October 6, 2013
After Ramming about Reims, I was in Chalons for a whopping DAY before I once again left for greener pastures, in this case the Champ de Mars and Paris. On Thursday I went into Pierre Bayen, ate lunch, had my introductions with two classes, met almost all of the English professors, and then went home to finish unpacking my bag from Reims and repacking it for a long weekend in Paris-dise. Even though it meant living out of a suitcase for a few days again, I was ready for a real dose of Frenchness, of all things proper, and of black clothing. So at 4:16 on Thursday, just more than 24 hours after I arrived back in Chalons I was back on the train for a most spectacular ride into the city. Wound up would be an understatement of my level of excitement.
First, and most importantly, it meant I was leaving Chalons en Champagne and headed to one of my favorite places in the entire world, Paris. Secondly, it was a beautiful day. Thirdly, it was in the late afternoon. Fourthly, the French country side is really beautiful. And fifthly, the view of Sacre Coeur as the train started coming into Gare de l’Est was almost an almost existential experience. Not because it was beautiful (it was that too), but because it meant I was back in civilization. I don’t think I can really express how much I love Paris and how naïve I was to think that I could live in province (the country) after having already fallen in love with Paris and the Parisian lifestyle. We don’t need to get into that right now, but here’s a brief the view, even with the glare of the window, that really made my heart sing.
Sacre Coeur comes into view as I head into Paris
When I got off the train I was basically a madman and almost ran (obviously things were dire if I considered running) to the Métro. The only bummer of my first few minutes in Paris is that I sort of broke one of the feet off my carry-on suitcase but honestly, I was so excited to be in Paris that I pushed the foot back on and kept going. (Note to the madre: better research getting that fixed properly.) It was hotter than the hinges on the gates of hell in the Métro, but it was the best feeling getting off the Metro at Ranlagh, walking down the hill, and walking into my life as a wannabe Parisian.
I know I’ve said it before but I honestly cannot even begin to express how incredibly lucky I am to have had such a phenomenal relationship with my French host family; they are the best! I walked into the apartment and it was almost as though I’d never left. In fact, it’s actually sort of like going home now. I had wondered what I would do about dinner on the train ride into Paris, but I’d had a fairly large lunch, so I figured I could just find something really small in Paris if I got hungry.
As I was wheeling my crippled bag to “my” room I happened to glance in the dining room and noticed that the dining room table was set for three. Hmm, I thought, maybe somebody is coming for dinner. I was getting things out so I could take a shower when my French mother came in to hear mes nouvels (the latest of my life) and then she said, I hope you don’t mind, but for dinner I made a roast beef, potatoes, and I’m about to make a salad. I hope you don’t have any dinner plans. Mind? Why the hell would I mind about that? I haven’t had a home cooked meal since the last time I was in Paris and ate chez Cécile (about 10 days before) so talk of a home-cooked and HOT meal sounded like a song sent directly from heaven. (I wish I could say I was exaggerating, but I’m not.) Obviously I consented… not even reluctantly…
I took a shower, changed, and then went to tell my host mother more about my life as a Chalonais. I don’t know if she was more confused, terrified, shocked, or some combination of the above, but it was a reaction that could almost be described as visceral. She just kept looking at me and going, “Oh, mon pauvre. Oh, mon pauvre!” She told me that the clear solution would be to come to Paris on a weekly basis, but I think that’s a bit excessive, even if it is a good idea. It’s really reassuring to know, however, that the offer is there. She’s the best. (As though I didn’t already know that!)
When she found out how little I knew about news of the outside world she quickly went and gathered all the newspapers from the last few days, gave me the tv remote and I sat in the salon (living room) watching news on television, reading the French take on the shut down of the American government, and catching up on emails. Seriously, I’ve never been so happy in my entire life. The house smelled incredibly good from the roast beast in the oven, I had newspapers, television news, and could be in contact with the outside world. It all seems so trivial, but for me those are very important things, and I don’t think they’ve ever been so meaningful!
Dinner was incredible -obviously- and was followed by personal favorite dessert: cheese and more baguette. I was considering going out after dinner to go to Trocadéro to remind myself how beautiful the Eiffel Tower is and how much I love Paris, but in the middle of dinner it started pouring. Oh well, no outing for me, but it did give me time to send a few warning messages to friends in Paris that I was back in town and before long I had plans for Saturday.
The next day, Friday, I slept in a bit and then went to the marché for some fresh and delicious French food. Everything at the market looks so good and the entire experience is one that I love. The cheeseman, the olive man, the fruit man, the fish man, they’re all there and they all offer whatever is freshest at the moment. After the market I dropped my purchases off at the apartment and decided that I would go to the new exposition at the Musée d’Orsay that explores the use of the male form and masculinity in art between 1800 and the modern time. I saw the posters in the Métro when I was in Paris before and they looked incredible, so I was really excited to go. Unfortunately, I’d forgotten that for the Orsay you need to be there the moment it opens, not 3 hours later, if you want to actually enjoy yourself and the exhibit. Well I was way to late and the line was miles long. What does any good American do when the line is too long? Eat of course! And then plan a new attack. My new attack involved a trip to the Trinity campus to use the computer and get the address for the Picasso museum so I could stop by and see my friend Ann Lawson who works there. I knew roughly where it was, but I needed to reassure myself and make sure I didn’t get off at the wrong Métro stop. Before too long I was on the Métro headed toward the Picasso museum. Unfortunately she was in the archives that day playing touchy-feely with Picasso originals, so I went to my favorite museum in Paris, the Carnavalet, which is just around the corner. The Carnavalet is dedicated to the history of Paris, is free, and is full of period rooms, including two rooms dedicated to my favorite style of all time: the Art Nouveau. They’re soo good. My favorite room consists of the late 19th century jewelry store of G. Fouquet, both the exterior and the interior. Its sinuous forms are so natural yet so bizarre; everything seems to grow out of something else, and I don’t think there’s a straight line in the entire store. I could go on for ages about how much I love the Art Nouveau, but instead I’ll just let you decide for yourself.
Art Nouveau period room
The jewelry store of G. Fouquet.
The peacock was one of the many symbols of the Art Nouveau as it epitomized natural beauty. In many ways the Art Nouveau was a French interpretation of the English Aesthetic Movement, where the emphasis was on beauty for the sake of beauty, art for the sake of art.
How about that fireplace on the left?
Louis XVII (le Dauphin) at the Temple (the prison where he was kept) painted by Joseph-Marie Vien
A piece of copy-work by the Dauphin.
Translated it means:
Nationally loved, Ignore the dark pleasures of humans, Oh for they are very vain.
After the Carnavalet I went back to the 16th, changed, had a snack made from my purchases earlier in the day and then went to Montmartre to meet up with the teaching assistants from Chalons who came into Paris to celebrate Nuit Blanche the following night.
nom nom nom
Sacre Coeur at night
The next morning I had set up a plan to meet up with a fellow Trinity bantam, which I was looking forward to doing. It just so happens a guy I sort of knew (we lived on the same floor during my junior spring, after I came back from France) from Trinity moved to Paris in September so we made plans to meet up and go to the top of Notre Dame de Paris, which I’d never done. The next day I met up with Adamo and a European (Spanish, I think) friend of his but, finding the line too long to go to the top of the cathedral, we went to another one of my favorite Parisian sites: the Sainte-Chapelle. Since they both have European passports and are less than 25 it was free for them, but I’d left my passport back in the 16th Arrondissement. What I kept, however, was my (now expired) student ID card from SciencesPo, from when I was a student there in 2011. I pulled that sucker out and BOOM! I was in, and fo’ free, too!
Built as the private chapel for the French monarchy in the 13th century, the Sainte-Chapelle is probably one of the most impressive monuments to Gothic architecture EVER created. To understand why I say that, you need to understand that the entire goal of the Gothic movement was to reduce solid wall space in favor of glass. Looking at the interior of the chapel itself, at least the top ⅔ of the wallspace is glass and of that glass, about 70 percent is original which is a staggering proportion. I’ve been there a bunch of times before (I tend to revisit places that I love) so I only took a few pictures, but you get the idea.
After that we walked around a bit before splitting up. I grabbed a bite to eat from Crêpes d’Or, one of my favorite haunts in the 6th when I was studying in Paris and while eating I planned my attack for the afternoon. Since I was having a late lunch and we were supposed to meet some other language assistants around 3pm in the Luxembourg Gardens for a picnic on the grass, it didn’t really leave me with enough time to go home and relax, so I walked over toward the Louvre to go into the Carousel, which is the underground shopping center. I didn’t really need anything, but there are some really nice shops (including an Apple store - hello wifi!) and it gave me something to do while also forcing me to walk more. I did that for a while, then I got in the Métro and arrived at the Luxembourg gardens around 3. I didn’t see anybody that looked like Assistants at first, so I just sat in one of the chairs and watched the little kids as they played with the toy sailboats in the fountain. There were probably 20 or more sailboats in the fountain, and all I could think of was how much I would have loved that when I was little. Hell, I’d love to do it now, and for 3 Euros for a half hour, I almost did.
Without doubt, the kid who chose the pirate ship was the most badass kid in the gaden.
I started seeing groups of twenty-somethings showing up and figured it was the Assistants, but since I didn’t see MY group of Assistants, I stayed near the boats, which looked more interesting anyway. Enraptured by the sailboats (and the crowds, and the hustle and bustle of Paris), I didn’t even notice Sarah come up to me, let alone the entire group of Reims-area assistants on the other side of the fountain. As a group we went over and joined the 100+ Assistants from the Paris region on the grass and amused ourselves for a while before going off for a coffee in a Paris cafe. It was at this time that I called home to talk to new cousin-to be, Amanda, who was in the process of getting her hair done before her marriage to my cousin, Christopher. She sent me a few Snapchats of her dress and her shoes and other girly stuff that didn’t really matter to me (I would rather have been sent PHOTOS of the wedding - hinthinthint), but it was nice to say hey and welcome to the family. Hopefully Betty Ford Rehab has a big enough suite for the entire clan, her too, when the time comes…
Coffee completed, it was time to go home, shower, grab a bite, and get ready for Nuit Blanche. Oh, and get ahold of Christopher, who had proven elusive earlier in the day during my calling spree. Tasks completed and super quick dinner consumed, I was off to the Pompidou Centre to start my Nuit Blanche.
Literally translated, a nuit blanche is a white night, but it really means something like an all-nighter, where you don’t sleep at all. In Paris, and in other cities around Europe, Nuit Blanche is a night when the museums are open all (or almost all) of the night and when there are all night special art installations and exhibitions spread throughout the city. There are probably over a hundred events in Paris alone, so you need to pick and chose which ones look most interesting, usually choosing one part of the city and seeing a handful of events there.
I had arranged to meet up with Ann Lawson at 9:15 at the Hôtel de Ville and from there we would walk together to the Pompidou Centre to meet up with other Assistants at 9:30. In typical Willie (though in this case I guess I could call it Parisian) form, I was 10 minutes late, but we still made it to the fountain in time. Well, within 5 minutes of being on time… There were no assistants to be seen. None. We waited, and waited, and around 9:50 the first group showed up. So Ann Lawson and I decided that we would wait no longer for the second group and together with those who had arrived we visited the first installation.
Designed and carried out by a German, Thorsten Streichardt, this installation was contemporary art of the strangest degree. Really. You walked down multiple flights of stairs until you finally reached a landing where there was a man instructing you to make noise into a microphone. Awkwardly we all made various noises ranging from raps to grunts to anything in between. Then down another flight or two of stairs into a large room with a giant ring of paper set up in the center. Inside this ring of paper was a man in a kilt and a white turtle neck with two pencils drawing lines on the paper. Attached to the ring of paper were speakers and apparently somewhere there was somebody taking the sounds we made, remixing them into new orders and combinations, and then playing them for the man in the paper circle. In addition to these sounds, the pencils were also amplified so you could hear the sound of the graphite on the paper. It was super weird. And as far as art goes I didn’t get it. I tried to, but It was just too strange. It was, however, an interesting display of what could be done with technology.
Thoroughly perplexed by the state of art in the modern world after our first encounter, we exited expecting to find the rest of our TAPIF group. We looked, and looked, and still failed to find them. So we went into the next installation which happened to be at the church next door to the Pompidou Centre, St. Merri. Just another Gothic church in Paris, St. Merri had been completely transformed inside with the addition of hundreds of I.V. Drip bags hanging from the ceiling, each with a small light inside, and each with a long sprig of ivy coming out of it. (Get it? I.V. bag with ivy coming out? I thought it was clever.) Anyway, these bags were grouped in clusters hanging from sort of polygonal shapes hanging from the ceiling of the church which, in fact, sort of (abstractly) reflected the shapes and design of the vaulting. It was cool and the ambiance of the centuries old Gothic church filled with illuminated water bags and plants that swayed as visitors moved about was almost surreal.
Following our visit to St. Merri we once again waited for the arrival of the other assistants, who claimed to be nearby. They finally showed up, but one of them promptly went missing and by then I was all done waiting. I had a Nuit Blanche to celebrate, things to see, and I wasn’t going to be held up by missing people, so off I went, with a group of some people who were ready to do things. The next installation we saw, which was actually right next door the the church, was called A Game of Chess. A board had been made on the floor of an art gallery and people were brought inside to serve as the chess pieces. Two of the chess pieces, however, were a bit different: they consisted of a man and woman, completely naked and painted yellow. It was strange, and I don’t know how the artist intended viewers to interpret the piece… but it was -euhhh- unique.
I've heard of blue balls, but yellow... I don't know...
From there we went to the Mairie of the 4th Arrondissement (sort of like the town hall for a certain area of the city) where there were 2 installations. One of them was in a large, heavily ornamented room, and consisted of a black board on the floor with a pile of illuminated lightbulbs. The second was a very large cage in the center of an enormous room and within the cage was a megaphone. Both were a bit underwhelming to say the least.
From the 4th we walked to the Louvre where, apparently, the other assistants had ended up. Who knows whether they saw any exhibitions or not, but they found the Louvre. We got to the Louvre just in time to see the fireworks display over the Seine, which was beautiful and went on for quite a long time. Fireworks illuminated the Musée d’Orsay and between the explosions in the sky and the resulting smoke, the Eiffel Tower could be seen in the distance.
We made our way to the River just as the fireworks were ending and people were beginning to leave for their next adventure which was perfect as we got a fairly good view of the next show which began only a few minutes after the fireworks ended. This exhibition consisted of a very large boat in the center of the Seine, directly in front of the Musée d’Orsay, illuminated only with red light and peppered with small white tents. Around this boat circled much smaller boats which were only minimally illuminated with small white lights. In fact, the part that was best illuminated was the person driving the boat, as his entire costume was covered in white lights. These boats would, in unison, send off fireworks, sparklers, and other pyrotechnic things and all I could think about was watching Whale Warriors on television as Paul Watson and his team of nutjob heroes would antagonize the Japanese whaling ship. I could try to describe what I saw as far as the fireworks went, but pictures are more fun.
The next day, I woke up late and had the most wonderful feeling. I knew I could a) stay in bed and enjoy wifi there, b) get up, shower, and then enjoy wifi, c) go out on the town, or d) any combination thereof. Just knowing that I had all of Paris at my fingertips, and wifi too, and could do as I pleased was easily the best feeling I’ve had since the last time I was in Paris. I have so much stuff I should be doing (grad school stuff, planning for class lessons, planning for my upcoming vacation, etc), but the complete lack of wifi in Chalons makes almost all of it impossible. Realizing that I really needed to get some things done, I decided to stay home for a bit to wifi (a new verb in my vocabulary) and then I went for a walk to Trocadéro to enjoy the view of the Eiffel Tower, then down and around the Eiffel Tower, then I slowly meandered back to the 16th where I enjoyed a coffee before heading home to pack my bags and head back to Hell. I mean Chalons. It was such a beautiful day and I was so lucky to be able to enjoy it in Paris.
Bag dinner à la française
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