france travelogue I: Paris
Aug. 27th, 2025 04:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishThe backstory to this trip: one, Steph's dad's mother was French, though she ended up in the States married to a preacher, and there's a whole branch of that family, still in residence and in contact, in various parts of the country. Two, Steph's parents met in Montpelier while doing a study abroad (from different colleges). Three, Steph's parents decided that they wanted to have a Big Family Trip back to France with the grandkids, and for redacted reasons it needed to be Real Soon. I am not entirely certain how or why I got invited but I'll take it.
I'm gonna keep harping on this as I go, but: this trip was compressed. Part of that's to do with it being a Family Visit trip and needing to hit three widely-separate locales, part of it's Steph's parents wanting to show their grandkids all the cool stuff in France. I think that the largest part, though, was just due to Steph's brother and family being of the Check-The-Box variety. I've never seen National Lampoon's Vacation but I've had the Grand Canyon scene described to me, where they all get out of the car and look for a minute and then Chevy Chase is shouting "Okay, everyone back in the car!" and they're off to the next thing.
I don't do well with that, unsurprisingly; I'd rather do a deep dive into fewer things. Oh well. When I travel on my own I can do that, on the off chance that that's a thing I'm ever able to do.
Saturday 8/09: Steph got the three of us a direct flight from MSP to Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris. The flight took off at I think fourish and landed at what would have been midnight, except due to the time difference it was seven in the morning. They did feed us twice, which I did not expect, though the second was a subpar breakfast-burrito thing.
Sunday 8/10: None of us got any sleep on the plane, so we went through VERY SLOW Customs at CDG on zero sleep. Not particularly recommended. The rest of the family had already been in Paris for a couple of days so they had checked in to the apartment we were staying in for the first few days. We made our way there, slept for an hour or two I think, and then headed off for the Catacombs.
Note that we are doing an awful lot of walking. Note also that Paris was in a heatwave, with temps over 32C (90F) most days.
I was aware of the Catacombs as "oh yes, there's a bunch of tunnels under Paris, they're used as a graveyard." The actual story is, to me anyway, far more interesting. Paris was built over a bunch of exhausted (limestone?) quarries, and in the late 1600s and early 1700s they started collapsing under the streets and people's houses. So the government deliberately dug out tunnels under the city big enough for people to get into, and reinforced them as necessary. Then, maybe a century later, when the city graveyards started literally collapsing into people's cellars, the government and the Church made a concerted effort to relocate an awful lot of old bodies into the catacombs, because that's where there was space for them. Perhaps a century after that (late 1800s) someone got the bright idea to turn the Ossuary into a tourist attraction, setting up walls of bones and the like.
I found the empty Catacombs more interesting than the Ossuary, personally, but they both made for a fine introduction to Paris tourism. Also the gift shop sold music boxes that played 'Thriller,' which is a fine choice.
From there we walked to the Luxembourg Gardens, about which I have little opinion as I was very tired (there was a reproduction of the Diana of Versailles on a pillar, and a pond with small sailboats one could push around with sticks). Then to a bistro where I had my first French meal: a quite good Caesar salad with chicken in. And then home and collapsing.
Monday 8/11: The Louvre. I think there was some sort of intention to do something different in the afternoon but seriously. It turns out I have a serious fondness for sculpture, particularly marble. I got to see the real Diana of Versailles, and Cupid & Psyche, and a number of "eighteenth-century aristocrat as mythological figure" sculptures. They did not have a Veiled Rebekah, a marble sculpture of a veiled woman that blew me away when I first saw it in Atlanta in high school, but there were plenty of similar things.
We passed the Winged Victory of Samothrace (it's Big), and from a distance the Venus de Milo, and from even more of a distance La Gioconda / the Mona Lisa. I do not feel any particular way about having checked those last two boxes; the Winged Victory was impressive, and we did get up close to it.
We started in the Islamic Art collection and I enjoyed it, but I think I would have gotten a bit more out of spending less time there and more elsewhere. I did enjoy the quick rush through a couple of halls of Big Paintings and occasionally saying things like "Hey, it's the Oath of the Horatii!" or "ooh, Marat in the bath!" Oils, paintings in general, do impress me; they just also overwhelm me quickly, and I can only process so much. For whatever reason sculpture is easier for me.
The thing about the Louvre is that it is an awful maze, and the maps they provide are minimal help. So there was a lot of seeing cool art, and also a lot of backtracking and "where even are we?" We spent the entire day there and I could have easily done another. (This will be a recurring theme.) In particular it would have been nice to spend some time among the foundations, since they have an exhibit on the history of the original fortress/palace. Ah well.
Tuesday 8/12: The first of three family (etc) gatherings was scheduled for lunch. We took the Metro to the Champs-Elysees and got off at roughly no. 30 (the address taken by the Count of Monte Cristo for his Paris apartment). It's... a street, with lots of shopping. Pleasantly wide and shaded. Not quite as impressive as I'd hoped for something whose name has been turning up at random in my reading since elementary school. We saw but did not approach the Arc de Triomphe (it is Very Big, bigger than I had expected, several several stories tall), and turned north and walked another half hour to Jan & Monique's apartment.
I have now had a Real French Luncheon, complete with salad/entree, quiche, a cheese course, and a light creamy fruity dessert. It was excellent and I could not do that all the time, or even as often as once a week. (I have also been politely ribbed by our host for mucking up the traditional alternating-gender seating pattern, as it was important that Steph be seated next to her kid, and that was honestly fine/fun as well.) Our hosts were most gracious and excellent conversationalists despite being in their late eighties, and spoke perfect English. They have a rooftop apartment from which we could see much of the city, including what Jan's grandson described as "the ugliest building in Paris, though it does have the best view since from it you can't see it." Wonderful all around.
After that we walked down to Ile de la Cite. I'm not sure what the others did but Steph and I abandoned them briefly to walk across and smooch on the Pont des Arts (as seen in the Good Place finale and the last scene of the 1995 Sabrina remake, among other things) and visit Shakespeare and Co. In the event there was a line to get into the bookstore, so we bailed and rejoined everyone else for a visit to Sainte-Chappelle.
Sainte-Chappelle is an enormous chapel, mostly arches with giant stained-glass windows. The interior looks like it's made of wood, rather than the stone one expects in enormous churches, but that seems unlikely. Regardless, it's got a very different feel to the space than in a 'normal' cathedral: very open and light and, well, airy. There's also some reconstruction work being done on one corner, but they've hung mirrors instead of the normal tarps or whatever so you still get the full effect. It's... humbling, maybe? Very big, very impressive, the kind of thing that feels like it's not really made for humans.
Afterwards everyone else went home and Steph and I returned to Shakespeare and Co. This time the line was much shorter, and moving, so we hopped in and made it into the store in ten or fifteen minutes. It's... I mean, it's a bookstore. It's maybe the platonic ideal of a certain type of city bookstore: a bit cramped, twisty passages and stairs, a fairly eclectic selection of just about anything. Mostly English-language, which I appreciated. It felt comfortable. I can't say it felt like an early Modernist hangout but what do I know. I enjoyed it. I picked up a copy of Wendy Cope's Collected Poems; she's been my favourite poet since discovering that "The Orange" and "Waste Land Limericks" and "Spared" were all written by the same person.
Then back to the apartment, for the last night in Paris for another week or so.
Next time: Versailles, an awful lot of driving, Cap Blanc and Lascaux.
I'm gonna keep harping on this as I go, but: this trip was compressed. Part of that's to do with it being a Family Visit trip and needing to hit three widely-separate locales, part of it's Steph's parents wanting to show their grandkids all the cool stuff in France. I think that the largest part, though, was just due to Steph's brother and family being of the Check-The-Box variety. I've never seen National Lampoon's Vacation but I've had the Grand Canyon scene described to me, where they all get out of the car and look for a minute and then Chevy Chase is shouting "Okay, everyone back in the car!" and they're off to the next thing.
I don't do well with that, unsurprisingly; I'd rather do a deep dive into fewer things. Oh well. When I travel on my own I can do that, on the off chance that that's a thing I'm ever able to do.
Saturday 8/09: Steph got the three of us a direct flight from MSP to Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris. The flight took off at I think fourish and landed at what would have been midnight, except due to the time difference it was seven in the morning. They did feed us twice, which I did not expect, though the second was a subpar breakfast-burrito thing.
Sunday 8/10: None of us got any sleep on the plane, so we went through VERY SLOW Customs at CDG on zero sleep. Not particularly recommended. The rest of the family had already been in Paris for a couple of days so they had checked in to the apartment we were staying in for the first few days. We made our way there, slept for an hour or two I think, and then headed off for the Catacombs.
Note that we are doing an awful lot of walking. Note also that Paris was in a heatwave, with temps over 32C (90F) most days.
I was aware of the Catacombs as "oh yes, there's a bunch of tunnels under Paris, they're used as a graveyard." The actual story is, to me anyway, far more interesting. Paris was built over a bunch of exhausted (limestone?) quarries, and in the late 1600s and early 1700s they started collapsing under the streets and people's houses. So the government deliberately dug out tunnels under the city big enough for people to get into, and reinforced them as necessary. Then, maybe a century later, when the city graveyards started literally collapsing into people's cellars, the government and the Church made a concerted effort to relocate an awful lot of old bodies into the catacombs, because that's where there was space for them. Perhaps a century after that (late 1800s) someone got the bright idea to turn the Ossuary into a tourist attraction, setting up walls of bones and the like.
I found the empty Catacombs more interesting than the Ossuary, personally, but they both made for a fine introduction to Paris tourism. Also the gift shop sold music boxes that played 'Thriller,' which is a fine choice.
From there we walked to the Luxembourg Gardens, about which I have little opinion as I was very tired (there was a reproduction of the Diana of Versailles on a pillar, and a pond with small sailboats one could push around with sticks). Then to a bistro where I had my first French meal: a quite good Caesar salad with chicken in. And then home and collapsing.
Monday 8/11: The Louvre. I think there was some sort of intention to do something different in the afternoon but seriously. It turns out I have a serious fondness for sculpture, particularly marble. I got to see the real Diana of Versailles, and Cupid & Psyche, and a number of "eighteenth-century aristocrat as mythological figure" sculptures. They did not have a Veiled Rebekah, a marble sculpture of a veiled woman that blew me away when I first saw it in Atlanta in high school, but there were plenty of similar things.
We passed the Winged Victory of Samothrace (it's Big), and from a distance the Venus de Milo, and from even more of a distance La Gioconda / the Mona Lisa. I do not feel any particular way about having checked those last two boxes; the Winged Victory was impressive, and we did get up close to it.
We started in the Islamic Art collection and I enjoyed it, but I think I would have gotten a bit more out of spending less time there and more elsewhere. I did enjoy the quick rush through a couple of halls of Big Paintings and occasionally saying things like "Hey, it's the Oath of the Horatii!" or "ooh, Marat in the bath!" Oils, paintings in general, do impress me; they just also overwhelm me quickly, and I can only process so much. For whatever reason sculpture is easier for me.
The thing about the Louvre is that it is an awful maze, and the maps they provide are minimal help. So there was a lot of seeing cool art, and also a lot of backtracking and "where even are we?" We spent the entire day there and I could have easily done another. (This will be a recurring theme.) In particular it would have been nice to spend some time among the foundations, since they have an exhibit on the history of the original fortress/palace. Ah well.
Tuesday 8/12: The first of three family (etc) gatherings was scheduled for lunch. We took the Metro to the Champs-Elysees and got off at roughly no. 30 (the address taken by the Count of Monte Cristo for his Paris apartment). It's... a street, with lots of shopping. Pleasantly wide and shaded. Not quite as impressive as I'd hoped for something whose name has been turning up at random in my reading since elementary school. We saw but did not approach the Arc de Triomphe (it is Very Big, bigger than I had expected, several several stories tall), and turned north and walked another half hour to Jan & Monique's apartment.
I have now had a Real French Luncheon, complete with salad/entree, quiche, a cheese course, and a light creamy fruity dessert. It was excellent and I could not do that all the time, or even as often as once a week. (I have also been politely ribbed by our host for mucking up the traditional alternating-gender seating pattern, as it was important that Steph be seated next to her kid, and that was honestly fine/fun as well.) Our hosts were most gracious and excellent conversationalists despite being in their late eighties, and spoke perfect English. They have a rooftop apartment from which we could see much of the city, including what Jan's grandson described as "the ugliest building in Paris, though it does have the best view since from it you can't see it." Wonderful all around.
After that we walked down to Ile de la Cite. I'm not sure what the others did but Steph and I abandoned them briefly to walk across and smooch on the Pont des Arts (as seen in the Good Place finale and the last scene of the 1995 Sabrina remake, among other things) and visit Shakespeare and Co. In the event there was a line to get into the bookstore, so we bailed and rejoined everyone else for a visit to Sainte-Chappelle.
Sainte-Chappelle is an enormous chapel, mostly arches with giant stained-glass windows. The interior looks like it's made of wood, rather than the stone one expects in enormous churches, but that seems unlikely. Regardless, it's got a very different feel to the space than in a 'normal' cathedral: very open and light and, well, airy. There's also some reconstruction work being done on one corner, but they've hung mirrors instead of the normal tarps or whatever so you still get the full effect. It's... humbling, maybe? Very big, very impressive, the kind of thing that feels like it's not really made for humans.
Afterwards everyone else went home and Steph and I returned to Shakespeare and Co. This time the line was much shorter, and moving, so we hopped in and made it into the store in ten or fifteen minutes. It's... I mean, it's a bookstore. It's maybe the platonic ideal of a certain type of city bookstore: a bit cramped, twisty passages and stairs, a fairly eclectic selection of just about anything. Mostly English-language, which I appreciated. It felt comfortable. I can't say it felt like an early Modernist hangout but what do I know. I enjoyed it. I picked up a copy of Wendy Cope's Collected Poems; she's been my favourite poet since discovering that "The Orange" and "Waste Land Limericks" and "Spared" were all written by the same person.
Then back to the apartment, for the last night in Paris for another week or so.
Next time: Versailles, an awful lot of driving, Cap Blanc and Lascaux.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-28 01:30 am (UTC)Also agree - that I don't like check the box, quick, on to the next site - and prefer deep dives. I like to meander and see things in more depth. When I visited London ages ago in the 1980s - a friend took me through the British Museum in the space of two hours. I'd stop to look at something and she'd drag me to the next thing. The British Museum is a two day affair, not two hours. Some day, I need to visit London again and investigate it further.
I remember visiting Paris as a child, but we never made it to the Louvre, Notre Dame, The Eiffle Tower, Versailles, and Montmarte - we did do. I loved Paris as a child - so much so, that I took French and tried to come back to it - but ended up in Bretagne instead and touring Mount St. Michele.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-28 04:01 pm (UTC)Mont St Michel was on the list of places we might have gone, but got cut for time and geography. Next time, maybe.
Paris really is a great city. I'm absolutely a sucker for cramped narrow streets (when I'm on foot), and the way there's something new and usually beautiful around every corner makes me so happy. Reminds me a little of the first time I visited Vancouver, honestly, though Paris has the weight of centuries adding to the appeal.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-28 05:38 pm (UTC)Mont St. Michel is mostly a tourist trap, but it does have the cool cramped narrow city streets and old buildings, and the scenery and architecture are admittedly stunning. But it is a tourist trap or was in the 80s.
NYC is similar to Paris in that way. The Financial District and Downtown Manhattan is basically narrow streets, some cobblestone, with a mismatch of architecture dating back to the 1700s. With something new around every corner. I love cities like that. London had that flair as well, and Paris is just magical.
I've not been to Vancouver or Toronto or Chicago or Boston - so not sure about those.