Waiting… Waiting… Waiting… Paris, France, May 2013.
Tag: France
Break Dancing
Break dancers performing on the NE side of the Esplanade du Trocadéro, May 2013.
A Decisive Moment
Deciding on the right moment in Paris, France May 2013.
France Day 30 Last Day In Paris
We spent our last day in Paris getting ready to leave — checking in for the flight, cleaning the apartment, preparing food and packing. We went out for a walk in the Tuileries got our last look at the Louvre in the late afternoon sunlight, and I took random photos in the Tuileries and on the street walking back to the apartment. We are leaving for the airport at 6:30 this morning.
France Day 24 Marie Antoinette
The Louvre and many other museums are closed on Tuesday, so we went to the Crypt under the plaza in front of Notre Dame. where they have Roman and medieval ruins and really nice interactive presentations on the history of Paris. Than we went to the Palace of Justice where the Sainte Chapelle and Ile de la Cité Conciergerie are. There are an impressive set of gates at the Palace of Justice.
Sainte Chapelle is a chapel that is stained glass on all sides. They really pushed the limits of gothic cathedral style construction with Sainte chapelle. From the outside it is buttressed with the stained glass set deep in between the buttresses so you don’t realize how much it is all stained glass until you get inside. You enter at the lower floor to a brightly painted vaulted room that supports the floor of the chapel. Then you climb a narrow spiral staircase and enter into the tall, narrow naive and a kaleidoscope of stained glass.
The Conciergerie was used as the main prison during the French Revolution and housed famous prisoners including Marie Antoinette. The literature said they would seat 2000 people in the large, vaulted hall, which has several large fireplaces in the middle ages. There were several little rooms set up to recreate the sense of the time, and room with the names of the 2600 guillotined, and a the room where Marie Antoinette was held until her trial and execution.
In the afternoon we sat out on the roof and watched people on the street.
France Day 18 A walk on Champs Élysées
Laurie and I stood in line and got tickets for Handel’s opera Guilio Caesare, and then walked the Champs Élysées for our 31st wedding anniversary. Our walk was from the Opera down one side of Champs Élysées to the Arc de Triomphe, a loop around the Arc, a shot of the CBD, the a walk up the other side of the Champs Élysées through the Jardin des Tuileries and the Louvre and back home. Along the way we saw the latest Renault Dezir on a showroom floor, and an old Citroën 2CV driving by. On the way to the Arc de Triomphe the sidewalk was covered with people as far was you could see, and the Champs Élysées had a constant flow of bumper to bumper traffic. The many cafes and restaurants lining the sidewalks were full of people and there was a mix of tourists gawking, street venders hawking, and well dressed business men and women making their way through the hustle and bustle.
Bathroom stops are quite interesting — you have to pay to pee in Paris, and you certainly can’t pee in peace, because there is always a woman in the men’s side cleaning. We stopped at the restroom at the entrance to the Jardin des Tuileries, and there was quite a line. There were several attendants keeping order on letting people in and out of the bathrooms. I got waved through, payed my 50 cents, and was standing at the urinal when I heard “Pardon!” in a female voice and felt a nudge against my shoulder. The cleaning woman was mopping making me and the guy next to me step over and around the mop while we were trying to pee. When there is a constant stream of people, she just cleans around them.
We got back to the apartment from our walk around 7:00 pm, then we went out to the Monoprix (a French Corte Inglés) and got food. Laurie made a pizza with bread, lardon (a cross between bacon, ham and salt pork), creme fraiche, eggplant and a medium aged Cantal cheese for dinner that was really good. You can see the outside of our apartment on the building in the last photo. The tiny window in the roof is the kitchen and the main room looks out the gabled windows on either side.
France Day 17 Aix to Paris
When we left Aix en Provence it was raining; it rained all the way to Paris, and when we came up out of the metro at Opera to go to the apartment we are renting, in was pouring rain. The first photo is a panorama of Aix viewed from up the hill from where we stayed. The second photo is a farm from the TGV traveling at 200 mph. The rest of the photos are of the apartment we are renting for the rest of our stay in Paris. It’s on the fifth floor (sixth, American) of a building at the corner of Ave de l’Opera and Rue d’Antin in Bourse, in the 2nd arrondissement, a block from the Palais Garnier – Opéra national de Paris (last photo).
France Day 15 Grand Canyon Du Verdon
We drove northeast of Aix to the Grand Canyon du Verdon. We turned around at the first photo, which was the Clue de Chasteuille Réglès at 1447 meters above sea level. This is the lower end of the Alps, and at that point we were about 200 kilometers from the Italian border. At one point we had a really good view of the snowcapped Alps, but the road was too narrow to stop and get a photo, and by the time I could pull over, the snowcaps were out of view. Along the way we passed the remaining supports of an old suspension bridge at the confluence of the Durance and Verdon rivers, a castle at Allemagne en Provence where a group of men were playing pétanque. At the mouth of the canyon is Moustiliers St. Marie with churches built up in the steep walls of a small canyon above the village. Moustiliers St. Marie is well known for the fine pottery produced there. We drove through the canyon on very narrow roads hugging the cliff, which made Laurie very nervous, up to the top where we encountered the view of Clue de Chasteuille Réglès. On the way back down, we stopped and hiked about a third of the way down into the canyon. To hike all the way down to the river and back would have taken three or four hours, which we didn’t have time to do.
France Day 8 Aix Water Bells
We went to the service as St. Jean de Malte this morning. It was a beautiful service with two infant baptisms and other people doing their first communion. The baptisms were different from the Methodist tradition in that the babies were presented naked and immersed in a big copper caldron of water three times and then dressed with little white shirt and either water or oil put on their heads. The choral music was great and the pipe organ was wonderful. We walked around Aix after church, talked to an Australian for a while and then went back to the house where we are staying, and I took a photo of the view from our walk to and from Aix. After we got home, I helped our hostess build a chicken coop, which looks more like a chalet than what we’ve used for chicken coops in the past. Then we went to cooking class in the evening, learned to make quiche, ate it and got home late again. We have to get up early to go to Marseille.
France Day 5 Travel to Provence
Laurie and I got to Notre Dame at 8:00 am, right after it opened, listened to mass, and then looked at the exhibits behind the altar area. The French government restored the pipe organ and the bells for the 850th anniversary, and the exhibit noted that renowned musicians play the pipe organ on Sundays. They also have concerts at Notre Dame, so we are planning on attending a concert and going on a Sunday to listen to the organ when we return to Paris at the end of the month. After mass and exploring a little more of the church, we sat out on the bleachers and ate bocadillos for breakfast before we had to go back to the hotel and collect our luggage to catch the train to Provence. Since there were few tourists sitting on the bleachers that early, the sparrows mobbed us to get our bread. They were quite aggressive little beasts, and I think they would have preferred to have eaten us if they were big enough.
Getting mob of 20 students plus a few parents and a kid to the TGV (high speed train) on time proved to be quite challenging, as we all barely got on the train before it left, and three people managed to get on the wrong train, but fortunately the two trains were attached and stayed together until we got to Aix en Provence.
The countryside was covered with green fields punctuated by fields of yellow Colza flowers (used for canola oil) and a few brown fields waiting to be planted most of the way to Provence. Low clouds hung in the sky all the way to Aix with the atmosphere below the clouds alternating between clear and mist. The landscape became drier and rockier the further south we went, but it was still much greener and wetter than New Mexico.
We are staying with a family in a large house on the northern edge of Aix en Provence. Sophie, the hostess, is a native of Aix, but has lived in England with her Husband Paul. She has one daughter living at home, a couple of other students who go back to the States on Wednesday and a dog name Lilly, who insists that I throw a ball for her and give her lots of attention.
We are starting on classwork this morning and our first cooking class is this evening.
Off Center & Not Even 