homeward

The French keyboard is a little hard to manage, I must say. You have to do more Alt-ing and Shift-ing, and it's not a qwerty keyboard either.

I found an interesting e-mail in my inbox last night. I’d been following the British Airways cabin crew strikes story in the newspaper and on CNN (the only English-language TV station here). The company had gotten an injunction to postpone the strike, apparently citing that the “proper paperwork” hadn’t been filed to have the strike in the first place.

Visiting a country in which the spirit of revolution still makes itself known from time to time, I was amused by this. Since when do you file papers to have a strike? I always thought the whole point of a strike was to refuse to work without much advance notice to one’s employers. Having to file papers to strike somehow takes the heart out of it, I think.

Anyway, because the strike was postponed, British Airways had started to reinstate some of the canceled flights, and my flight home was one of them. Since they’d not reimbursed me yet for the canceled flight, my dilemma was: do I take that flight home, which is direct from London to Baltimore, or do I take the re-booked United flight that had a 3-hour layover in Chicago, which I’d paid for (because how was I to know the flight would be reinstated?), assuming the reimbursement from the canceled flight would cover the re-booked flight?

I wasn’t going to get reimbursed for the United flight if I canceled my ticket. And since British Airways had reinstated my direct flight home, they weren’t going to reimburse me for that one either if I canceled it.

Eventually, I worked it out so I could get a credit for the United flight to use on another trip and take the British Airways flight home.

My train ride back to London was much better than the one to Paris. I had a seat all to myself near a window with no loud and annoying children crowding me out. They served breakfast in the car I was in, so I didn’t even have to go down to the dining car.

I got to Heathrow plenty early, despite having to get creative with navigating the London tube system since St Pancras station was a zoo and several Tube lines were shut down for repair. However, once at the airport, it only took about 10 minutes to get through security. Since it was lunch time, and my flight didn’t leave for several more hours (the gate hadn’t even been posted on the board yet), I decided to eat.

I hadn’t yet been to a Wagamama Noodle Bar restaurant in London yet, although they’re quite popular. Lo and behold, there’s one at Heathrow. I had the. best. noodle. soup. ever. A huge bowl of coconut milk and lemon grass soup with rice noodles, bean sprouts, onions, and who knows what else. It was hot and spicy and freshly made. I could seriously wax poetic for days about this soup.

I think there are Wagamama restaurants in Boston, but not elsewhere in the states, which is a shame. I’d be a regular customer.

The flight home was interesting. Once I got to the gate, I noticed there weren’t many other passengers. I imagine many who were on the flight I was on originally had re-booked like I did. We were eventually put on a bus and driven all around the tarmac. We were beginning to think the driver didn’t know where he was going, and I was worried we’d be on a puddle jumper for eight hours, and most of that over ocean.

We finally arrived at the plane, which was bigger than a puddle jumper but not as big as a jumbo jet. Since there were so few of us, the cabin crew, who were quite friendly and didn’t seem at all grumbly about the postponed strike, told us we could spread out and take any seat we wanted. So we did. I had three seats to myself in the middle section, and watched Sherlock Holmes and then The Importance of Being Earnest, and then listened to Michael Palin read from his autobiography.

I was glad I took the direct flight home. I was back in the States by 7 pm. It would have been midnight if I’d taken the United flight home.

It’s disorienting to try to adjust back to American living. The Europeans are so much better at it. They get a minimum of five weeks of vacation every year. Fresh healthy food is plentiful and available within a five-minute walk of anywhere. Packaged and processed junkfood is scarce. People lounge in cafes or on the banks of the Seine and have long involved conversations while drinking coffee or wine. They don't rush, and they don't watch much TV. They do a lot of walking and bicycling.

Amazing. Our twisted idea of eating grub out of boxes and working ourselves to death and gorging on reality TV to make ourselves feel better or more successful than others is just wrong and it certainly isn't making us happy, is it?

We have so much to learn. The slow food movement and giving up cable TV and being "green" is just the beginning of how much better our quality of life could be. Makes me want to turn around and go right back across the pond.

I think maybe a two-week ramble around England next year. Or perhaps Ireland. We’ll see.

is the Sun King in?

I took the train out to Versailles today. It’s a bit of a walk from the train station to the palace, but not bad.


I visited Windsor Castle last October. Versailles Palace is far larger and more ornate.



Louis XIV, the self-proclaimed Sun King, attended chapel services here:



Marie Antoinette’s bedroom - quite pink and girly:



The Hall of Mirrors - mirrors were a great luxury in Louis' day, so to have an entire room of them would have been daunting to any visitor:



Despite all the luxury you can gawk at in the palace, I think people really come here for the gardens:


And the sculptures - they're all over the place in the gardens:



I got a salad at one of the outdoor cafes and strolled through the maze until I found a bench in the shade. Thus fortified, I found my way out of the maze to encounter a but-wait-there’s-more situation - the estate extends as far as your eye can see and then some:



I spent the rest of the hot afternoon walking down paths and getting lost and doing my best to stay in the shade.


There’s a working farm here still. I found a quiet, shady and breezy spot next to a field where sheep and horses were grazing, and took a nap. I wasn’t the only one - a lot of people were lounging in some of the other fields, having picnics, riding bicycles or jogging.





I definitely liked the farm better than the palace. Had I lived a few centuries ago, I probably would have been a farm girl. I would have been better suited to farm life than to court life, and I doubt I would have looked good in those big curly powdered wigs anyway.


I took the train home and had dinner at Nabuchodonosor Restaurant and then walked to the Eiffel Tower and spent the rest of the evening lounging on the lawn in front of it. It was apparently picnic night on the lawn, so no lack of company.


I’ve really enjoyed being in Paris, despite the crowded feeling. I like the old-world and slightly shabby atmosphere. I admire the locals’ pride and respect for the history of their city. French people are polite and helpful, and not rude (they put up with Americans like me mangling their lovely language, which could possibly be grounds for sainthood), and I think they live a far more relaxed and healthy life than we do in the US. They sure do eat better.


I’ll come back someday.

look up

I spent my birthday in the Louvre today. There’s a metro stop right under it, in which you can see the original foundation walls from when it was a fortress:

A view from underneath the big glass pyramid:

Just like the British Museum, the Louvre is not to be seen in a day. I reckon it would take at least a week to see everything. Hell, its collection comprises the ancient world through about 1850! Therefore, I followed the self-guided tour in the Rick Steves’ Paris guidebook and went for the highlights.

Here’s Venus de Milo - a perfect study of opposites and balance:

The Winged Victory of Samothrace:

The little dark square in the middle is the Mona Lisa - notice how she gets her own wall:

The closer you get to the room in which the Mona Lisa is displayed, the more crowded it gets.

I managed to get up to the roped area, which keeps the public about twenty or so feet away from The Painting. I took a good long look at it. Even under glass, it’s a magnificent painting. I remember studying this painting in art history classes in college – the triangular solidity of the figure, the depth of the background landscape, the way the eyes follow you no matter where you are in the room, the hint of a smile. The significance of these elements doesn’t quite come through in a photograph. You get it when you see it with your own eyes.

I saw several people making copies of paintings:

As long as the copy isn’t the same size as the original, you can make as exact a reproduction as you like.

Nothing in the museum cafés interested me, so I wandered down to the food court for lunch instead. It’s organized by region – Asian, Greek, Italian, Mediterranean, etc. I went for the latter and had salmon, rice, hummus, and grilled zucchini.

There’s a post office in the Louvre, which seemed logical, not to mention handy. Imagine how many postcards are sent from there!

I was dismayed to find an Apple store and a Virgin megastore in the museum. No getting away from them, I guess.

The Opéra Garnier is about a 15-minute walk from the Louvre. Along the way, I stopped in at a sheet music shop. It was dim and musty-smelling inside. Flipping through wooden bin after wooden bin of cello sheet music, most of which was notated in French or German, felt like being in a record store in the 80s. Nothing really caught my eye, so I didn’t buy any sheet music, but I was glad to know that a shop like that could still exist in the modern day. At least in Paris, it can. It probably couldn’t in the US.

In its day, the Opéra Garnier was the rich people’s opera house:

The theater inside isn’t all that big, but the halls and stairways surrounding it are quite spacious and ornately decorated:


It was more important to see and be seen than it was to hear and see the performance on stage.

Unless you’re with a tour group, you can’t get into the lower level of the theater. However, a few of the upper boxes are open, so I went into one, leaned a little over the balcony of it and looked up to see this:

Seriously, click for big on this one.

Marc Chagall painted the pieces for the ceiling in 1964. Beautiful, isn’t it? Chagall lived in Paris for awhile. He moved there in 1910 and studied the work of other artists. He went back to Russia in 1914, and then returned to France in 1923. He only just made it out of France again in 1941 when Germany took control of it. The more I see of Chagall's paintings, the more they grow on me.

I had some trouble finding the nearby metro station. I had a couple of maps with me, and they both indicated that the metro station was just to the left of the opera house. In fact, it’s directly in front of it, and not marked with any sort of sign. I only managed to find it because I sat on the steps of the opera house and just observed people for about 10 minutes. I noticed people disappearing down steps in the cul-de-sac in front of the opera house and so went to investigate. Had I still not found it, I would have resorted to asking the nearest friendly-looking Parisian, “Ou est le metro?”

"...when good Americans die, they go to Paris."

(I really must re-read A Woman of No Importance one of these days.)

I stopped at a flower shop near Père Lachaise Cemetery to get some roses. The proprietress asked me, “C’est un offer pour la cimetière?”

When I said, “Oui,” she prepared the flowers for me – took the ties off, snipped off the ends of the stems, got the majority of the thorns off, and re-wrapped the roses in paper. Not bad for 8 euros.

I really enjoyed spending a sunny afternoon in this cemetery, which sounds like an odd thing to say, I know. High stone walls surround the more than 100 acres of tombs and block out pretty much all the street noise, so it’s very quiet and peaceful inside. There are trees everywhere, and benches to sit on.

The cemetery was named after Père François de la Chaise, who was Louis XIV’s confessor. It was established by Napoleon I in 1804, although it wasn’t a popular place to be buried in at first, being rather far from the city at the time. So the People in Charge organized a big to-do to re-bury the remains of Jean de La Fontaine and Molière. Later on, the idea was repeated with the supposed remains of Héloïse and Abélard, who have quite a nice monument. (I didn’t take a picture of it because there was scaffolding all over it since it was undergoing repairs.) After these fanfare events, everyone wanted to be buried with the famous people. Today there are more than 300,000 bodies buried there, as well as the cremated remains of even more people in the columbarium.

If you take bus 69 to its last stop, you end up at Porte Gambetta, which is one of the entrances. Then, if you cross straight through (more or less), you can take bus 69 back the other way.

I left roses at Oscar Wilde’s and Chopin’s graves. Wilde’s grave was just what I would expect of him – large, art nouveau, and covered in kisses and flowers. Although there’s a notice about not defacing his grave, few seem to comply. Somehow, I think he’d like all the lipstick marks, though.

Chopin’s grave had a veritable blanket of flowers around it. An older couple was there ahead of me, and they seemed quite pleased that someone my age would appreciate Chopin. The elderly gentleman kept nodding and smiling at me while I was arranging the roses I’d brought.

I also found the graves of Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas, Colette, and Rossini, among (many many many) others. There are quite a few Holocaust memorials as well.

I highly recommend Waiting for Gertrude by Bill Richardson, if you want to read an imaginative book set in Père Lachaise Cemetery. It features the feral cats that roam the cemetery and take on the personalities of many of the famous inhabitants.

I was following the self-guided tour in the Rick Steves Paris Guidebook, when a couple approached me and asked, in French, if I knew where Edith Piaf’s grave was. The man then launched into a detailed explanation, in ever-more-rapid French, of everywhere they’d looked trying to find her grave, complete with almost stereotypical hand gestures to emphasize the effort of their quest. Since I could only catch a word here and there of what he was saying, and since I didn’t think offering “a droite” and “a gauche” and pointing up the path would do much good, and since Piaf’s grave was my next stop anyway, I just said “On y va,” and motioned to them to follow me. I’ve got to hand it to Rick Steves and his researchers. Their directions were very precise, so I was able to find it pretty easily and offer a “C’est ca!” with what was hopefully an appropriate fingerpointing flourish at the tomb to my new friends.

I'm not into photographing headstones, but I thought the sculptures on the graves were fascinating, so here’s a little photo essay of some of them:

This is above Chopin's grave:

"my wars are laid away..."

I went to the Marais district today. It's definitely a less touristy area as evidenced by the lack of people. It was downright silent in this neighborhood, and is equal parts pre-Revolution, medieval, and bohemian.

The Place de la Bastille is one of its markers:

Remember Nicholas Flamel from the first Harry Potter book? The real Nicholas Flamel lived in this area. As did Victor Hugo.

I got a bit lost, but ended up in this picturesque square with a bit of Place de Vosges (built by Henry IV) in the background:

A 14th-century building (it's got some reinforcements on the right side to keep it standing up):


A few places in the Jewish Quarter:



One hundred sixty-five Jewish children from this school were taken to concentration camps.

The head of the school, who was not Jewish, accompanied them, so he could look after and comfort them. Neither he nor the children survived the camps.

I saw two really neat rooms at the Musee Carnavalet, which contains a lot of pre-Revolution and Revolution-era art:

I thought I should have at least one fancy dinner while I' was in Paris, so I went to Le Bosquet, which is near my hotel. I had a goat cheese salad, salmon and basmati rice, and three-fruit sorbet. I think it was more a matter of the food being served all dressed up, rather than the food itself being fancy. It was all yummy nonetheless.

I walked down to the Eiffel Tower after dinner. There are lawns in front of it where people like to lounge and hang out and drink wine. As it gets darker, the Tower lights up:


And at 10, 11, and 12, it sparkles:

This shot, although out of focus, really shows all the lights flashing on the Tower:

hills and agile rabbits

I thought the London Tube was crowded during rush hour! The Paris version is worse. It was a morning of the “how many people can you stuff into a train car?”game. I’m really starting to get claustrophobic in this city. No wonder it’s a prime place for pickpocketing. Paris doesn’t really have much in the way of violent crime, but theft is a huge issue. Best thing to do on a crowded metro car is to keep your purse or backpack in front of you with your arm across it.

I was finally able to squeeze out at Montmartre – the hill of martyrs. Or perhaps, a martyr. This is the spot where St Denis was beheaded:


The story goes that after he got the chop, he picked up his head, brushed it off, and walked about four kilometers (uphill, no less!) before collapsing and actually dying.

Montmartre is my kind of suburb – quiet, not nearly as crowded, and a little more elbow room all around. Combine the hills of San Francisco with an historic district of your choosing, add artistically minded people, and you have Montmartre. Technically, it’s considered part of Paris, but the people who live there will always say they’re “going down to Paris.” I can see why they’d do that. Montmartre has a different feel than the rest of the city. If I were to live in Paris, this is where I’d choose to be.

Van Gogh lived here for awhile (the floor with the shuttered windows):


And so did Renoir (the top left windows):


I shook the hand of this man for good luck:


It’s a sculpture inspired by a story called Le Passe-Muraille by Marcel Aymé.

This is the Lapin Agile Cabaret:


Andre Gill painted a sign for this place that shows a rabbit jumping out of a saucepan. Locals then began calling it "Le Lapin à Gill" ("Gill's rabbit"), which then morphed into Lapin Agile. At the beginning of the last century, the Lapin Agile was a favorite spot for people like Picasso, Modigliani, Apollinaire, and Utrillo. Pablo Picasso's painting "At the Lapin Agile" made the place world famous. Anyone remember the play Steve Martin wrote - Picasso at the Lapin Agile? It's about an imagined meeting between Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein at the Lapin Agile.

Just across from the cabaret is a vineyard:


A singer named Davila also lived in Montmartre for awhile. I'd never heard of her, but she was apparently more popular than Madonna in her day. The locals quite liked her. Sadly, she commited suicide.

The Sacre Coeur Basilica is at the highest point of this area:


I walked around the inside perimeter while Mass was in progress (no indoor picture-taking allowed). The Lord’s Prayer recited in French is quite beautiful, especially with the echo and the faint smell of incense.

I saw a huge statue of St Therese of Lisieux (she is the patron saint of France, along with Joan of Arc). I bought a wooden mini version of the statue in the little shop. I consider her a sort of personal patron saint because when I was little, I used to stare at the statue of her in the church that my grandmother attended. There’s something about the tan and brown earth tones of her habit and the red roses she held in her arms that could easily occupy a little girl’s attention for a half-hour service.

The ceiling mosaic depiction of Christ is impressive. His heart is rendered in gold, as is the halo and rays of light behind him. The woman next to him also has a golden heart. I can’t tell if it’s the Virgin Mary or Mary Magdalene. Generally, the Virgin Mary is dressed in blue and white, and this woman is dressed in blue and red, which is often how Mary Magdalene is depicted, and since she was present at Christ’s resurrection, I’m leaning toward it being her. Anyone know for sure? I can’t find any information about it.

There are amazing views of the city from up here:


I’m told that the mayor of Montmartre is a more serious fellow than the mayor of Paris. One of the unique services he performs is a solemn “un-marriage” ceremony. Many couples with children here are not married, but they want their relationship recognized, hence the ceremony. And only a civil ceremony makes a marriage legal in Paris. Getting married in a church does not.

There’s a bohemian-tinged district just around the corner from Sacre Coeur. The portrait artists are pretty pushy, I must say. I wanted lunch more than I wanted my portrait drawn. Parisians take their time with lunch – a lot of places close for two hours in the middle of the day so everyone can eat. However, brasseries are generally open, so that’s a good place to hunt down a meal.

I decided on another museum visit in the afternoon and ended up at the Musee d’Orsay, which used to be a train station:

It’s only been open as a museum since the 1980s. Inside, you find lots of romantic, idealized figure sculptures and more Impressionist art than you can shake a baguette at. There’s a nice art nouveau furniture exhibit tucked in a back corner on the upper floor.

I took a bus back to the hotel and watched an episode of the Simpsons in French. The voice actors try to imitate the vocal styles of the American actors who voice the characters. And they don’t quite make it work. It comes across as sounding almost like a parody.

I walked down to Rue Cler again for dinner. I found a not-too-crowded café and had salmon and curried rice for dinner. Then I bought a pint of fresh strawberries for dessert from one of the produce markets and ate them while window shopping on Rue St Dominique.