Paris

After a really impressively fast TGV (Tres Gran Vitae) express train from Aix En Provence, my family and I arrived in Paris. I would be there for a week, the first half with my family and the second half on my own, once they'd all flown home. The first half we stated in a nice cozy little hotel right off the major street of St. Germain du Pres. The Hotel (Pas du Calais) had a little indoor courtyard with a skylight and a whole wall of flowers and vines supported by wooden latticework. We came down and sat there every morning for a breakfast of yoghurt, cheese, coffee, or tea, and fruit. While my family was there we also ate well the rest of the day, most notably on their last night when we ate at a restaurant called Los Boquinistas where waiters with crisply starched shirts served us a meal mostly consisting of very tender meat and deliciously seasoned bit-sized side dishes.

Once my family was gone, however, it was the beginning of my budget travel. I stayed in a 5-floor industrial-feeling youth hostel and ate food out of the grocery store or fruit stands along the street. I realized at the end of the week that I had, in effect, become a vegetarian for the rest of that week. It wasn't on purpose, I was just too cheap to buy any meat. Eventually on the last day I broke down and got a chicken dish at a little cafe, and probably looked quite strange to the people walking by as I devoured it. It didn't really help that in cafes in Paris, all the seats face out; the point is to allow for better people watching, but it doesn't work out so well if you don't also want the people walking by watching you.

So, besides sleeping and eating, what did I do in Paris? Well, for one, I saw a lot of museums. I mean, a lot. I spent two days in the Louvre alone: one for the ancient stuff (Greek, Egyptian, etc), and one for everything from the Middle Ages on. The Musee d'Orsay was a great stop, with a lot of Impressionist painters and a great exhibit of Art Noubeau furniture. The Pompideau Center was home to a huge collection of modern art, meant to contain a survey of modern art with a couple of works form almost every notable artist from the late 1800's one. Not only that, but it was modern art itself, a huge monstrousity of a building with all of the insides on the outside (pipes, beams, etc). I also snuck in visits to the Picasso Museum (I'd gone to see his earlier work in Barcelona, so I couldn't resist this one), and the photography museum. Whew. I spent a lot of time in these museums, listening to the audioguide, reading all the text, and generally slowing down my entire family. But I kind of felt like this was stuff I should already have known about, especially since Product Design is supposedly a great bit about, well, design, which supposedly has some relationship with this art thing. And to be honest, I really am woefully ignorant on the subject.

Well, anyways, besides my art history education, I also saw a great deal of monumental architecture. With my family I saw Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower. With a couple of boys from DC (one of whom had my friend Krystal's mom as an elementary school teacher) who I met at a crepe stand, I went to go see Versailles. They were all sufficiently monumental, although I thought the gardens at Versailles were actually way more impressive than the super famous Hall of Mirrors.

Another thing I saw a lot of was tourists. As a tourist, I 'd say other tourists are probably the thing you see most. It doesn't help that by the end of the summer most local people are off being tourists somewhere else. But seeing so many tourists helps to reflect on what kind of tourist you might be yourself (or I might be myself, you know, however it should be phrased). There are the safari tourists, people dressed up like they are going to be in the African wilderness full with completely rainproof gear and vests with a ridiculous number of pockets. There are family tourists who are basically doing whatever they can to get their kids to shut up and not run into traffic. There are loud tourists, smelly tourists, quiet tourists, I've seen it all tourists, bored tourists, and tourists that are just trying to navigate all the other tourists to get into the Louvre.

The worst kind of tourist, though, is that kind who doesn't care about damaging the place they are going as long as they get a picture or souvenir. They're the kind of people who would pick an endangered flower in the rainforest to take home and show their friends. In their Paris incarnation, however, they take flash photos of light-sensitive centuries-old paintings. The Italian wing, where the Mona Lisa is kept, is the one hall of the Louvre where no photography at all is allowed (let alone with flash!). So of course there were so many flash bulbs going off that it was like the Mona Lisa was Britney Spears and we were all the paparazzi trying to catch her abusing her child. Plus there was such a huge, pushing crowd in front of the painting (people actually shoved an 8-year-old child out of the way) that I doubt anyone could get a good picture anyway. Just buy a postcard people.

But I'm not excluding myself form the strange behavior that categorizes tourists. I wear the same clothes several days in a row to avoid having to do laundry, and I take plenty of pictures too (although I try not to be obnoxious about it). I, too, get frustrated when I can't read directions or make myself understood, even though I know I can't expect anyone to speak English and my French is extremely minimal.

So, along with running into all the other tourists in museums and other sight-seeing musts, I also ended up meeting a lot of foreigners in bars and restaurants. While at a grungy cellar bar on his last night in town, Nathan and I met an English girl who was teaching art at an International School in Paris, along with her French boyfriend. Once everyone else had left, when I went out to a bar on my own I met an American woman who went to high school in DC a couple of blocks from me (at GDS) and is now a design agent in Paris. We met again for coffee later and she introduced me to her German art professor friend. And then there were the two DC boys I met at a crepe stand and went to see Versailles with. So I met a lot of people, it just so happens that none of them were French (except for the English girl's boyfriend, with whom Nathan had quite an animated, if slow, conversation). Maybe this was due to my complete incompetence in French, maybe to the fact that all the French people were out of town, or maybe I was just destined to hang out with Americans and Brits. Who knows. But in the end i saw lots of new things, met lost of new people, and learned a bit about art history. I'd chalk that up to a pretty successful week, I suppose.

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