Paris
In Paris, everything is perfect. The broad avenues intersect in star plazas with huge statuary and fountains. Your walk is always close to trees and little public flower gardens. The buildings are all decorated as finely frosted cakes. Everything is just a little nicer than it needs to be, but also spookily uniform. The city is spotless. There are recycling centers and rubbish bins every fifty feet. Its all meticulously well maintained. Paris is a huge city, but its easy to get around, easy on the eyes and choc full of interesting things. We only saw a tiny tiny piece of what we’d like to have done.
We’d heard about fashion in Paris, so we were hoping to see funny clothes. We did, but not the way we expected. People in Paris dress neatly and deliberately with almost no variation. The women’s outfits come in five varieties of Power Secretary, a big scarf is mandatory. The men have two outfits: Bank Teller and Bank Manager. Its really boring, and more than that, slightly unnerving. The sk8ter kids all dress in the same conventional style as everyone else. Like the buildings, the population is in uniform. It really started getting to me by the third day.
We really started hitting the museums and monuments. Centre du Pompedu, a modern art museum, has the guts of the building built on the outside and color coded: Red for heat, green for plumbing, blue for air, yellow for electrical, black for structural. We also went to see the Catacombs underneath the city that house the bones of millions of Parisians. As you enter the kilometer long walk of bones a sign reads: “Arret! Vous entree Le Empire du Morte!”. Notre Dam was nice from the rear with its layers of buttresses and crazy gargoyles, but pretty dull inside. The Louvre really seemed to go for quantity over quality. Maybe if I knew more about art history I’d be tickled to see some milestone works, but very little in the Louvre grabbed my attention for its own sake. Notable exceptions were Da Vinci’s paintings, which were easily my favorites. He does animated and expressive like nobody’s business. The Mona Lisa, for instance, I had real doubts about, but it really works and is a pretty nifty trick. I went back to look at it twice.
Musee d’Orsay was my favorite. Great sculpture on the ground floor and impressionist masterpieces on the top. I turned a corner and saw my first real live Van Gogh. It was literally stunning. I’d always kinda liked his lines and the layout of his work, but seeing his paintings in person is just completely different. The colors he uses are incredibly bright and jump out of the painting like field lines and reverberate against your brain directly. Its transfixing. His self portrait which I’d seen a million ho-hum prints of zaps you with vibratey squiggly goodness in person. I was so shocked I just wandered dazedly through a whole room of Monets and an another of Renoir before realizing I was missing my favorite impressionists.
There’s a big line for me between what I consider “really good” painters and magicians. For instance: Renoir was a really good painter and Da Vinci’s are captivating, but I think I grok the process and the mind with which they were created. Monet and Van Gogh, however: I just cannot fathom how they were created, and how they do what they do.
Our adventures in local cuisine began in Paris. I’ve never liked French sauces, I’ve always felt they were too thick and creamy. This is because….drum roll please…they were! French sauces are delicious and very thin and delicate. All the food is delicate. But we didn’t eat out much, mostly we self catered. In Paris grocery stores are like big convenience stores. Your real staples for the day are bought at le boucher, le fromagier, le fruitier, le pannier, le perfumerie etc. which are everywhere you turn. The chains haven’t wiped out all the variety. Constantly dealing with small businesses is one of the real joys of being in Europe. Like the rest of the continent, most of the food (even in the grocery stores) carries the “BIO” label. This label probably means as little as the Organic label in The States, but if you talk to the proprietor, he can tell you who he gets his stuff from. He or she has probably visited the abattoir or the dairy or vineyard where the products come from, and can verify its not a factory farm. He doesn’t “just work there”.
I learned some of these details from this guy, Johannes, we met on the train from Paris to Berlin. I asked him how the little shops could compete when supermarkets were so much cheaper. He said:
“Yes, but they’re not as good. They’ll never be able to compete on quality. People will never give up their food.”
Our camera broke on our second night in Paris. These photos are all we were able to retrieve.
We were going to go to Munich, but Oktoberfest was on and prices were doubled. Also, party culture wears on us pretty much instantly and we’d just been to Amsterdam. So Berlin it was. I drifted off to sleep on the train and was awakened by a steel toed boot to the head…