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Jun. 19th, 2003 12:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
darcydodoHow strange. Livejournal has suddenly decided that it wants to be in French, too. Clearly the disease Ujournal had is catching; I guess it's a virus.
Anyway, I'm going to be completely daft and type up this journal entry now rather than later. This is daft because I have to wake up nice and early tomorrow in order to help Sandrine with her paper again. Yippidy-doo-dah. (Oh, and the stupid printer is fucked up, so I had to take ages longer doing something tonight than I should've. So not fair.)
After the excesses of last night, I woke up at a strangely early hour, futzed around for ages, and then headed over to the Musée du Vin. I took the train to Passy métro station, and in the process, discovered two things. First of all, this train line (6, I think), is the one that goes over the bridge that runs the closest to the Eiffel Tower. This means that it's the line we took eight or so years ago, when I was last in Paris, and we caught a train across the river at night just so that we could see the Eiffel Tower all lit up and golden and pretty. Then, when I got off the train at Passy, I realized that it was precisely the same station that we had gotten off at those eight years before, and as I climbed up the steps to Rue des Eaux, I had this strange doubled sense of time. Like déjà vu, only it was an actual, identifiable memory that was coalescing around my reality.
After I found the museum (which took a bit of wandering, and only partially 'cause I was being dense), I went in and presented my student card in order to get a reduced-price ticket. I had a moment of panic, because I'm in the habit of showing my Fondation des Etats-Unis card (it's orange and easily spottable in the darkness of my backpack), and I realized I'd left it at home. But I had my Alliance Française card, which of course could serve equally well. In point of fact, it served far better than the other would have, because it turned out that the guy taking my money knew a professor at AF and hence has a soft spot for its students. As a result, I got charged even less than the normal student price, and he gave me a glossy book for free. The book basically recapitulates the information on the signs in the museum, so it will be nice to leaf through at some point.
The displays were very cool. I started out trying to read all the signs but eventually realized that I actually would be in there all day long if I continued to do so. So I wandered through and looked at the objects (tools, accessories, etc.) and wax figures and occasionally glanced at a sign or two and tried not to get carried away with reading them, 'cause I really did want to know what everything was! My "favorite" object (read: the object which most impressed me) was a footless glass from Picardie, from the beginning of the 4th century AD. Always nice seeing really ancient stuff cropping up at random. Anyway, I got to the end of the tour and realized that I hadn't seen the wax figure of Balzac. Puzzled, I consulted my glossy book and discovered that he should have been at station 12. I sped back there, and saw precisely nothing; it was where I had earlier admired a nice little stairway fading into the darkness beyond an iron gate. However, just at that point, a group of Englishmen was wandering through, guided by someone who had been there before. Puzzled, he stopped, and commented that this was where Balzac usually was, and he didn't know why they had the lights turned off; maybe, he suggested, the nearby Balzac museum had complained about the presence of Balzac in this display.
Well, at least that explained why I hadn't noticed Balzac, despite being on the lookout for him. I really need to remember not to expect things in Paris, because otherwise, I'm guessing, they simply won't happen, in spite of my (often well-founded) expectations.
There was a free taste of wine included with the price of the ticket; I got the red, and it was very nice. The wine was Chateau Labastidié, but I'm not sure precisely what type. Then I headed off.
It was only 1 in the afternoon, and I wasn't going to go to the Louvre until at least 3, because tickets were more expensive prior to that. So, I decided, as I was near the Eiffel Tower, I might as well go climb it for once in my life, so that I could say I had if nothing else. First, however, I went to find some lunch. I got a tuna sandwich at a random boulangerie a few streets away; it was nice, it had lettuce and tomato and pickles and slices of hardboiled egg. And, of course, fantastic bread. I ate it while I was walking and sat down on the steps by the Musée d'Homme to finish it. I had a direct and close view of the Eiffel Tower from there, because all that separates the two is a long fountain, the river, and a little bit more space.
There are lots of pretty parks by the Tower. If I'd had more time, I would've liked to simply wander around them, but I think that wandering in parks is going to be something I actually do very little of in Paris, unless Sam and I do some park-wandering while he's here. But I did pass by a pond with lots of carp in it, and this reminded me of something that I saw at Chantilly which I'd forgotten about already by the time I was writing my journal entry. I was walking around the formal bit of the grounds, the bit with the fountains, and I saw a strange stirring in the settled muck at the bottom of one fountain. It looked like a miniature sea serpent. On closer inspection, I realized it was a solitary carp, cresting through the water and showing off its scaly back, while churning the muck with its tail. Anyway, there were lots of carp here at the Eiffel Tower, too, and they were very large. And turbulent.
Last time I was in Paris, we went to the Tower at night, and I lay on my back in the pebbles beneath the tower directly below the center and stared up. I couldn't remotely do that this time, for two reasons. Reason 1) it was broad daylight. I have some sense of self-preservation and of how to maintain some shred of dignity and apparent sanity, despite any evidence to the contrary at home. Reason 2) they were repainting the Tower, and hence had a big green net spread across at the level of the first floor. Thus I couldn't see the top anyway. But I didn't really want to lie on my back under the tower, I wanted to go up it, and I did. Climbing the Tower was fun. Sadly, I could only go to the second floor; for once, my physical exertions were not even causing me the twinges of a headache, and I was feeling really good. So I think I could have made it to the top-top pretty easily by climbing. But I wasn't allowed to, so I had to be content with wandering around the observation deck and noting where I had eaten lunch and finding out interesting facts like that the pretty domed roof I could see not so far away was Les Invalides. There were signs everywhere with information on things that had happened between 1883 and 1983, a hundred signs that had been put up for the centenary. They were generally good fun to read, though I didn't actually read all hundred of them.
I left the Tower and headed to a métro station so that I could go to the Louvre. On the way, I stopped at a phone box and talked to my parents for a while; my mom told me the names of various chocolatiers she thought I should visit. One's near the AF, it turns out, so I may well do that at some point. (After all, who'd pass up a visit to a chocolate store?) The conversation took long enough that it was already 4:30 or so by the time I actually made it to the Louvre.
My goal this time was to see the French painting. Anything on the way could be looked at, but was not the main purpose of this visit. Well, one of the things on the way was a display of Egyptian shabtis, and they were really very cool. There was a whole troop of identical little glazed blue-green shabtis of maybe three different sizes, plus many other shabtis and some papyrus and this and that. Cool stuff. But reading the signs, all in French, got a bit tiring after a while, and I gave up and just enjoyed looking at the things.
Then I arrived in the area of the French statues. I looked at the outdoor statue population but eschewed the indoor portion, as well as the bit in the Entresol. They were nice, but I couldn't afford to spend too much time down there; I wanted to make sure I had time for the paintings, and I didn't want to get home too too late either. So I headed up to the second floor, and arrived in the section of Flemish and Dutch paintings. Sadly, Vermeer was in the wrong direction; I will make it back to the Louvre one day and visit his stuff as well as things like Napoleon's chambers and the crown diamonds, which I've also never seen. This trip, though, it probably won't happen, as I'm almost museum'd out.
The first paintings I saw were two almost-still-lifes by Franz Snyders, entitled "Les marchands des poissons" and La marchande de gibiers, which I refer to as almost-still-lifes because of the people-presence. They were very nice. I like still-lifes. Then I discovered that I was entering a set of rooms mostly filled with Rubens. That was particularly cool because I looked at the first painting and thought "hmm, those women look quite Rubenesque," and then glanced at the ID and discovered that there was a very good reason for this. I also discovered that Rubens upon occasion really mangles the natural drape of cloth in order to hide genitalia.
I liked Intérieur d'église. Effet de nuit by Hendrick II van Steenwyk quite a bit; there were other, fairly similar paintings by him, though, which allowed me to come to the conclusion that I specifically liked the first painting by him, not just that style of architectural painting in general. I think he may draw nothing but the insides of churches, actually.
There were more paintings-within-paintings that I stumbled across, of course; one was Une Galerie de tableaux / Cabinet d'amateur by Baellieur, in which the paintings really did reflect all the different types of Dutch and/or Flemish paintings that I was seeing around me. Religious scenes, mythological scenes, still-lifes, and individual paintings of random tropical birds and animals.
I began to feel unreasonably tired; not I-need-to-sit-down tired, but I'm-going-to-fall-asleep-on-my-feet tired. This was bad, and I went and stared blankly at my Let's Go guide for a while and then felt strangely refreshed.
I got to the beginning of the French paintings and slowed down a bit, although I did feel like I was rushing a bit through some of the rooms in an effort to make sure I finished before the museum closed. (I had ages, but there were a lot of rooms.) A few paintings had incongruous elements of one sort or another that just really made me laugh. Nicolas Poussin, who generally painted quite well, had a set of four seasonal paintings one of which was entitled "Le Printemps / Le Paradis terrestre." The painting itself was very nice, but God was lying up in the sky on a cloud while looking at Adam and Eve, and it struck me as strangely funny. Cloud-ware designer furniture. He looked awfully comfy, sprawled up there. Another strangeness was in two paintings by Michel Dorigny, "La Tempérance" and "La Force et la Prudence," both of which featured a bright pink cupid!
Today I was evidently liking paintings of urban waters (by which I mean canals, harbors, city-girded rivers...). Anything that contained such a feature seemed to automatically pop into my head with a bright smile and a wave. (Of a non-existent hand, not a wave of water, thank you.) I have no idea what influences my tastes in this fashion.
In one room, there were four gigantic paintings that simply awed me on account of their scale; they were by Le Brun and comprised "L'Histoire d'Alexandre." In the next room, I saw a painting that appealed to me particularly, but possible just because it combined a still-life theme (the fishes!) with today's pet theme of urban water. It was "La Pêche miraculeuse," by Jean Jouvenet.
Antoine Coypel painted a smiling, tooth-missing "Démocrite" whom I liked quite a lot. The subject was very unlike the usual Greek philosopher type, though. And there was an "Etudes des mains" by Nicolas de Largillierre, which was very strange not simply because it was just hands and bits of sleeve, but more because it was properly painted, not sketched, and yet was still a study.
Pierre Subleyras painted the very cool "Caron passant les ombres." Charon is nude, and young, and his back is to the viewer; the shades are nothing but masses of white drapery. The contrast is remarkable, and it took me forever to even notice anything in the painting but Charon poling his ferry through the fiery waters of the Styx. (That fusion of rivers made me wince slightly, of course, but what can you do?)
It was strange seeing very old paintings of places I've actually been to myself; Hubert Robert painted a set of antique places in Provence, which included the Pont du Gard and the Maison Carrée and Temple of Diana at Nîmes. There were people in strange clothes walking where I myself have walked, and random objects in the picture that so clearly didn't belong to this day and age. Robert also painted a pair of pictures that fall into the paintings-in-painting category, but with a twist. They were "Projet d'aménagement de la Grande Galerie du Louvre" and "Vue imaginaire de la Grande Galerie du Louvre en ruines." The former was simply a gallery scene; the latter was, as its name suggests, a projected idea of what would be left and what the scene would be were the first in ruins rather than whole. I particularly liked the recurring figure of an artist in each, copying a painting in the one and drawing a surviving, still-standing statue in the other. The abstracted parallels were curious.
The strangest picture I saw, and probably my favorite (I need to find a poster or a postcard of this): I have no idea, which I'm furious about. It had a placard next to it that said "Laban cherchant ses idoles," by Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, but it wasn't that remotely. It was supremely cool, and almost modern in its style. In fact, it reminded me strongly of the style used by Edward Hopper.
Elsewhere, there was a fantastic painting by Fleury-François Richard of Le petit Chaperon rouge! It was absolutely fantastic. Our red-cloaked heroine was happily waving to a slavering, red-eyed wolf, who hadn't even bothered with the disguise of clothes. I love the images that Perrault's slightly-less-happy tales provoke. :)
Lastly: there was much Prud'Hon, whom I generally like and some of whose paintings/pastels/whatevers I really do like quite well. There was much Ingres around, too.
I managed to get out of the museum by about 8:45 or 9 and went looking for dinner. I ended up at a Chinese restaurant just off the Boulevard Saint-Germain; I couldn't be bothered to look for something French, I was too hungry and tired. (Annoyingly, I later saw a crêpe stand a couple of blocks away. I'm sure it hasn't been there before at this time of night.) But before I actually went into the restaurant, I very randomly encountered a girl from UC Women's Chorale with her father and her friend. (I knew her to be in UCCE 'cause she was wearing her Chorale shirt.) She was on that wonderful, windy, sopping wet Christmas caroling trip to SF and had apparently talked to me and Ari a bit. She looked vaguely familiar, but apparently she remembered me far better. And she told me her name again tonight and I've already forgotten it, 'cause I'm terrible with names like that. Gah. Her father's name was Doyle, though, I remember that much! (Hmm, wonder why I'd remember that name...)
So anyway, I had dinner, and then decided to splurge further because it might be my last time in that specific area, so I had the hot chocolate from Les Deux Magots. Which was nice, and certainly better than your run-of-the-mill hot chocolate, but no better than something I could make myself if I used melted chocolate and cream rather than nonfat milk and powdered chocolate. :) One of the chocolatiers my mother is urging me towards reputedly has the best hot chocolate around, so a comparison test is hereby to be initiated.
Having said which, I shall take myself off to bed, 'cause I'm really quite stupidly tired, and am now only going to get about five or six hours of sleep.
Edited: added hyperlinks
Anyway, I'm going to be completely daft and type up this journal entry now rather than later. This is daft because I have to wake up nice and early tomorrow in order to help Sandrine with her paper again. Yippidy-doo-dah. (Oh, and the stupid printer is fucked up, so I had to take ages longer doing something tonight than I should've. So not fair.)
After the excesses of last night, I woke up at a strangely early hour, futzed around for ages, and then headed over to the Musée du Vin. I took the train to Passy métro station, and in the process, discovered two things. First of all, this train line (6, I think), is the one that goes over the bridge that runs the closest to the Eiffel Tower. This means that it's the line we took eight or so years ago, when I was last in Paris, and we caught a train across the river at night just so that we could see the Eiffel Tower all lit up and golden and pretty. Then, when I got off the train at Passy, I realized that it was precisely the same station that we had gotten off at those eight years before, and as I climbed up the steps to Rue des Eaux, I had this strange doubled sense of time. Like déjà vu, only it was an actual, identifiable memory that was coalescing around my reality.
After I found the museum (which took a bit of wandering, and only partially 'cause I was being dense), I went in and presented my student card in order to get a reduced-price ticket. I had a moment of panic, because I'm in the habit of showing my Fondation des Etats-Unis card (it's orange and easily spottable in the darkness of my backpack), and I realized I'd left it at home. But I had my Alliance Française card, which of course could serve equally well. In point of fact, it served far better than the other would have, because it turned out that the guy taking my money knew a professor at AF and hence has a soft spot for its students. As a result, I got charged even less than the normal student price, and he gave me a glossy book for free. The book basically recapitulates the information on the signs in the museum, so it will be nice to leaf through at some point.
The displays were very cool. I started out trying to read all the signs but eventually realized that I actually would be in there all day long if I continued to do so. So I wandered through and looked at the objects (tools, accessories, etc.) and wax figures and occasionally glanced at a sign or two and tried not to get carried away with reading them, 'cause I really did want to know what everything was! My "favorite" object (read: the object which most impressed me) was a footless glass from Picardie, from the beginning of the 4th century AD. Always nice seeing really ancient stuff cropping up at random. Anyway, I got to the end of the tour and realized that I hadn't seen the wax figure of Balzac. Puzzled, I consulted my glossy book and discovered that he should have been at station 12. I sped back there, and saw precisely nothing; it was where I had earlier admired a nice little stairway fading into the darkness beyond an iron gate. However, just at that point, a group of Englishmen was wandering through, guided by someone who had been there before. Puzzled, he stopped, and commented that this was where Balzac usually was, and he didn't know why they had the lights turned off; maybe, he suggested, the nearby Balzac museum had complained about the presence of Balzac in this display.
Well, at least that explained why I hadn't noticed Balzac, despite being on the lookout for him. I really need to remember not to expect things in Paris, because otherwise, I'm guessing, they simply won't happen, in spite of my (often well-founded) expectations.
There was a free taste of wine included with the price of the ticket; I got the red, and it was very nice. The wine was Chateau Labastidié, but I'm not sure precisely what type. Then I headed off.
It was only 1 in the afternoon, and I wasn't going to go to the Louvre until at least 3, because tickets were more expensive prior to that. So, I decided, as I was near the Eiffel Tower, I might as well go climb it for once in my life, so that I could say I had if nothing else. First, however, I went to find some lunch. I got a tuna sandwich at a random boulangerie a few streets away; it was nice, it had lettuce and tomato and pickles and slices of hardboiled egg. And, of course, fantastic bread. I ate it while I was walking and sat down on the steps by the Musée d'Homme to finish it. I had a direct and close view of the Eiffel Tower from there, because all that separates the two is a long fountain, the river, and a little bit more space.
There are lots of pretty parks by the Tower. If I'd had more time, I would've liked to simply wander around them, but I think that wandering in parks is going to be something I actually do very little of in Paris, unless Sam and I do some park-wandering while he's here. But I did pass by a pond with lots of carp in it, and this reminded me of something that I saw at Chantilly which I'd forgotten about already by the time I was writing my journal entry. I was walking around the formal bit of the grounds, the bit with the fountains, and I saw a strange stirring in the settled muck at the bottom of one fountain. It looked like a miniature sea serpent. On closer inspection, I realized it was a solitary carp, cresting through the water and showing off its scaly back, while churning the muck with its tail. Anyway, there were lots of carp here at the Eiffel Tower, too, and they were very large. And turbulent.
Last time I was in Paris, we went to the Tower at night, and I lay on my back in the pebbles beneath the tower directly below the center and stared up. I couldn't remotely do that this time, for two reasons. Reason 1) it was broad daylight. I have some sense of self-preservation and of how to maintain some shred of dignity and apparent sanity, despite any evidence to the contrary at home. Reason 2) they were repainting the Tower, and hence had a big green net spread across at the level of the first floor. Thus I couldn't see the top anyway. But I didn't really want to lie on my back under the tower, I wanted to go up it, and I did. Climbing the Tower was fun. Sadly, I could only go to the second floor; for once, my physical exertions were not even causing me the twinges of a headache, and I was feeling really good. So I think I could have made it to the top-top pretty easily by climbing. But I wasn't allowed to, so I had to be content with wandering around the observation deck and noting where I had eaten lunch and finding out interesting facts like that the pretty domed roof I could see not so far away was Les Invalides. There were signs everywhere with information on things that had happened between 1883 and 1983, a hundred signs that had been put up for the centenary. They were generally good fun to read, though I didn't actually read all hundred of them.
I left the Tower and headed to a métro station so that I could go to the Louvre. On the way, I stopped at a phone box and talked to my parents for a while; my mom told me the names of various chocolatiers she thought I should visit. One's near the AF, it turns out, so I may well do that at some point. (After all, who'd pass up a visit to a chocolate store?) The conversation took long enough that it was already 4:30 or so by the time I actually made it to the Louvre.
My goal this time was to see the French painting. Anything on the way could be looked at, but was not the main purpose of this visit. Well, one of the things on the way was a display of Egyptian shabtis, and they were really very cool. There was a whole troop of identical little glazed blue-green shabtis of maybe three different sizes, plus many other shabtis and some papyrus and this and that. Cool stuff. But reading the signs, all in French, got a bit tiring after a while, and I gave up and just enjoyed looking at the things.
Then I arrived in the area of the French statues. I looked at the outdoor statue population but eschewed the indoor portion, as well as the bit in the Entresol. They were nice, but I couldn't afford to spend too much time down there; I wanted to make sure I had time for the paintings, and I didn't want to get home too too late either. So I headed up to the second floor, and arrived in the section of Flemish and Dutch paintings. Sadly, Vermeer was in the wrong direction; I will make it back to the Louvre one day and visit his stuff as well as things like Napoleon's chambers and the crown diamonds, which I've also never seen. This trip, though, it probably won't happen, as I'm almost museum'd out.
The first paintings I saw were two almost-still-lifes by Franz Snyders, entitled "Les marchands des poissons" and La marchande de gibiers, which I refer to as almost-still-lifes because of the people-presence. They were very nice. I like still-lifes. Then I discovered that I was entering a set of rooms mostly filled with Rubens. That was particularly cool because I looked at the first painting and thought "hmm, those women look quite Rubenesque," and then glanced at the ID and discovered that there was a very good reason for this. I also discovered that Rubens upon occasion really mangles the natural drape of cloth in order to hide genitalia.
I liked Intérieur d'église. Effet de nuit by Hendrick II van Steenwyk quite a bit; there were other, fairly similar paintings by him, though, which allowed me to come to the conclusion that I specifically liked the first painting by him, not just that style of architectural painting in general. I think he may draw nothing but the insides of churches, actually.
There were more paintings-within-paintings that I stumbled across, of course; one was Une Galerie de tableaux / Cabinet d'amateur by Baellieur, in which the paintings really did reflect all the different types of Dutch and/or Flemish paintings that I was seeing around me. Religious scenes, mythological scenes, still-lifes, and individual paintings of random tropical birds and animals.
I began to feel unreasonably tired; not I-need-to-sit-down tired, but I'm-going-to-fall-asleep-on-my-feet tired. This was bad, and I went and stared blankly at my Let's Go guide for a while and then felt strangely refreshed.
I got to the beginning of the French paintings and slowed down a bit, although I did feel like I was rushing a bit through some of the rooms in an effort to make sure I finished before the museum closed. (I had ages, but there were a lot of rooms.) A few paintings had incongruous elements of one sort or another that just really made me laugh. Nicolas Poussin, who generally painted quite well, had a set of four seasonal paintings one of which was entitled "Le Printemps / Le Paradis terrestre." The painting itself was very nice, but God was lying up in the sky on a cloud while looking at Adam and Eve, and it struck me as strangely funny. Cloud-ware designer furniture. He looked awfully comfy, sprawled up there. Another strangeness was in two paintings by Michel Dorigny, "La Tempérance" and "La Force et la Prudence," both of which featured a bright pink cupid!
Today I was evidently liking paintings of urban waters (by which I mean canals, harbors, city-girded rivers...). Anything that contained such a feature seemed to automatically pop into my head with a bright smile and a wave. (Of a non-existent hand, not a wave of water, thank you.) I have no idea what influences my tastes in this fashion.
In one room, there were four gigantic paintings that simply awed me on account of their scale; they were by Le Brun and comprised "L'Histoire d'Alexandre." In the next room, I saw a painting that appealed to me particularly, but possible just because it combined a still-life theme (the fishes!) with today's pet theme of urban water. It was "La Pêche miraculeuse," by Jean Jouvenet.
Antoine Coypel painted a smiling, tooth-missing "Démocrite" whom I liked quite a lot. The subject was very unlike the usual Greek philosopher type, though. And there was an "Etudes des mains" by Nicolas de Largillierre, which was very strange not simply because it was just hands and bits of sleeve, but more because it was properly painted, not sketched, and yet was still a study.
Pierre Subleyras painted the very cool "Caron passant les ombres." Charon is nude, and young, and his back is to the viewer; the shades are nothing but masses of white drapery. The contrast is remarkable, and it took me forever to even notice anything in the painting but Charon poling his ferry through the fiery waters of the Styx. (That fusion of rivers made me wince slightly, of course, but what can you do?)
It was strange seeing very old paintings of places I've actually been to myself; Hubert Robert painted a set of antique places in Provence, which included the Pont du Gard and the Maison Carrée and Temple of Diana at Nîmes. There were people in strange clothes walking where I myself have walked, and random objects in the picture that so clearly didn't belong to this day and age. Robert also painted a pair of pictures that fall into the paintings-in-painting category, but with a twist. They were "Projet d'aménagement de la Grande Galerie du Louvre" and "Vue imaginaire de la Grande Galerie du Louvre en ruines." The former was simply a gallery scene; the latter was, as its name suggests, a projected idea of what would be left and what the scene would be were the first in ruins rather than whole. I particularly liked the recurring figure of an artist in each, copying a painting in the one and drawing a surviving, still-standing statue in the other. The abstracted parallels were curious.
The strangest picture I saw, and probably my favorite (I need to find a poster or a postcard of this): I have no idea, which I'm furious about. It had a placard next to it that said "Laban cherchant ses idoles," by Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, but it wasn't that remotely. It was supremely cool, and almost modern in its style. In fact, it reminded me strongly of the style used by Edward Hopper.
Elsewhere, there was a fantastic painting by Fleury-François Richard of Le petit Chaperon rouge! It was absolutely fantastic. Our red-cloaked heroine was happily waving to a slavering, red-eyed wolf, who hadn't even bothered with the disguise of clothes. I love the images that Perrault's slightly-less-happy tales provoke. :)
Lastly: there was much Prud'Hon, whom I generally like and some of whose paintings/pastels/whatevers I really do like quite well. There was much Ingres around, too.
I managed to get out of the museum by about 8:45 or 9 and went looking for dinner. I ended up at a Chinese restaurant just off the Boulevard Saint-Germain; I couldn't be bothered to look for something French, I was too hungry and tired. (Annoyingly, I later saw a crêpe stand a couple of blocks away. I'm sure it hasn't been there before at this time of night.) But before I actually went into the restaurant, I very randomly encountered a girl from UC Women's Chorale with her father and her friend. (I knew her to be in UCCE 'cause she was wearing her Chorale shirt.) She was on that wonderful, windy, sopping wet Christmas caroling trip to SF and had apparently talked to me and Ari a bit. She looked vaguely familiar, but apparently she remembered me far better. And she told me her name again tonight and I've already forgotten it, 'cause I'm terrible with names like that. Gah. Her father's name was Doyle, though, I remember that much! (Hmm, wonder why I'd remember that name...)
So anyway, I had dinner, and then decided to splurge further because it might be my last time in that specific area, so I had the hot chocolate from Les Deux Magots. Which was nice, and certainly better than your run-of-the-mill hot chocolate, but no better than something I could make myself if I used melted chocolate and cream rather than nonfat milk and powdered chocolate. :) One of the chocolatiers my mother is urging me towards reputedly has the best hot chocolate around, so a comparison test is hereby to be initiated.
Having said which, I shall take myself off to bed, 'cause I'm really quite stupidly tired, and am now only going to get about five or six hours of sleep.
Edited: added hyperlinks
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no subject
Date: 2003-06-18 05:11 pm (UTC)It popped up German, too.
Not that I don't like my mother tongue, but that's just...not right.
And hey, even more tales!
Never worry about the continued Louvre trips, by the way--I've been there: you really can't do it in one or even two days, as it is true for all great art museums-- had I tried to do the National Gallery in London all in one day, I sure would have gone mad. Well. Even madder than I am, anyway.
I'm actually amused-- you do mirror my sister's and my travels a bit; when in Vienna, of course, we did check out the superb chocolatiers in the Palais Ferstel and went to the History of Art Museum.
There even was a visit to a fabulous wine cellar where sis and I got some lovely red and white. But I will get to my account of Vienna soon...
Cheers,
M.
no subject
Date: 2003-06-18 10:58 pm (UTC)It's... spooky. And gives me an unsettled feeling in my stomach. :)
you really can't do it in one or even two days, as it is true for all great art museums
So very true. I'm thinking that I could just about do the Musée d'Orsay in exactly three days (if I weren't in a falling asleep mode at the time), but it's also extremely small. The Louvre? Hah. Just calculating at random, I'm guessing that it'd take a good couple of weeks to actually go through it all. On a grammatical note, "as is true" would be better than "as it is true." Sorry, I've been correcting too much (well, not enough, in terms of time and finishing things!) of Sandrine's paper. :)
Awaiting the Vienna trip description with anticipation...
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Date: 2003-06-19 04:18 am (UTC)Kathrid
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Date: 2003-06-19 05:24 am (UTC)Definitely.
"The Louvre? Hah. Just calculating at random, I'm guessing that it'd take a good couple of weeks to actually go through it all."
Sounds realistic...
"Sorry, I've been correcting too much (well, not enough, in terms of time and finishing things!) of Sandrine's paper."
No problem. Feel free to do so!
Cheers,
Mona