The order in which I visited the places in Paris, even the ones that made the biggest impression on me, remain a bit muddled. I *think* I visited the Luxembourg Gardens before Les Halles. But my travel journal recorded (days later) the other way around. Not that it matters much. Just strange is all.
Walking around the area of the Pompidou center I wandered through some narrow streets, finding so many beautiful looking buildings that I had to restrain myself from taking so many pictures that I would run out of film before I came upon something I *really* wanted to photograph. I found a small park next to "Les Halles" called "Fontaine des Innocents." Roughly in the center of in a curving plaza with cobblestones arranged with a dark/light colored spiral pattern I found a sculpture: a big giant head. To save on bandwidth I cropped the picture, leaving in only one person for perspective.
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| Big Giant Head statue at Fontaine des Innocents |
It is a truly giant head. And not the only one. (BTW, the cobblestone plaza with its undulating pattern I found quite relaxing and I sat there resting for a while. If anyone is interested in seeing the larger, un-cropped, picture, please let me know. It's one of the better ones that I took myself).
As the afternoon passed, I realized that I was on the same side of the river as and actually quite close to my hotel and the Pere Lachaise cemetery. I took the Metro to the right station (it's relatively easy when you have a good map, and my Library Director lent me a really good one before I left). There are only a handful of the original Art Nouveau Metro station entrances left. The one for Pere Lachaise looked gorgeous, but the light was failing by the time I was there. It's also in a tricky location in terms of natural light. You have to be there at the right time of day or forget about a picture (darn). Walking around the neighborhood looking for the entrance to the cemetery I noticed a strange sense of familiarity. I overheard the people around me speaking. It's a neighborhood with a wide variety of residents, many of them from Francophone Africa. The University where I work has had, now and over the years, many foreign students, including ones from Africa. I could not possibly tell you sound by sound, consonant by vowel, how African accented French sounds and how it differs from Parisian French, but something in my head does recognize the difference.
Although I realize it sounds morbid to visit a cemetery on a vacation, the Pere Lachaise cemetery is one of the best free art museums in the world. Not only are there many famous people buried there (don't ask me about Jim Morrison, I was never a "Doors" fan and I did not go anywhere near where he's planted).
Despite the failing light and the intermittent drizzle and clouds, I did take some nice photographs. I do not want to take up lots of bandwidth with them here. I will try joining Picassa or some other photo sharing service sometime. I found Chopin's grave had the most flowers and showed signs of numerous people over the years making an effort to maintain it.
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| Chopin's grave at Pere Lachaise cemetery |
The other person's grave I wanted to visit was Oscar Wilde. Anyone whose last words were "Either this wallpaper goes or I do," has to have something on his grave worth seeing. The white marble marker stood about 8 or 9 feet tall, with an abstract angel frieze carved at the top. The front had numerous lipstick "kisses" at mouth level and a sign explaining in various languages admonishing the reader not to vandalize the grave as it was a French national landmark. Unfortunately there were three drunken and somewhat obnoxious teenagers sitting in front of it and I could not get a good picture of it without idiots in the frame. But I wrote down part of an inscription that appeared on the back. Along with a summary of his life and works appears this verse:
And alien tears will fill for him
Pity's long broken urn
for his mourners will be outcast men
and outcasts always mourn
At one of the entrances I consulted the map/guide and thought maybe to try to find another person. But the guard very politely informed me that the cemetery was closing. On to dinner. I did not find a place that had a menu I could figure out or when I could, food I felt like eating. I bought a fish-burger and fries at a stand on Oberkampf. When the young woman asked about the size of the fries order I said "Gran." Oops. A large order of fries turned out to be *way* more than I expected. I took my food back to my hotel and ate it there.
At Notre Dame on Sunday I had made an effort to get up early and get my butt in gear. The line to enter looked about half as long as the day before. I had "dressed for church" as they say in the U.S.: I had a jacket and tie. I was probably the only person in the entire huge building wearing a tie. Oops. I wandered with the overall flow of people. I quickly noticed I sign that read (in multiple languages) that the "visitors" should keep to the periphery and those attending the mass could enter the central area where they had numerous pews. I ambled quietly into the "mass" area, wondering what might happen if I "got busted" (as an unbeliever). But I observed the ushers, some old French guys, only shooed away tacky, tactless tourists who stepped into the "mass zone" to snap pictures. A sign at the entrance read in a half dozen languages that flashing cameras were not permitted. I sat by myself and no one questioned my presence. The service included a lot of singing and organ music. Unlike most church services I have attended in the U.S. the French here knew how to sing and the organist really knew his (or her, I couldn't see) business. At one point there was this very intense organ solo during an interlude after the Agnus Dei. It was in a minor key, very intricate counterpoint and reminded me of the organ music in "Carnival of Souls" that got the organist kicked out of a Baptist Church in the deep South. Generally the tourists circulated counter-clockwise around the periphery and only got in the way of the service when the Priests came through with their procession, including the guy swinging the incense censor. I remember thinking the guy could hurt someone with that thing if he really felt pissed off about all the cameras flashing in his face. It's a good thing I did not become a priest - I could not resist the temptation to knock a camera out of some tourists hands with that incense censor. After I left the mass I circumnavigated the cathedral and looked into all the little nooks and chapels along the way.
After the mass I wandered over to the arena. I did not know until I read about it a couple of weeks before my trip that Paris has Roman ruins. The arena was once huge, but the remnants of it have only a few rows of "seats" and not in a complete oval. There were some actors and singers preparing for a performance (free music theater). Since I was hungry and wanted to visit the Luxembourg Gardens I took a few pictures, sat in the stands, then left in the direction of the Gardens.
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| Paris Arena with original seating at left |
Along the way I found a cafe with a nice look to it. I ordered a "Croque madam" and said in my best, phrasebook French, "no ham, no meat." Perhaps to make up for the lack of meat they served me two open faced sandwiches with a fried egg on top of each one. I had not realized how much walking I had done and nearly inhaled the two sandwiches. Fortified with a nice lunch, I found an entrance to the Luxembourg Gardens near the French Senate building. It's a stately and ornate granite 3 story building that goes on for at least 200 yards. Attractive enough architecturally, but rather imposing. Then, as I reached the far corner of the building, I saw a view of the garden that caused me to stop dead in my tracks. It was like Dorothy seeing the Emerald City. Flowers, two huge circular pools filled with toy sailboats, and in the distance, a statue of, you guessed it, a big giant head.
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| Big Giant Head statue at the Luxembourg Garden |
The Luxembourg Garden has statues of all different kinds. It also has a puppet theater (which I did not attend) a large grove of shady trees (I did not identify the species) and flower beds everywhere. I sat and relaxed for the better part of an hour. The atmosphere remained very low-key and I noticed everyone appeared to be having a nice day (including the armed soldiers on patrol - the Senate building requires some security presence I suppose).
After my rest I walked to the area of the Sorbonne where I saw this big blue and white statue of a man sitting lotus-position and bent over. I did not take a picture although in my time in Paris I walked passed that statue many times. It was always mobbed, mostly by children. It was obviously designed to be irresistible to children as they loved to climb up the long slope of its back or hide in the recess of its crossed legs. I could never get a shot of anything but the crowd around it.
My next stop was the Cluny museum of medieval art. Here I saw the statues that had been removed from Sainte Chapelle. The building itself started as a Roman bath with additional rooms and stories build on it over the centuries. I saw several doors (huge dark wooden ones) with intricate carvings on them which you might miss, mistaking them for plain vanilla doors, if you did not look carefully. Looking over my travel journal, I see that I did not write anything down about the Cluny other than the fact that I visited it. This does not mean I did not enjoy the place, only that the trip overall had me tired enough that I could not write as much as I would have liked. I do remember, in addition to the statues and the doors, that some Celtic carvings and jewelry, in very good condition, was on display along with the Frankish and other medieval artwork. I quickly tired of the "portable docent" - what I call the recorded "tour" that they give you when you enter some museums. They make me feel too much like a robot obeying commands to go here or there and I suspect that someday, somebody with a twisted sense of humor who records these tours will have tourists doing the hokey-pokey, recording the hapless saps with hidden cameras then putting it on the internet.
My day ended with a visit to friends of friends living in Paris: a very nice multi-lingual couple, Siegfried and Ladka, with a very cute 3 year old son, Sasha. When receiving and following directions I realized that the Metro stations had their exists numbered. If you take note of a given exit's number and give it to someone who does not know the system it becomes possible to meet at a given entrance/exit without ambiguity of confusion. Despite this, my "I'm not from around here" insecurity made me ask the man who walked up to me whether he was Siegfried. He replied, without missing a beat, "No, I'm some other guy ... of course I'm Siegfried." When traveling, even in a crowded city, you can start to feel very isolated without someone to speak to in your own language. And as much as I've studied foreign languages, I have seldom had the fluency in a language other than English for a sustained conversation. I had a very enjoyable 2-3 hours Sunday evening. The most interesting insight for me was Siegfried's interpretation of Kafka. According to Siegfried, Kafka's friends used to laugh themselves silly reading his manuscripts. The English/American translations make Kafka's writings inhabit a very much more dark place than his original German would. One of Kafka's friends who lived to the mid-20th century remarked that the 3 bureaucrats that the surveyor has to deal with in "The Castle" would, in a movie version, best be portrayed by the Marx Brothers. I'm going to keep an eye out for when Siegfried finishes his translation of Kafka. That should be an interesting read.
