giverny

 

Fantastic peonies in bloom

 

Mom poses on one of the famous Japanese-style bridges

 

A close-up of a fantastic purple flower (I have no idea what it is)

 

Iconic view of waterlilies and a bridge (if only there weren't so many tourists in it...)

 

A rhinoceros sculpture by Alfred Jacquemart outside the Musée d'Orsay

 

My secret photo of the interior of the Musée d'Orsay