November 10th

Today is the last day in Paris - headed home in a few hours, catching the train to the airport much sooner. But this morning there was still time for one last museum. Joy and I went to the Maritime Museum this morning. It was an extensive museum with mostly model ships and paintings. Strangely, some of the paintings and sculptures seemed to have very little to do with the ocean. Many of the model ships were very old and based on real ships. Apparently, the French royalty had scale models of all their ships built while the real ones were being constructed. Overall, a neat museum, but nothing spectacular. And now - to see the space that the theater school has to work in, which is apparently quite beautiful.

November 9th

This morning was mostly spent in Avie's beatiful apartment, having coffee and pasteries. Then Joy and I wandered about the Bastile area, doing a bit of shopping, and went to her plaza so that she could check on the spice store that she is imitating. From there we wandered back towards the metro so that Joy could go to class, stopping for a bit more shopping along the way. After sending Joy to class, I walked back to the hotel to deposit bags. On the way I walked down Rue Montorguel, a street full of cafes and food shops of various sorts. It is a lovely little street, and mostly not driven on (though it appeared delivery vans were allowed).

For the rest afternoon, I decided to actually see some of the "big" sites in Paris. Namely, I took the metro to the Champse-Elise and walked up to the Arc de Triumph, which you can only get underneath if you pay. Since I decided I didn't really want to go up the Arc today - save that for the next trip - I continued on to the Eiffel Tower. Sadly, just as I rounded the corner to see the whole thing, the sun took its final dip below a bank of clouds. But it is still an impressive structure.

From the Eiffel Tower, I again jumped on the Metro and went to the Photography Museum. It had a lot of strange modern photography, which I did not like - very violent. There was also an exhibit by a man who mostly paints industrial type things in stylized ways. Here, though, was mostly a display of the photographs he takes as references, which were surprisingly beautiful and colorful.

November 8th

Today has been full of late 19th and early 20th century Art. Joy and I got up and went right to the Muse d'Orsay this morning. We got ourselves confused as to where the various rooms we were looking for were, and ended up in a section on Art Novoue (no idea how to spell that), which was facinating. We walked through rooms of delecately grand and sweeping furnature, all carved out of wood. Eventually we figured out how to get to the Impressionists, which was where we were headed to begin with, and found lots of Monet, Degas, Van Gough, and so on. There were a few rooms full of Monets, which was wonderful. We went further to the Post-Impressionists galleries, which had a full range from the original carefully dotted post-impressionism, to Gaugin (again with the spelling?) and many more. The best part about this Museum, apart from the art itself and the amazing building, was the information sheets that they had at every area. They were extremely informative about the particular art movement that you were seeing. Joy went to class at about 1:15 and I wandered through the Museum a bit more, finding more impressionists and a strange display of two Van Gough paintings in a cart of plastic citrus fruit.

After that, I decided to walk to the Rodin Museum, as it has been a lovely sunny day. Unfortunately, there were no sandwitch shops between the two museums (strangely, this whole day has been a failure to find the sandwich shops I thought were everywhere). The Rodin Museum is wonderful! The garden outside is relaxing and quiet, while the extensive collection of his sculptures inside is amazing. I particularly like his pieces where he leaves a lot of the marble in a very rough state. He manages to still capture detail and a huge amount of movement withough fully developing the bodies he's sculpting. That said, there were also amazing finished pieces, such as "The Kiss" and several of sets of hands.

Tonight Joy and I will do dinner on the boat again, though we are still staying at the hotel for better sleeping arangements.

The rest of November 7th

And now the bits I didn't have time to write in yesterday:

Cool thing at the Middle Ages Museum: Next to the tapestery called "The Grape Harvest" there was a minature in relief with brail on the faces and a little brail description below it. I have never seen anything like that before!

On the way to Notre Dame, I passed another church, which turns out to be the Church of St. Steven, from which there was eminating orgn music. So I stopped in and found myself in a lovely little church full of beautifully sweeping pilars and arches, and a combination of old and very modern stained glass. Later I read in my guidebook that this was the site that a "defrocked priest" stabbed another one to death - talk about wierd!

After my day of wandering, I met Joy, along with Anne and Avie, and we all went to a Scottish Pub near Avie's apartment to play a "Round the World Quiz." It was much like Trivial Persuits, and a good deal of fun as most of the bar was filled with people speaking some sort of accented English and participating in this game.

November 7th

After a lovely, long night's sleep, I got up and decided to walk
around Ilse de Cite and the Latin Quarters for a day. I first walked
through Ilse de Cite and across the Siene to the National Museum of
the Middle Ages. It is in a beautiful old buliding that mixes
remnants of Medieval architecture with varing modern areas. Inside
there are rooms and rooms of sculptures, wooden carvings, paintings,
and tapestries. There was one tapestry that I particularly liked that
was called "The Grape Harvest" (or something along those lines) and
was of people harvesting and crushing grapes. The Museum's claim to
fame, however, is the series of six tapestries called "The Lady and
the Unicorn" about which several books have been written. They are
very different than most others, containing only one person and two
large animals (the unicorn and a lion) on bright red backgrounds.
Five of the series represenst senses, often times with a small cheeky
monkey giving the clue to which one. This sixth is "To My One
Desire."

I also did a tour of the Notre Dame, climbing the towers to view the
gargoils and the extensive city scape. Thankfully, the weather had
cleared to make this a beautiful view. And, of course, I saw "the
bell", which I don't think actually rings anymore. For the rest of
the afternoon I wandered around a bit, ending up in a Roman
ampitheater that is now a beautiful little park where kids play soccer
in the center. And, running out of internet time - more later.

November 6th

Today we woke up in uncomfortable ways on the floor and bench of the boat and decided to find another place to stay for then next few nights. We went into Centre Pompidu planning to meet Nir at 11:00, only to find out he was not coming, but Joy's band did want to play at 11... and through the confusion, Joy and I ended up doing the Centre Pompidu ourselves for a few hours. (Incidentally, it was free, as many many things are on the first of the month in off tourist seasons.) We went to a children's light exhibit that played a lot with shadows, and then to an "Invisible Maze" exhibit there. The invisible maze was very cool. You put on a headset and walked into an empty room. The headset would vibrate whenever you "hit a wall" and you had to find your way through the maze. Next we headed upstairs to the usual Pompidu artwork. It has been recently rearranged into an
exhibit they call "Big Bang" and is organized based on themes rather than chronologically. I have to admit that there wasn't anything that particularly grabbed me from the exhibit, though that may have been due to tiredness. It is also a lot of artwork to take in at once, a feeling I remember having last time I saw it.

After grabbing a sandwitch Joy and I went next door to the Brancusi Museum. It is set up exactly as his studio was, the entire studio having been given to the french government in hopes of saving the space that he carefully organized while he worked. All the works he sold were replaced with plaster replicas. Beautiful space!

Next for the day was a bit of grocery shopping for dinner, and then Joy did meet up with the Good Looking Bastards to play in front of the Pompidu, where all artists are allowed to work and play for free. I listened to them for a bit and then wandered around the square peeking at the other performers. At about 5:00 they packed up and Joy and I checked into a Hotel for the night, then headed back to the boat to make dinner and collect our things. Joy had told her boatmates that we would be cooking, and the party expanded, so we were afraid there would be tons of people there. Insead, there were only six of us, as had been originally planned. We cooked, ate, and sat at the table for several hours enjoying the company, then walked up to the train
station singing musical numbers, which Nir even knew in Hebrew. Avie, Joy, and I were very amused.

November 5th

November 5th:

Today was a late start, but still a big day. We first spent about two hours observing the square that Joy's class is reinacting for their "autocours" for the next week. We went for the cleanup which people hadn't seen before. After the hustle and bustle, there were teh enormouse green street cleaning crews that I remember from my first time in Paris. From there, Joy and I spent the rest of the afternoon at the Picasso Museum. It is an interesting collection with very few of his more famous works in it. It goes through his works chronologically, with a few mixed rooms with sculpures downstairs. The sculptures were great, and Joy and I discovered that we like very diffferent periods of his art. Joy loves pure cubism, and I preffer his much later work, when he simplifies his lines and shapes, but keeps the details and his knack for exageration bordering on grotesque.

After the Picasso Museum, we met Nir (in Joy's class and from Isreal) at his apartment and chatted for a while. After long discussion of whether he was going to go out, as a friend of his had told him he had to, or not - we found a place to eat and went to a late dinner instead. The place was wildly decorated, as somewhere that names itself "Paris's first gay restaurant" should be, and the food was fully decent. Joy had Kageroo and said it was the best meal she has had in Paris. And the company was fantastic!!

The rest of the night turned into a fiasco as we missed the last train back to the houseboat, and instead caught another one that took us nearby, but we weren't exactly sure where. We ended up walking the wrong direction for 40 minutes, figuring it out, then walking back. When we got to the boat at about 2:30 we sadly discovered that Joy's roommate had company - so it was blankets and sleeping bags in the dining room area, and plans to find a hotel the next day.

November 4th

November 4th:

Today was much more exciting than yesterday. We started the day planning to go into the city for the band to play in the streets, hoping to make a little money. On the way into the city we got a call from Anne saying that it was too cold for Emil to play, though. Instead, Joy and I got breakfast at "Paul", which is apparently a chain, but fully decent none the less. After breakfast we wandered in the direction of school, stopped and chatted in the bar/cafe that they all frequent, and Joy went to class and I went off to be a tourist.

I was considering doing one of the walking tours in the Fodor's guide book, but quickly scratched that idea and picked what I wanted to see out of the tour. The first stop was Eglise delaMadeleine, a church that took nearly a century to build because they couldn't decide what to do with it. At one point it was going to be a monument in memory of Napoleon's victory in Russia - but then he failed and that plan was scrached. However, some of the basic foundations were already laid for a classical building, so the outside is surrounded by large formal columns. Next on my little tour was a walk through the edges of Jardin des Tuileries which was full of playful dogs being walked, and on to "Union Central des Artes Decoratifs." Or, that was the plan. That portion of the exhibit was closed until 2006 however, and instead I saw a clothing exhibit and a jewelry exhibit. The clothing was a mix of very old coats and jackets on display with very strange modern clothing. The jewelry had a room full of very old and ornate jewelry and a room of bizaarly wonderful modern jewelry, much of which didn't look as if it was meant to be worn. Then I went to the "Bibliotheque Nationale Richelieu" which is home to rotating photography exhibits. The exhibit that is there now is black and white photos by Santiago Saldago, whose work I believe I have seen before at some point. The were beautiful black and white compositions with amazing depth and detail, and mostly documenting poverty. There were a few nature shots, but most of the exhibit was people in rural or run down cities throughout the world. There was also a room of people attempting to stop gushing oil fields in Kuwait and a room of pictures of hundreds and hundreds of people in a Brazilian gold mine. Moving and beautiful! Downstairs was a strange modern art room.

After Joy's class, I met her and various others at her bar, then we went to dinner with two British classmates, James and Bet. After a lively dinner we went to see a one-woman play. It was in french, which none of us understood much of, but was fantastic because of the woman's use of her body. She was able to assumùe completely different personas on a moment's notice. After the play we went to a bar across the street, and then back to the houseboat, which sadly was very noisey late into the night. Ah well, more sleep tonight, hopefully.

hmmm

confused as to why that didn't post right away... oh well, working now.

Here at last!

Here at last! The flight went smoothly, but getting into Paris did
not. There is no reason to believe that I went about it in the wrong way - the train simply broke down, then I couldn't firgure out how to use the public phones so I didn't call Joy to let her know what was going on until several hours after I was supposed to have met her. (For the record, public phones in Paris are opperated by using a phone card that you have to buy either in a shop or at a train station - not by change or credit card.) But it worked out and she got me to her houseboat, where I crashed for a few hours. Now I am in an internet cafe down the street from her school, where I will meet her shortly to go to the bar where she's a regular with her friends, then on to dinner and band practice. What fun!

The rest of the night went rather well. Joy's band is named "Good Looking Bastards" and features Joy, a woman from Paris named Anne, and a Swede named Emil who looks like Johnny Depp. They play guitar and sing and do hand and tamborene precusions - mostly blues-flavored things. There is also a lot of improv in their singing, especially as they are still working on many of the words. Songs tonight ranged from Bob Dylan's "Quinn the Esquimo" to Sweedish pirate songs. Dinner was cooked by Emil and mostly involved vegetables - for the veggies being from a frozen bag, it was not bad at all! (Though apparently not quite up to Emil's standards.) After dinner was political conversation until we were all so exausted we had to go home and hope the trains were still running. Paris has a wonderful train/metro system that will get you just about anywhere.