27 October 2013
This is the first of three entries that will be dedicated to Nancy. This will be on Nancy as a whole, random things I did, and food.
As I mentioned last time, I spent two and a half days this week in the lovely city of Nancy, France last week. I’d never been to Nancy before, but I’d read a lot about it and decided I really had to go visit. After my departure from Chalons and only a few days in Paris to recharge my batteries a bit, I was looking forward to seeing Nancy and being a thoroughbred tourist rather than a wannabe Parisian.
I packed my backpack (LL Bean, 2006, for the win) on Tuesday morning (since my carry-on suitcase is being repaired after a minor boo-boo on a trip from Chalons to Paris), and went to Gare de l’Est shortly after noon on Tuesday. Since I gave myself plenty of time, I found myself walking around the train station and was a bit surprised to turn a corner and see a great big piano in the middle of one section with a man playing it. Apparently it is some sort of incentive to get travelers to relax for a minute and do something creative. Sure enough, this man had just stopped in the middle of his day, sat down at the piano, and was surprisingly talented! As in really good. There were loads of people stopping, taking videos, and watching and it was a really nice change from the normal hustle-bustle of a train station. Oh, and definitely something you would never seen in America!
I got on my train, a TGV (train de grande vitesse - a really fast train) and just more than 90 minutes later I was in Nancy. I love the French train system. It’s so pleasant and there’s something about zipping through the French countryside that is just so appealing to me. Stupidly I had not printed out a map of Nancy but I had a pretty good sense of where my hotel was in the scheme of things, and I had an address, so I used my Spidey-senses to start feeling my way down toward my hotel. Before long I found my hotel, the Hotel au New York, put my things inside, and got a map. The Hotel was only an 8 to 10 minute walk from the very center of the city and my room was small but perfect for me. I also had an enormous bathroom - so big that it actually competed with the bedroom in terms of square footage. For the price I paid per night, I think I did very very well with my choice of hotels.
Since I didn’t arrive until late afternoon, I didn’t think I had time to do any museums so I just sort of wandered around the city and was pleasantly amazed by how beautiful it was. The central square, Place Stanislas, was beyond gorgeous. Surrounded on all four sides by large 18th century buildings, it was truly a vision of beauty, day and night.
Morning
Afternoon
Night
Hôtel de Ville en bleu
Purple Hôtel de Ville
Beaux Arts Museum at night
Stanislas keeping watch over things
Apparently, into the 1980s the central square was used as a giant parking lot but, following a movement that is currently been seen throughout France, the city government decided to return the city center to a pedestrian only zone and it’s wonderful. They re-installed the amazing gates that had been removed to allow cars to access the square, installed very beautiful nighttime lighting, and really made it a gathering place rather than a parking lot.
1980s chic - or not
Today
The fountain in one corner of the Place Stanislas with the gates going to the public garden beyond.
NOTE: There are more people in this photo that I would see in 2 weeks in Chalons
Same fountain in the early morning
There was a really neat public art/garden display in the Place Stanislas - this section featured carrots
All that glitters is gold
The square had people in it at all hours, and I don’t really think they were all tourists. There were little nursery school kids with their teachers who came to look at the garden installations and temporary fountains. There were grandparents pushing strollers, there were students reading books (whoa, shocker: people still read in France) and playing on their iPhones (yeah they are iPhone addicts, too). It was really a place where the locals actually came. During my time in Nancy there were dozens of high school or university aged students out in the city with huge drawing boards all part of a program that was focused on drawing architecture, and I’m not sure if it was a part of the local architectural university in Nancy or what, but they certainly had plenty to draw! One day when I was there there were hordes of college students who were covered in paint and who were carrying large pictures that they had clearly just painted. They were all so happy and were going up to groups of people in the square and trying to give away their artwork. They didn’t normally succeed, but it was certainly entertaining to watch and added to the general conviviality of the area.
Everything about this photo just oozes French
Another thing that I found amusing was the small tourist train that left from the city center and which was normally full of elderly tourists (particularly groups of elderly Asians from what I could tell). It was quaint to see it rolling around, but I loved sitting on the benches on the side of the Place Stanislas one day as the train slowly came back to do its final loop and two boys ran up and jumped on the side of the engine. Imagine what would happen in America? Two little boys run up and jump on a tractor driven train pulling 8 or 10 cars of passengers?! It would definitely involve at least 17 lawsuits, a workman’s liability claim, and a lawyer’s field day. In France, the train keep doing it’s thing and the boys had a conversation with the driver. Pish posh.
Not surprisingly, because of its architectural beauty, much of Nancy has been deemed a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and rightfully so. There is so much beautiful architecture throughout the city. Ranging from Renaissance churches, Ducal Palaces, and - of course - the Art Nouveau, Nancy really does have it all. What I found interesting was that Nancy is currently in the midst of “rediscovering” it’s Renaissance past and there is now a sizable movement to underline that aspect of the city’s history.
Like any city of a hundred thousand, Nancy had plenty to do: parks, museums, churches, walking, and food. And I did it all. I visited the Musée des Beaux arts (which will be the next blog post), the Musée Historique Lorrain (which is housed in the former Ducal palace), and the the Musée de l’École de Nancy (another blog post), among others.
The organ gallery in the Cathedral
The Basilica of St. Epvre, which dates from the end of the XIX century
Residential architecture
Residential architecture
The Musée Historique Lorrain was a fairly good museum, but I didn’t really understand how it was set up. There were, however, some very nice exhibits and interesting artifacts… but they were mostly too dimly lit to take decent photos. The building however, which was once part of the Ducal palace, was really very neat. On one side it was Gothic and showed some of the original 15th century architecture, with carved sculptures and interesting details. On the garden side, however, the building showed the results of a significant renovation in the 18th century.
I really liked this helical cornice, and the gargoyle
Garden façade
This was one of the sculptures on the main façade. Even though he has no face after 500 years, I'm sure could use some:
(the slogan is "It's dumb to be in pain.")
What I liked even more than the main museum building was the building next door, which was once the Church of the Cordeliers. This building, from the exterior is very average and housed the private burial chapel of the Ducal family. Not surprisingly it was heavily damaged during the French Revolution because of its links with the monarchy but was rebuilt in the early 19th century. Today the church and convent houses part of the Museum of Lorraine, and some of the tomb sculptures have been replaced. The private Ducal chapel is this wonderful octagonal chapel very much Italian in form and detail and shows the wealth of the Duke and his family. Built in the first few decades of the 17th century, it has very close relatives in the (now destroyed) Vallois family chapel at St. Denis, near Paris, and the Medici family chapel in Florence.
From the rear of the church looking forward
The rose window in the church was amazingly beautiful in the afternoon light
One of the sets of gisants (tomb sculptures)
Ducal chapel
The ceiling
Somewhat surprisingly, Nancy has maintained many of its Medieval City gates and you can walking down a street and all of a sudden there’s a city gate ahead of you! It’s really neat and gives a sense of the growth of the city over the past few hundred years. Each is totally unique and really quite beautiful. One, the Porte de la Craffe, has been recently restored and it’s hard to believe it dates from the 14th century… yeah - the 1300s - and the two towers date to 1463! To put that into perspective, at the time the towers were erected, Christopher Columbus was only 12 years old and it would be another 29 years before he took his illnesses to America to “discover the New World” and wipe out the Indians.
Porte de la Craffe
Another city gate just south of the city center
Porte Saint-Georges, saved from demolition in 1878 due to the intervention of Victor Hugo (of Hunchback of Notre Dame fame)
Here is the entry gate into the Place Stanislas
Another interesting thing I did, though while not a museum, was to visit the store of the Daum glassworks, the famous Nancy glass company. If I had been smarter I would have walked to their factory and done a tour or something, but I didn’t realize that the factory was so close until my last day in the city. The store, however, was pretty cool. Daum Brothers made a name for themselves making really beautiful things from glass as a part of the Art Nouveau and they’ve managed to keep up with the times into the modern era. (In my next blog post about the Musée des Beaux arts I’ll show some of their glasswork from the Art Nouveau movement.) I’ve always been intrigued by blown and pulled glass and looking at this stuff it is clear to me that glass is one of the coolest materials and the store made it clear that the men and women that do this stuff are truly artists. The store also provided some nice aerial views of the Place Stanislas.
View from upstairs of the city centre
Even cooler than blown glass is, however, food. It’s one of my favorite things in life and I did fairly well in Nancy in the food department. My first night in Nancy I walked around my neighborhood and didn’t find a whole lot that really called out to me. While my hotel was really great in general, it was right on the border of a heavily Middle Eastern neighborhood, and I really wasn’t in the mood for kebabs. Instead, I walked toward the city center and didn’t see anything that looked like what I wanted. Then, by chance, I found this little side road that was chocker block full of restaurants. One of the first ones I saw was an Italian place and I decided that would be a fine option. So I popped a squat and ordered myself a nice bowl of tagliatelle with foie gras. Now before any of you start sending me PETA videos to convince me that eating foie gras is inhumane, I promise you it won’t work. That stuff is delish. And I’m not giving it up. Not for a week, not for a month, not for Lent, not for nothing.
The next day I was out and about and it came time for lunch and I realized that I had put the name of an Art Nouveau café on my list of places to check out. Well the Excelsior lived up to its reputation. Opened in 1911, the building was designed by the architects Lucien Weissemburger and Alexander Mienville and while the building is good, it’s nothing spectacular; the interior is where it is at! Jacques Gruber made the ten stained glass windows, the sculptors Galetier and Burtin ornamented the interior with plaster sculptures and phenomenal moldings, Pèlerin did the floor mosaics, the workshops of Louis Majorelle oversaw the panelling and furniture, over three hundred light fixtures were created by the glassblowers at Daum, and finally, a few years later, with the Art Nouveau giving way to the Art Deco, Jean Prouvé put in an Art Deco entryway and staircase. So for those of you who don’t know artists and architects: there’s some good stuff going on in here! Oh, and for lunch, I had steak tartare, one of my favorite French meals that I would never imagine ordering in America. (More pictures of the building in the final trilogy post.)
That night I went searching for dinner and decided to investigate another street in town. I was walking along and all of a sudden got this whiff of the most unpleasant smell. It was terrible. What was even worse was that I knew that I recognized the smell but I couldn’t place it. It was the smell of yucky bread, staleness, and and underlying scent of American globalization. But I still couldn’t place it. Then I turned a corner and what did I see?
Yeah, I bet you know exactly what smell I’m talking about now.
After having an olfactory assault courtesy of globalization, I went back to the same little street that I visited before and decided to try another restaurant. This time I picked a small Pakistani restaurant called Le Gandhi, and it was beyond delicious. I mean over the top good. I can’t say enough about how much I loved my meal. It was amazing. Super authentic, the woman who served me, who I’m sure was the owner, was wonderful and welcoming, the food was fresh and amazing, and it was the best meal. To start with I had little chicken beignets, which were sort of like those chicken wings you get in Chinese restaurants that are fried and really yummy - but they were better than what you get at American Chinese restaurants. With this came some naan, everybody’s favorite Middle Eastern starch, and all sorts of yummy dipping sauces for the chicken. Then the main meal was chicken curry with really good basmati rice. What I really loved was that she brought out this little decorative metal thing with a tea light in the middle and it ended up being the device to keep the curried chicken warm. Then for dessert some yummy French glaces (ice cream). It was a great meal!
On the final day, when I did my Art Nouveau death March of some sixty buildings (the third installment of the Nancy, France Trilogy), I ate a kebab for lunch (I love me some kebab from time to time!) and then I went to a little restaurant on the same road as the previous two night that advertised local cuisine. It was a crappy meal. Really not very good and very mediocre service, even for French standards. The best part was dessert, which even then wasn’t very incredible. As a part of my menu, a prix fixe deal frequently found in France, I got oeufs à la neige, which is a floating meringue in crème anglaise. It’s really rich and really yummy when done well. This wasn’t the best I’ve ever had, but given the other meals, I let this one slide.
My final gastronomic discovery was Bagelstein, a French bagel restaurant chain. They are apparently all over France I was pleasantly surprised with it. The man who ran it in Nancy was very nice, spoke perfect English (he has family in Miami and New York) and he was very intrigued by my being Nancy. The bagels were good, the prices were great, and he was very funny. (Whenever he wasn’t using the cash register, the part that tells the customer the price read: F--K BURGER KING, but he had it spelled out. I had one for breakfast one day and I had one for the train ride back to Paris. It definitely wasn’t your typical New York deli with surly Jewish men slathering your bagel with enough cream cheese to clog an elephant’s artery (don’t get me wrong, I love New York delis!) but it was pretty good.
Oh, the final thing, and probably the most French, is the typical French café with coffee (an American expresso) and pain au chocolate (chocolate croissant). Really, how can your day go wrong when you start it like this?
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