Hotel de Ville, Paris City Hall
Paris is in full Christmas bloom.
Tree in front of Notre Dame Cathedral.
Each of the 20 arrondissements, or districts, of the city identifies several business districts for street lighting. Hovering over the selected boulevards and rues are small, twinkly lights in various shades of red and blue and gold and white. Very subdued and tasteful, almost quaint in some cases. But at several locations scattered around the city there are far more spectacular displays of Holiday lighting.
The most impressive is along the Champs Elysée. The trees lining both sides of this wide boulevard for its two-kilometer length are covered with tiny, blue lights, many of which are twinkling. At the top, the Arc de
Triomphe is bathed in floodlights.
At the bottom, in front of the Tuileries Jardin, a mammoth Ferris wheel covered in white lights is surrounded by Christmas trees also lit up in white.
A more brilliant wall of light is found along the kilometer stretch of Boulevardd Haussmann occupied by the adjacent Printemps and Galeries Lafayette department stores.
It’s a madhouse of Christmas lights and of people that have come to view the clever animated window displays and to shop
Even the news last week of a bomb threat (and the finding of a stash of dynamite, minus any detonator, in Printemps department store) hasn’t seemed to make a dent in the throngs.
Then there are the
smaller scenes that linger. Like seeing Santa Clause driving a big delivery truck this morning. Or watching several people transporting their newly purchased small Christmas trees on their rented Vélib bicycles. Or salivating over the special Bûche de Noël cakes and gourmet foods displayed in the windows of pâtisseries and specialty food shops. Since the last note the weather has been very cooperative. Mostly cloudy with an occasional shower and highs in the low forties. One late morning last week we had a brief, heavy, wet snow shower which melted as soon as it touched the ground. This past week, though, it has warmed up about ten degrees and there have been a number of mostly sunny days.
Earlier this month we made a special four-day side trip to London. It had been over 20 years since we were last there. The Eurostar train by way of the chunnel is the way to go.
It takes about 2 ½ hours to go from the center of Paris to the center of London. Spectacular St. Pancras Railway Station from our Hotel in London
Customs is very simple and you need arrive at the station only a half hour before departure. Although the air travel time is less, the trip by airplane can take twice as long when you add in the transport time to and from the airport and the time to clear airport customs and security. And the price was cheaper by train. It cost us about $80 round trip each.
Heartman check into hotel.
Heartman visits Trafalgar Square.
While there we visited the British Museum (twice) and the National Gallery, both outstanding museums. We were especially impressed with how the paintings in the National Gallery were displayed and how they had been carefully restored to their original vibrancy. We spent far longer in both museums than we normally last. I think being able to easily read the English descriptions helps with this. Several things stood out:
- Meeting with our friend Inda for coffee near museum closing time and chatting away for almost three hours. She was our French teacher in Paris last year but moved to London this summer.
- Striking up a conversation with a host in the National gallery who gave us some insight into several of the paintings. She had complaints as to the arrangements, made by a new “American” curator, of some of the paintings– like two Vermeers that she thought should be side by side as opposed to be hanging in separate rooms.
- A special Babylonian Empire exhibition in the British Museum that was exceptional. Lots of very well preserved items including many cuneiform tablets. It’s the time of Nebuchadnezzar, the Tower of Babel, the Jewish captivity, Daniel and his interpretation of dreams, the lion’s den, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and much, much more. Yet the Empire lasted less that a century.
- Two long “tapestries” of pills representing the 14,000 pills taken on average during a lifetime by each man and woman going through the British Public Health System. They were accompanied by photos and brief descriptions of major health events in the lives of the man and the woman.
Heartman tries to make a phone call in a London phone booth. (See him pulling on the handle?)
All went well in London with one minor exception. We stayed at the modern Hotel Novotel next to the downtown St. Pancras Station where our train arrived. When we went down for our buffet breakfast our first morning, the lobby was dotted with many buckets catching the dripping from many locations in the ceiling. We were guided away from the hotel restaurant to a temporary location, a conference room, for our meal. A few days earlier someone had stuffed a towel down a toilet. This had precipitated in a cascading series of events that resulted in pipes being popped in numerous locations on the main floor. The buckets did not disappear not did the restaurant open until the morning of our departure. The complexities of a modern, large scale plumbing operation!! Some highlights of our past month:
- November 30 we moved out of our Villa Monceau apartment and temporarily relocated to a comparably sized apartment in the Marais for the month of December. This place, only a few minutes to Hotel de Ville or the Centre Georges Pompidou, is centrally located and much closer the city’s hustle and bustle. Although adequate, it is not nearly as well equipped and the internet access is more limiting. But it is nice to be able to experience a different neighborhood.
Our friend Trish is here in Paris for three weeks and we have connected with her a number of times around meals, walks, and visits to various places around the city. We had a nice dinner with here in our apartment tonight, Christmas Eve, and tomorrow she leaves for Boston. - There were several thought-provoking exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo. One that stood out was a photo of a handwritten poem in English titled “The Rampton Drip”. The page was covered with the words “drip-drop, drip-drop, drip-drop, . . “ written over and over and over again. At the very bottom of the page the words “will it ever stop” were written. Rampton is a prison in England.
- The Petit Palais was a pleasant surprise. It was closed for a number of years and I thought it was used only for special exhibitions. It turns out it has a permanent collection that covers twenty centuries of art and was well worth the visit. And interspersed with the permanent collection of the objects in the museum, mostly paintings, was a great contemporary photo exhibition. Nice juxtaposition of the old and the new. Since we did not see all of the permanent collection or the special exhibitions that were there, we’ll return for another visit.
- We took a trip out to see Musée Marmotten again. We last saw it about 4 years ago. This small museum, in Paris proper, but off the beaten path, has the world’s largest collection of Monet paintings as well as a number of works by his contemporaries, Berthe Morisot, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Definitely worth a visit.
Enough for now. Joyeux Noël et Bonne Année! Wendy & Dan December 24, 2008
