Cité Day

All of today's attractions were situated on the Ile de la Cité, one of the two islands in the Seine and the site of the first human settlement in Paris.

First on the list was Notre Dame, which I'm sure needs no introduction, supposedly being Paris' most visited attraction. I think it being free to walk around the church might have something to do with that, though I did wait over an hour to go up the towers which you do have to pay for.

It is a beautiful church, both inside and outside, though I do like the outside better with all the sculptures on the facade, particularly the gargoyles and chimeras, though the rse windows inside are amazing.


I had seen the church on my previous visit to Paris, but never went inside, deterred by the line, which snaked all the way across the square in front of the church. I am now glad that I left it until now, as the gardens around the church were full of colour, which they weren't in winter, and I was able to take a couple of really nice photos, my favourite of which is this one, where it looks like its floating on a sea of blossoms.


I want to add that it was around here that my camera almost reached the end of it's usefulness, the memory card only had space for around thirty more photos and I wasn't too sure that the battery was going to last that long as the low battery indicator started flashing at me. Note to self for next trip, either buy a larger memory card or redce the quality of the photos, and charge the batterties overnight and carry the spare around. Or be less happy snappy. But that's the least favoured option. I like all my photos. *smiles*

From Notre Dame it was a hop skip and jump to Sainte-Chapelle, my next destination. A chapel built by Louis IX to house the relics of the Passion of Christ which he bought, The lower chapel is pretty, but the upper chapel is absolutely breath taking, whith it's 15 stained glass windows, supposedly 600 square meters in area, all depicting a different religious tale, not that I know any of them well enough to follow the depictions. Well, at least the ones which were well lit by the sun.


Combined with my tickets to Sainte-Chapelle was one to the Conciergerie, which is part of the current Palais de Justice, which was where the Revolutionary Tribunal was held during the Reign of Terror and the Conciergerie was used as a prison where most of the captives ended up on the guillotine. There was a room full of boards which contained a list titled "liste generale et tres extacte des 2780 condamnes a mort a paris" where each person was listed with their occupation. The most famous immate, Marie Antoinette wasn't on the list, but there was a chapel there dedicated to her and a reconstruction of the cell she would have lived in for the two to three months she was there. It was an informative visit, but a little underwhelming, I don't think the displays really gave a sense of what it was like that the time, probably needed more background, since most visitors are from overseas and don't know all that much about the French Revolution.

Actually, with that ends my break to Paris, the last couple of hours were spent walking back to my hostel and grabbing my bags and walking to the train station. I've really enjoyed myself this weekend. I was worried about it being lonely by myself and not having anything to do in the evenings when all the sights were closed, but this wasn't a problem as I always found something to do, even if it was sit down for a couple of hours and write while resting my feet. I'd forgotten what it is like to be in a big city, with lots of people and lots of cheap take away food. Mmmm... I really like the city, there is so much to it, and I think the fact that I know about it from books and films really helps, though knowing more would have obviously been better. Also, because I've been living in Geneva for so many months now, being in a French speaking city doesn't feel foreign anymore.

Paris, je t'aime.

As a postscript though, I want to add that while it is a lovely city to visit when it's sunny and warm, I didn't really enjoy my time there in the dead of winter with cold and the sleet and slush; and I can see how living there might not be all that pleasant, particularly if you can't afford to live near the centre.

Paris tu paries Paris que je te quitte
Que je change
De cap de capitale
Paris tu paries Paris que je te quitte
Que je te plaque
Sur tes trottoirs sales

History Day

I don't really know if that's the correct title to sum up the day, but it's the first thing that came to mind, so it'll have to do.

Actually, I just noticed, I got so caught up in describing the opera theatre and its patrons of the time; I forgot to mention it's most famous patron, namely, the Phantom of the Opera. When they were building the Palais, they had to drain a body of water underground, during which the neighbours heard voices, which is how the myth began, and any mysterious occurrences at the theatre were attributed to a ghost. In particular, the falling of one of the counter weights to the auditorium chandelier on a woman in the renters area. An incident which was embellished in the novel by Gaston Leroux, on which the musical was based, in which the ghost received his own box but luckily for the theatre, the musical has never been performed in Paris, nor the movie, so audiences sit in Box 5 which no thoughts regarding the phantom.


Oh, and the ballet I saw was a contemporary one, choreographed by John Neumeier to Gustav Mahler's Third Symphony. I didn’t a playbill until afterwards, so I didn’t know about the season theme or the love story, but I quite enjoyed it. I would have really enjoyed it if I had a seat though. It was a two hour performance with no interval, and after the first act, I was finding it hard to concentrate on the stage, and by the last act, I was fidgeting all over the place. Which was a pity, since the choreography was really interesting and the dancers very good. Note to self for the future, it is worth paying more for a seat at a theatre, though in this case I didn’t really have a choice as they were all sold out. It was an experience though, they had two doors that went to standing room seats where they had padded rail for people to lean or perch on. The more seasoned of the audience went in early and stood near the rope separating the standing audience from the seated audience in the hope that they would be allowed into any empty spots, though there weren’t any at this performance. We didn’t have that bad a position actually, an unobstructed view of the whole stage. I’ve paid much more at home for worse.

Anyway, I should stop talking about the theatre and mention what else I’ve been doing. Which has been a whole lot of walking. Yesterday I way, very slowly, from Opera Garnier to Opera Bastille, doing some window shopping and sight seeing along the way. I breezed though Galleries Lafayette, which was very luxurious (I had a peak at the Tiffany section) and did have a very big lingerie department, though I don’t know about the largest in the world. It also had a very nice view over Paris from the terrace and a very pretty dome.

I also looked inside Le Printemps, the department store next door, but it wasn’t as pretty, so didn’t bother looking around. I also went though Passage des Panaoramas, a covered shopping arcade, which was a bit of a let down from my guide book description, not as nice as the arcades back one and away from the entrance lots of empty stores.

I also stumbled across the Eglise St-Eustache, which has a very beautiful façade with lots of arches, though the inside doesn’t really match it with lots of the paintings needing restoration work done.


And with that, I think I’ve finished describing yesterday. Today’s plan was kind of similar, I had a couple of places I wanted to go, and whatever was interesting in between or around I would decide to visit when I got there.

The first attraction was the Hôtel des Invalides, which houses the Musée de l'Armée and Napolean’s Tomb. Before I went there however, I made a slight detour to the École Militaire, from which, there is a great view of:

Le Tour Eiffel. I didn’t bother going any closer as I have plans to go up it in summer with my boyfriend, but I thought that I would at least take a photo of it since I was so close.

From there it was a short walk to the Hôtel des Invalides, which for those who have been to Paris, is the gold domed roof near the Eiffel Tower.

This is the roof of the aptly named Dome Church, in which is Napolean’s Tomb, where he lies within five successive coffins encased in a sarcophagus on a floor on which is written eight of famous victories and on the surrounding walls are ten marble sculptures of his civil achievements, one of which lists all the buildings he commissioned in Paris. Quite ostentatious really. Granted, it wasn’t planned by the emperor to be interred in such a state, all he supposedly specified was to ‘lie by the Seine, among the people he loved’ but I’m pretty sure he would approve of his final resting place:

Who wouldn’t be? 12kg of gold was used to gild the dome when it was restored in 1989!

The rest of the complex wasn’t as ornate, since that church was originally built for King Louis IV to come and hear the same mass as all the veterans of his wars for whom the complex was built, which encompassed the functions of a hospice, barracks, convent, hospital and factory. It you’re wondering, the royal church was never used for the military, they had their own plainer church, behind the royal one, currently decorated with flags and standards taken from enemies.


The Musée de l'Armée is split into three sections, one of which was closed for renovations. I only went through one of the remaining two, The Antique Arms and Armour Deparment, knights to permanent army. The other was devoted to the First and Second World Wars, but I ran out of time and wasn't really interested in the topics, as in the past I've found it difficult to stomach exhibits on those wars. I'm fine looking at swords and muskets and chain mail and suits of armour but find it hard to look at guns and tanks. I think it's because history has romanticised knights and sword play and it is hard to identify with the individual people on the battlefield who couldn’t write and tell us about what it was really like, but there is nothing romantic about mechanised warfare, which is more recent of which there are plenty of memoirs describing the horrendousness of it all.

I also got distracted by the Musée des Plans-Reliefs. As some of you know, I have a thing for maps, I like seeing how things are organised on a larger scale and maps made in times past are even more interesting as you can compare them to today and see the development. Oh, as anybody who has travelled with me probably knows, I also have a thing for miniature models; I always look at them and take photos of them if there are any around. So the relief maps were the combination of these, scale models of fortified towns and surrounding countryside all along the French border made from 1668 to 1870. They were pretty cool, but I didn’t find them that interesting since I hadn’t been to any of the places except one and all the descriptions were in French. Though, the thing that interested me about most of the models was the star-like shape of the town defences:

which I had never seen before, supposedly built in this shape as round towers have blind spots. You can see how the town could go in hold out in a siege until they ran out of supplies. They had a cool set of models showing the stages of a battle from as the advancing army comes in from the distance to breaking the walls and entering the town.

From the Hôtel des Invalides, I headed, again very slowly, east toward my second attraction, the Panthéon, going past the Eglise St-Sulpice whose name you may recognise from Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, which he places a meridian line he calls ‘The Rose Line’ and is the setting of a murder. For those who have seen the movie, there really is a meridian line marked on the floor of the church

but as a sign in the church states, this was placed there for a scientific study conducted by the Paris Observatory, directly south of the church, and the P and S symbols in the windows don’t stand for the Priory of Sion, but Peter and Sulpice.

Anyway, I finally made it to the Panthéon, which I was looking forward to for numerous reasons. The geekiest of which is:

it is where Foucault set up his first pendulum back in 1851, demonstrating the rotation of the Earth. Now the last time I saw one was at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles last August, after which I said I was going to find out how it worked. I remember looking at the Wikipedia page, and I can’t remember how it differs from an ordinary pendulum. I’m it has something to do with the length of the strong and the weight of the ball and I know the angle through which it rotates changes with latitude, and at the poles (or was it the equator?), it would act as an ordinary pendulum (or rotate though the full 360 degrees), but I can’t remember why.


The building is magnificent and has a very interesting history, which I won’t bother to go into here, because I will probably wrong and I want to mention the other reasons I wanted to go there, namely that Victor Hugo and Alexander Dumas and Pierre and Maris Curie are all interred in the crypt along with lots of other French people, most of whom I don’t know, though I did recognise some of the names, like Voltaire and Rousseau, though these don’t interest me as much as Nobel Prize winning scientists and novelists whose books I know and love.

From these, I headed to the Jarin du Luxembourg, where I am currently writing this very long entry and in which there is a multitude of flowerbeds in bloom

and grass you can’t walk on with guards posted to blow whistles at people who try. Oh, they are also there to tell everybody to leave the park when it closes…

Ballet Day

I'm currently waiting in line at the Opéra Bastille to buy ballet tickets for a performance tonight, hence the title of the post, though most of the things I've done today have revolved around the Opéra National de Paris and its two opera houses, Opéra Bastille and Opéra Garnier.

My first stop this morning was Opéra Garnier, to buy a ticket for a guided tour, which was in an hour. I spent that time taking photos of the exterior of the Palais:

and walking randomly around the area, ending up at the Place Vendôme as I saw Napoleon's column, celebrating the victory of Austerlitz for afar and decided to find it:

I guess the fact that I walked past Tiffany and Cartier and quite a few other luxury jewellery stores on the way should have been a hint, but I was very surprised by the range of stores and hotels in the square. There was Chanel and Dior and others, all with very sparkly jewllery in the windows with no price tags.

Anyway, back to the Opéra Garnier, for which I warn you, I will go into way too much detail, since I went on a tour and it is a topic I'm interested in. I was looking forward to seeing the Palais, and it didn't disappoint, despite the fact that the auditorium wasn't open for visits due to a rehearsal.

The theatre was commissioned by Napolean III during a period when going to see a performance meant something very difference from nowadays. The audience was split up into two categories, those with season tickets who bought a box for every night for the entire season, and those with single tickets, degradingly called renters. As you can probably guess, upper class people were season subscribers and lower class people or foreigners bought single tickets. Now if you were a subscriber, and went to the theatre every night, you would end up watching the same show many times over. So it wasn't for the performances that these people came every night, but for the social interaction, and the theatre was designed with this in mind.

There are three difference entrances to the building, One fr the renters, one for the subscribers and one for royalty. Inside the theatre, the areas for each were laid out such that there was minimal to no interaction between them, and each was decorated very differently. The renter's area was very plain, while the subscribers area was very sumptuous, with a marvellous staircase with lots of overlooking balconiesand two foyers full of gold and art:


You would think that the imperial entrances would be just as grand, but they are surprisingly plain, with just raw stone walls. This is because Napolean want to war with Prussia during the construction, and lost, after which France became a republic whose government wouldn’t pay for the building. So Garnier completed his opera house with very little funds, leaving the imperial entrances unfinished, since nobody would be using them.

Theatregoers still flocked to the performances, despite the royal boxes being empty, and their priority if been seen and seeing others meant a very different type of dynamic inside the auditorium. After the entrance parade on the staircase, people would go to their boxes and look at each other until the curtain went up, after which they would go to the back of their box, draw their curtains and talk, have dinner, sleep or whatever. The performers performed to half empty theatres most of the time! In fact, the auditorium always had some light throughout the performances for the audience.

Due to this audience dynamic, the boxes right next to the stage were the most desirable, since they are the most visible and also were lit by the stage. The stalls seating was the least desirable of the subscriber areas and only males bought those seats, supposedly for the view of the ballerinas and because females at the time couldn’t manoeuvre their skirts through the rows of seats.

Subscribers also had keys to their boxes and the opera house and were allowed to go anywhere they wanted in the theatre, including all backstage areas, like the dressing and rehearsal rooms, which is quite a strange concept, since that would distract the performers immensely. However, as you can probably guess, performers back then weren’t very respected by French audiences, particularly the ballerinas, who according to the tour guide were selected more for their looks rather than their dancing abilities. Most of them also came from poorer families and needed the money since wealthier girls would never show their lets in public like that. Supposedly, a status symbol of the time, if you were male, was dating a ballerina, since they were known to be very greedy and wanted clothes and jewellery and apartments with servants from their suitors.

Anyway, it obviously isn’t like that nowadays, mainly due to foreign influences on the French theatre from countries where the performers were respected, like Russia, Italy and Germany. I wish I could see a performance in the palais, but nothing is showing there for the nights that I’m here, which is why I’m lining up here for last minute, standing tickets…

Museum Day

I’m in Paris for the Easter long weekend, and so far it’s going fairly well. I had wanted to go somewhere warmer for the break, but couldn’t find any cheap flights anywhere. So I decided on Paris, it’s only a four train ride from Geneva and while I’ve been here before, there is still plenty of things I want to see and do.

One of which was to spend more time in the museums here. So today, I spent 2.5ish hours in the Museé d’Orsay, 0.5ish hours in the Museé de l’Orangerie and another 2.5ish hours in the Museé du Louvre. If you’re wondering how I managed to fit that all in today as well the train ride here and checking into my hostel, the answer is that I took a very early train here this morning and the Louvre is open until 10pm on Fridays with a reduced entrance fee.


Anyway, now my feet are aching and I’m a little over art, not being that interested in or knowledgeable about it in the first place. I enjoyed the 5th floor of the Orsay where their Impressionist collection is displayed, absolutely loved of the Waterlily rooms in the Orangerie, was awed by the Napolean III rooms in the Louvre, but by the end, I was decided to do the tourist thing and run around taking photos of famous pieces.

Here is a selection of the paintings I saw today (sculptures and furnishings don’t collage together that well). You’ll probably recognise most of them, or at least be able to guess the artist.