Thursday, May 28, 2009

Zut!

Finally the Paris post! We arrived in Paris bright eyed and bushy tailed and the city didn't disappoint. I stayed in 3 different hostels over our 10 day stay here, all in the Montmartre district. Our first hostel was near the Sacre Coeur and the fabric district.
View from the Sacre Coeur.



This chat noir wandered throughout the area and chilled with us while we ate our crepes at a cafe. As we kept seeing black cats though, we started to wonder if the district had a secret black cat stash and was just pumping them out for us tourists.
If only all graffiti were as whimsical as Parisian graffiti.


Markets and cafes were everywhere. The neighbourhood markets tended to look like this:Une fromagerie.


Centre Les Halles with view of Notre Dame in background.
We caught our first French protest at Les Halles - from what we could gather it was a Sarkozy-critical demonstration raising awareness about the wrongful deportation of immigrants from France.
I went to a great contemporary art gallery and saw the work of (will remember artist's name soon) who covered canvases and the buildings huge windows in her work.
One of my absolute favourite spots was this canal in the northern part of the city that was always populated with locals hanging out by the water. There were great cafes and restaurants, and even a two-building movie theater on each side. It had an especially relaxed vibe at night when the canal became lined with 20-somethings having late night picnics. We're talking gourmet picnics with wine, pasta, fancy salads, and the oh-so-necessary checkered blankets. Those kids could cook!
It was a love from afar... Croque Monsieurs were calling my name everywhere in Paris. But their insistence on containing jambon complicated matters. We both knew it could never be anything more than a shopwindow romance :(
A made the day trek to the Palace of Versailles. After the first — and very brief — time I traveled to Paris I regretted not seeing Versailles immensely. I didn't want to miss it this time. It was a full day of grandeur and absurd opulence.
This was the room of a few different queens throughout history. The green upholstered chairs were commissioned for the birth of Marie Anntoinette's first child.

The famous Hall of Mirrors.
I couldn't believe how massive the gardens of Versailles were. I could only walk about a quarter of the area, it was just too vast.


The base of the Eiffel Tower.
Modern Art Museum of Paris

I checked out the Palais du Tokyo contemporary art gallery which unfortunately was between exhibits, though I did get to hang out at it's wicked restaurant and gift shop. I love that lamp!

The smelliest museum in the world! It may seem weird but the Paris Sewer Museum was quite cool. There was a lot of information on how the system needed to change during the growth of Paris from Roman times to present day. I found out that along with friend Emmanuel Bruneseau, Victor Hugo spent a lot of time surveying and mapping this underground network in order to gather information for Jean Valjean's adventures in Les Miserables. Apparently the book is of major historical value because of his accurate depictions of the system at a time when few people ventured into the poorly understood maze.






Mom, this one's for you. Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris! The very spot Angela Lansbury picked up her very own Dior gown despite all snooty Parisian obstacles.

A highlight of Paris for me was La Cinematheque Francais which I've wanted to check out since watching Bertolucci's The Dreamers. The Cinematheque was born out of Henri Langlois's attempts in the 30s to prevent films of the silent era from being lost. During WWII he and friends smuggled a large collection of movies for safe-keeping in France that were ordered to be destroyed by the Nazi party. After the war he continued to archive films and items relating to the film industry in general and amassed a museum collection which got funding from the French government. The museum also functioned as a movie theater that is famous for giving members of the French New Wave their film history lessons. A neat story about Langlois: In 1968 the powers that be at the Cinematheque were fed up with Langlois' disorganized work habits and arrogance and fired him from the institution. Students protested and letters of complaint from directors like Hitchcock, Kurosawa, and Felini came in threatening to no longer show their films at the Cinematheque. It worked! Langlois got his job back.

The new Cinematheque building was built a few years ago by Frank Gehry.
Replica of the metallic suit Brigitte Helm had to wear in Fritz Lang's Metropolis.
Early tickets to screenings from Langlois's film club.
There was a large collection of early experimental animation gadgets by people like the Lumiere Brothers and Edison.
Can you guess this famous skull?
Jules and I checked out the city Aquarium. Those are jellyfish in that blue tank, and some scarily still piranha.


Star Trek. Opening Night. Amazing.

Montserrat

While in Barcelona Jules and I got up early to take a train to Montserrat, which we had heard from a fellow traveler was gorgeous."Montserrat" translates to "jagged mountain" in Catalan, and is composed of pink conglomerate, a form of sedentary rock. The site is home to Santa Maria del Montserrat, a Benedictine abbey that treats its guests to a legendary boys' choir concert every day at 1 pm. Every day that is, except for the day we decided to go. Unbeknownst to us the boys were on a day trip that day. Nonetheless, we were breathtaken by the mountain and the view it offered once you take either the funicular up to the monastery, or the cable car. Being slightly freaked by the intense slope of the cable car, we chose the funicular (a train that winds its way slowly to the top). Get ready for some serious scenery!

Early morning mist at the top of the mountain.

Views from the funicular.





Funicular station at landing of the mountain.

The monastery.











The view was incredible.









A bunch of teens were climbing this sculpture at the edge of a cliff while we watched with motherly concern.
Then this dude came and gave them a talkin' to.
Ahhh. Death avoided. Scenic beauty restored.