Just posted a bit about honey in France to the bee blog: C'est Beaucoup Du Miel.
In it, I mention we met some horses (and a braying donkey, by the way). They had a very unusual (to me) build. Anyone know what kind of horse it is?
Every night as we go to sleep and remember the day, it amazes us that where we woke up this morning was really the same day. Each day feels like a week.
Orleans ended up being a cute little town bordering on a city. It was clean and full of shops and such, but we didn't spend much time in it, eager as we were to hit the French countryside, which I've romanticized as full of people who look like Jean Luc Picard, ride bicycles with strapped on baguettes down birch-lined roads and full of cows and sheep that bleat in French. Fortunately, I merely underestimated how beautiful it is.
First though, some things we enjoyed about Orleans.
Later than we'd hoped, we set sail for the French countryside. Oh, and a what a countryside it was!
The countryside itself is everything I'd imagined: pastoral scenes of rolling hills of vineyards and pastures, centuries old farmhouses and barns, trees and green. What sets it apart from Eastern Washington or New England, though, is that every 10 km or so, you roll through a village that has been there for centuries, mostly still the same old buildings. It quickly becomes passe to see turretted walls left over from feudal times, as an hours drive will bring you by a half dozen of these. Chateaux with moats, booooring. Ancient abbeys and cathedrals with bells ringing in the hours by the fistful.
The cool thing is that it seemingly never gets tired. Each one we went through, we'd oo and aah and jump out of the car and walk around and snap pictures and stop and have a snack and gander and gawk.
We spent last night in the hilltop town of Vezelay, pop. 491, and woke to a dense fog. Exploring the towns of the Loire, Burgundy and the Cote D'Or today in a gradually thinning fog was quite a treat. In some ways, of course, we wish we could have seen to the horizon, but the mist gave the whole day a timeless, otherwordly feeling.
We especially enjoyed Flavigny-sur-Ozerain (where Chocolat was filmed) another tiny, medieval hilltop town and Sully-sur-Loire, a fairy-tale like moated chateau. Mostly, though, we loved just watching the scenery flow by, and stopping every once in a while to walk around, eat some food (we did some grocery shopping) and be amazed.
The GPS has turned out to be a Godsend. We tell it where we want to go, and it gets us there. No futzing with maps or worrying if we're going to miss turns. It's pretty much dead-on in estimating time, too.
Tomorrow, we're heading to Lyon and hopefully more couchsurfing.
Monday night we moved in with our second couchsurf host, Prunelle (aka Celine). She was also sweet, though her French was not as good as Justine's, so making conversation was a bit more difficult. She made us a dinner of lasagne (good) served with wine (awesome). She took care to instruct in the proper opening and tasting of wine, much to my pleasure. Her family has been in the restaurant business for at least 4 generations. We'll definitely visit her family's restaurant in Marseilles.
Tuesday brought us to the Palace at Versailles, the most splendid, fantastically, opulently, over the top, gaudy building ever constructed by man. It's as if Tammy Faye Baker was transported to the 17th century and had a gajillion dollars to decorate with.
And, granted, hired some of the greatest painters of all time to help her.
My camera screen broke as I was buckling up after using one of those squat toilets I thought they only had in 3rd world countries, so not many pictures, but it's hard to capture, anyway. Just imagine really, really gaudy, except maybe the original gaudy, what gaudy is trying to be. That.
Area 19 folks: note the wallpaper. Area 19 and Versailles: separated at birth!
As this is written, we are in Orleans, a small, old city a few hours south of Paris. We rented a car in Paris and made our exit today, and the acquisition of the car was a bit of an adventure (hint: don't just walk in to a rental agency and say "I'd like to rent a car"), but all worked out alright in the end (if by "alright" you mean paying a lot of money).
After a dizzying half hour driving in Paris (where streets change name every block and there are no right angles), we decided to pay a bit extra for a GPS, which I think will turn out to be a good investment. It's pretty sweet in that you can tell it where you want to go, and it tells you exactly, turn by turn, what to do. If you take a wrong turn, it doesn't say "I told you to turn! How come you didn't turn?!" as I might be wont to do, it just politely figures out a new route from where you are and continues.
Our plan is to get off the beaten track and explore the back roads of Burgundy and the Loire Valley with the aid of the GPS to bail us out when we decide we've had enough.
Monday, Justine, Michelle and I took a nice, long walk starting off at Le Marais and on up to La Cemeterie de Pere Lachaise, the largest (only? oldest?) cemetery in Paris. The cemetery was amazingly dense, grave stuffed in with grave on top of grave replacing grave, and all of them works of art unto themselves. A brief slideshow of some of them are below. Also, I've got it marked on the Google Earth map that's linked to from the right. You can switch to hybrid view and see it from a satellite view.
Note the grave of M. Noir in particular and where his reclining statue has been rubbed so frequently the brass always shines through. Apparently, if women stroke him there, it brings them fertility. We also visited Jim Morrison's grave, as is de rigeur. Nothing special, really, some flowers and a bottle of scotch, a few notes.
There were a number of other famous people there, such as Oscar Wilde, but we neglected to get a map on our way in, which was just as well, I thought, as the folks wandering around sniffing after the "famous" graves seemed to be missing the beautiful but pedestrian sites all around.
At one point, I sought out the restroom and ended up in the mortuary under the chapel, almost toppling over the steel tables they use to prepare the bodies. Oops.
Afterwards, we returned to Justine's and packed ourselves up to move to a new couchsurf host. Staying with Justine was a great pleasure. She was sweet and easy to get along with, the kind of person you can chat with or be silent with, as your moods suit. We'll miss her.
Janice, if you're reading this: there are a thousand Fournier's in the cemetery. I've also seen your face on the streets of Paris often.
We saw the coolest green wall in Paris on Sunday. Check this out: the whole side of the Musee de Quai Branly is a garden. I've wanted to make one of these forever, and even got as far as having Buphalo create the infrastructure (my design will integrate a sundial, as well, bien sur) but got busy with this and that and never finished. This one is an inspiration.
The rest of the day was spent in pleasant strolling. We picnicked at Les Invalides, an old army barracks converted to a museum and park and home of, I believe, Napoleon's tomb. For some inexplicable reason, twenty or so guys in the uniforms of the army from different eras all lined up and had everyone take pictures at one point, so we joined in that fun.
I also found another sundial inside. There were several, actually, and I think I may have missed one, but I took a picture of the description of it in hopes of translating it later.
We also found a couchsurfer's meet-up on the lawn (we had read about it on the site) and hung out with them for a little while. All very sweet people, mostly from Paris, but a few guests from elsewhere, as well. It was someone's birthday, so there were a few home made cakes and some wine. Perfect afternoon snack!
We finished the day over at the Grand Palais where there was an awesome exhibit on design and furniture, Design Contre Design. The pieces they had were just so cool, and they did a really good job of showing how different pieces in different eras influenced each other.
The pieces ranged from traditional to a bar shaped like a giant metal cat, but our two favorite pieces were:
a complete...room? house? shaped like internal organs and a womb: it had a shower, toilet, a kitchen, and a bedroom that you crawled in through by a tube, and it all looked like internal organs. I wish we could have taken pictures, but it wasn't allowed. There's a video of it being unveiled on this page, though. We bought the catalogue, you can check it out when we get home.
Our day of art at the Musee d'Orsay on Saturday was delightfully completed by a night of art at La Nuit Blanc, a city-wide, one night free annual arts festival. Justine, Michelle and I had some dinner at Justine's, then hopped the metro to Le Marais (the Jewish and gay section of Paris), where La Nuit Blanc web site showed there would be a number of different pieces.
Before we left Justine's, she had been watching bits of the much anticipated France v. New Zealand rugby match. We'd seen people in the Musee d'Orsay with the blue, white and red of the French flag painted on their faces, people had been chanting "allez le bleu" ("go blue") in the club the night boefre, so we were starting to get an idea that it was a big deal, and Justine had mentioned that the train to London (she works on the Eurostar) that day was full of fans heading to the game, but still didn't think much more of it. When we left the apartment, France was behind and was expected to lose, in any case.
Coming up out of Hotel de Ville Metro station, though, was a different story. People were running down into the station screaming, the people they screamed to starting screaming too, and as we came up the steps towards the street it sounded like a riot or a war. France won, and they had apparently shown the game on an enormous inflatable screen in the square that we were coming up into. People were screaming, chanting, honking, climbing things, reinforcement police were blaring in to keep things under control (apparently, they had fewer men on patrol in anticipation of a loss).
Allez le bleu! Allez le bleu!
The art was not spectacular, but still really cool to see pieces set in little medieval courtyards and churches. Our favorite was in an old chapel with a red carpet set in the middle you could sit and lie on. On all four walls there were projections and a hypnotic, droning music accompanied by tabla and other simple instruments lulled you into a trance.
Most of the art would have felt very much at home at Burning Man: a giant projection of the name of semi-precious stones that slowly coalesced out of stars, then exploded only to slowly reform over five or ten minutes; a giant papier mache star hanging in an courtyard with spooky blue light and words projected over it, an three-story high wall video of people explaining what their favorite objects were, and a bizarre piece of theater called "Theatre Bla Blah".
Here are a few shots, with a bit of Paris graffiti thrown in for good measure.
Our second day in Paris started a bit slow on account of our first day ending in our first night, which turned out to be wild and late. What a treat, though, to sleep in, slowly wake up to the sound children playing in the square across the street, walk down to the boulangerie for a baguette and croissant to go with our breakfast, and to enjoy the light of Paris coming through the trees into the window as ate.
Most of our day was spent in the Musee d'Orsay, which many people have said is their favorite museum in Paris, and for good reason. It has a varied collection, including paintings, architecture, sculpture, photos and even furniture, but, unlikely the Louvre, it is carefully curated and selective, so each of the pieces is remarkable and worth spending time with.
We were careful to pace ourselves, enjoy pieces, enjoying a snack on the balcony overlooking the city, enjoying more of the work, enjoying a break on a bench and so on until closing time.
I wrote about one of our favorite pieces in my bee blog, Pan et Oursons, on our bee blog, so you can read about that one there. Some of our favorite pieces were:
The first picture here I entitle "Self-Portrait with a Self-Portrait". Tres meta! The second is the view from the balcony where we snacked and the third is the Opera House cut-away.
On Friday, we made our way from the Eurostar train through the Metro to Dupleix, a cheerful neighborhood in the Southwest of Paris, just a short walk from the Eiffel Tower (I'm trying to mark all the major spots we visit on the map to the right, give it a click to see), where we met Justine, our couchsurfing host.
We were her first couchsurfing guests and she our first couchsurfing host, so I think we were both a bit nervous, but all hit it off immediately. She's cheerful and easygoing, a hostess on the Eurostar, moved to Paris from Fountainbleu just to the South a few years ago, and has the patience of a saint to explain all the details of Parisian living and French to us.
She welcomed us into her tiny apartment with croissants and coffee, gave us a bit of time to get our wits about us, then we three set out for a walking tour of Paris. I guess I thought that only certain sections of Paris would be narrow, winding cobbled streets with balconies overlooking, but everywhere we went seemed like that (occasionally broken up by the larger boulevards).
I didn't take a ton of pictures, mostly content to gawk and chat, but was enamored enough of a few pieces of street art that I grabbed photos of them. The one below of the cart with the purple cat and the heart balloons is signed at the bottom "Le Koeurele", which Justine explained was a play on words: "couer" is heart, "quereller" is to argue and the "ele" ending means that you have wings, so the artist's signature is something like an arguing heart with wings.
Yeah, maybe you have to be French to get it.
Another thing I love about this city is the public bikes. All over town they have these beige bike stands. You can use a card to check one out and then return it to a similar stand elsewhere in the city when you're done. I'm not sure exactly the price, but I think it's free for the first 30 minutes, then a dollar or two an hour after that.
We ended our walk by passing through the Louvre (just the outside, the inside is for another day) and enjoying a glass of wine in le Quartier Latin and then returned to Dupleix, where Justine fixed us a delicious meal (Pouler du Justine), a nice change from the taste and price of English food, I'll tell you!
La Nuit Bleue
The three of us hopped the Metro to go out, but Justine got a call from a friend on the way who was having drinks in the Quartier Latin, so we shifted direction and headed over there. Our first stop was a fun, loud Australian bar where we had a few drinks and met the crew we would be spending the night with, all of them Moroccan by origin, but most with flawless English and long tenures in Paris.
I chatted the most with Amin, the dark-skinned clean-shaven headed guy you'll see in the pictures below. I couldn't figure out exactly his job, but it had something to do with "yield", with determining prices variably based on expected demand and time, the way airplane prices are set (i.e., if you buy your tickets far in advance, they're super cheap, even cheaper than the cost of production, but if you buy them the day before, you'll be paying thousands of dollars more). Excited and extended discussion followed.
After an hour or two there, we headed over to Bar Oz, a nightclub in Beaubourg or La Marais, I wasn't quite sure, about a ten minute walk on the other side of the Seine.
Awesome!
The place was packed to the gills, way over what would be considered "fire capacity" in the U.S., the music was bumping and everyone in the place was dancing. The tunes were mostly all old familiars (a dance remix of Joan Jett's I Love Rock n Roll, Funkytown and the like) and the DJ was a bit sloppy with the transitions (mostly just stopping one song then starting another), but the atmosphere was absolutely fantastic and we danced ourselves silly (and sweaty). Occasionally, the whole place would break out into chants of "Allez le bleu" in anticipation of the big rugby match between France and New Zealand the next day (despite the fact France was widely expected to lose).
Around 3 a.m. or 4 a.m., worn out from not more than an hour or so of sleep the night before, we stumbled out with Justine and made our confused way home to much, much needed sleep.
Justine's couch, should you be wondering, est tres comfortable!
Food, Money, and Clothing
The food in Paris has been a little bit of a disappointment. Even as I type this, Michelle is reading in the guidebook that the food of Paris proper is over-rated. Probably we just don't know the right places to go (I suppose if I were wandering Seattle and ambled into whatever restaurant I passed, I'd probably be disappointed, as well), but it mostly tastes like standard, mid to low-grade French food.
The dollar is much more effective here in Paris than it was in London. The Euro is worth about a $1.40 and, again, things are priced roughly the same in Euros here as they would be in dollars back home (meaning things are about 30% more expensive, which is better than the 100% we were seeing previously).
On the fashion side, Paris is distinctly more casual than London (or at least the parts we visited). The most common outfit we see by far on women is a short black dress over black shorts, black tights and black boots. Cute!
