Paris in a hurry!

The last day we had in Paris, Thursday, was a whirlwind of sightseeing.  Dave went to the last session of his conference and then we went sightseeing.  We first headed for the Pere Lechaise cemetery - the largest and oldest in Paris - because what's a vacation without a visit to a cemetery, right?  It's a HUGE cemetery and we were looking for a few notable graves, and encountered some weird stuff too.

Our hotel was on rue du Casimir Delavigne, so it was appropriate to pay respects here.  He was a poet and librarian to Napoleon. Terrible liver problems caused his demise.

This photo is weird at every angle, but it is the grave of Jim Morrison of The Doors.  I knew Dave really wanted to see this, and it was the main reason we tromped through the cemetery.  It's in a very strange, angled place, that is hard to reach, but there are groupies there to show you the way.

And of course, Fred Chopin.  There is a month-long concert series of Chopin going on during July in the Paris parks, open concerts that are really great and attract lots of people.

After leaving the cemetery, we went to the Sacre Coeur, the highest point of Paris.  It is adjacent to Montmartre, an artists enclave.

We rode the funicular, instead of walking - yay!!

 The Sacre Coeur - you can take a walking tour inside, but no photos.

I was thinking I would see mimes at the Eiffel Tower, but he was hanging out at the Sacre Couer instead!!

View from the steps - the tall tower on the right is Montparnasse - a  large tower that is pretty ugly, but as tall as the Eiffel Tower. 

Behind Sacre Coeur is  Montmartre, and some famous painters hung out there. 

Renoir hung out and painted here. Dali also.

This was where Van Gogh lived.  Other people live there now. And they were having work done, as there were painters coming in and out as we tried to take photos. 

Ok, from Montmartre it is a short walk through Pigalle, otherwise known as Pornville.  We didn't take any photos and a couple of times Dave stood in a window laughing with his mouth open and I had to tug on his sleeve to get him moving again.  Yeeks!!!!

To be continued . . . 

We are in Hungary!

Just a quick note to let everyone know we are safe and sound in our hotel in Pecs, Hungary. We arrived mid afternoon with time to check in and see some of the town and have dinner. Amy will post all the gory details tomorrow.

Coffee/cafe

Yesterday afternoon we located a coffeehouse recommended by one of Dave's former students who is doing graduate studies in France.  We went to Le Cafeoteque, which was written up in the NY Times in April.  They were very nice and the coffee was excellent tasting as well as pretty!

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There was a student there from Seattle who is doing a whirlwind tour of Europe, who took our photo, but was unfamiliar with how to use the camera.  :(

We walked past the French National Archives;

Dave didn't look like he wanted to go in, and it's not like I can read a lot of French. 

This is what the actual archives building looks like - kind of what I think Starr should build to house their archives, don't you think?

After this we walked to the Marais neighborhood and went to the Georges Pompidou center.  This is the center for Modern Art.  Anyone who knows me, knows I am NOT a fan of contemporary art, but Dave is, so we went.  I forgot to take a photo of the outside of the building, because it was starting to rain a little.

Inside we were greeted with some performance art.  We think this might by the type of thing that Hannah gets into as an Art Major.

There were a bunch of women dressed up as Sleeping Beauty having dinner at this long table.  There were machine guns, dead animals with jewelry, etc.  Do you get it?  I sure don't.  Visitors could interact and I told Dave we were moving on, there was enough more nonsense yet to come. 

The galleries did have some great art, don't get me wrong.  I appreciate Picasso and Modigliani, and Matisse and even Rauschenburg, of which there was a cool piece, but some of the violent porn-type stuff is a little over the top. 

I know Elizabeth likes the Guerilla Girls and this was an entire very large wall.  It's hard to tell the scale, because I waited for people to get out of the way. The label in the bottom right corner was about 10x15 in, to give you an idea of how big the walls were. 

After this we took the metro back to our neighborhood and had dinner at an Italian retaurant.  Dinner is an event and takes a long time, but it was very nice and we sat through the rain that was coming down.   Afterwards we walked through some neighborhoods and looked in shop windows and stopped at the Monoprix to buy some snacks and water and beer.  That have very citrus-ey drinks, which I really like, and everything is very fizzy.  I especially like the Schweppes that has grapefruit in it. 

Dave's conference ends today and tomorrow we take a plane to Hungary, where the adventure will really begin.  I had a year of HS French, which has served us somewhat well - but we know NO Hungarian!!  Let the adventures continue!!

More photos

For you devoted readers, here are some more vacation photos, so I don't have to make you all crazy with boring details when we get home.

Center point of France.  In front of Notre Dame.  The point from which French highways are measured. People spin on it and make a wish. 

From Notre Dame

Burial cover behind the altar - seems to be a pope or the architect? 

Original chandelier

Altar - very far to the back and not accessible to the photo-taking public.

Ok - that's quite enough for now.  It is slightly rainy here today, so we may revise our plans - not sure what we are going to see.  Last night we walked through the Tuileries Garden and could see the preparations for the arrival of the Tour de  France.  The original plan for this afternoon was to go the the Place de la Concorde and see the area where they race the final laps of the tour.  We have umbrellas with us, so maybe we will forge ahead!!

Catch up

Here is where I am planning on catching up on lots of things I didn't have time for before.  I tagged along to the math conference this morning, because there is free wifi.  We usually go to an English bar with "free wifi" -free unless you count the pints of beer we are consuming while we are there.

First - here is our hotel:

Our room is on the first floor and our window is the far right with the geraniums.  The ground floor is the floor you walk into, and the room numbers are 2 digits.  Ours is on the first floor above the ground floor.  You leave the key at the desk as you come and go, so they can clean your room, etc.  When we first got into the room, we couldn't figure out why the electricity didn't seem to work.  You have to insert your key into a socket on the wall to turn on the electricity.  When you take out the key, the electricity goes off.  So, you can't leave anything on in the room while you are not there.

Here is a photo of the metro -

They are like buses with rubber tires and everything, that run on the tracks underground, and sometimes they pop aboveground as well.  You open the doors on most of them manually, and you can open them before the train stops.  The newer trains open the doors automatically.  Also, no one speaks on the trains, people are generally quiet all the time.  And the terminals are fairly clean, I think they hose them down about once a week and use soap - one terminal I exited had just been cleaned and smelled very fragrant and clean. 

Here are some more photos of Le Louvre - probably the greatest museum on the planet:

Sword and crowns from coronation of Louis XV - the smaller one was made for his son, the dauphin, who then became Louis XVI.

Pyramid entrance to the Louvre - enter here if you want to stand in line a loooooog time.

The mall entrance, through Le Carousel de Louvre, is much faster and you come in right here:

Dan Brown's novel The DaVinci Code claims the holy grail is in this lower pyramid.

Other photos of the courtyard of the Louvre, as taken from inside at different spots:

Some of the fantastic things I saw at the Louvre:

Winged Victory or Nike of Samothrace - very cool to see in person

Throne of Napoleon I.

Napoleon's bedroom - what are the chairs and couches for?  Spectators - of what?????

Napoleon III's apartment - no wonder the underclass revolted - they had no bread and the king was living like this!

Greek pyxis - for you Hannah!!

Sword of Charlemagne, first Holy Emperor of what became France, dated to 800 CE.  His reign began the Carolingian Empire. (Very cool - thinking of Gabe, here.) 

All the people looking at, or not looking at, the Mona Lisa. you can just see the corner of it past the tall guy in the stripes.

Another angle of people not looking at the Mona Lisa. 

Self portrait of Albrecht Durer - printmaker extroidonaire (for you Liz)

Aphrodite, better known as Venus de Milo - and a spectator saying That's by daVinci, right dad?" And Dad saying "That's right!" Well, unless Leonard was sculpting in 800 BCE, I don't think so. My recollection has it that Leonardo was painting. sculpting, etc, in the 15th century. I'm such an elitist.

Museums and Big Churches

This morning we got up and went to a pastry shop for a bite to eat - the woman didn't speak much English, but the pasties were very good!  Dave had something with rhubarb and I had one with raisins. Yum!

 

We parted ways and Dave headed for the conference and I headed for the Metro stop.  Having a Navigo is like having an EZPass on the highway. You get your own entry in some of the stations and you pop right through.  I successfully navigated a train change and got off at the Musee D'Orsay stop.  It was easy to follow all the other people going to the museum.  The museum was great and I spent about 3 hours there.  No photos are allowed inside, but I took a picture outside. They are doing renovations and have thoughtfully relocated their famous paintings into temporary gallery space in which many people can try to be in all at once.  A word here about the French/European habit of not walking on the right.  I am the only person walking on the right, most of the time.  This makes it complicated when you are looking at paintings hanging directly on your right, when everyone else is looking at the same paintings, but walking in the other direction. The curators have also spent some time paring up paintings that are similar and were from the same area of influence.  Van Gogh and Gauguin, for instance - theres were all together.

After the museum, I went outside and walked along the Seine until I got to the Pont Neuf.  There is a yarn store near here, and yes I visited it.  I have successfully purchased French yarn!!

After the Pont Neuf, you come to the Cathedral of Notre Dame.  I stood in line, which moved fairly quickly, and went to see the great architecture.  Lots of photos, not much else to say on that - but very exciting to see all these things in person.

After Notre Dame, I navigated my way back to the hotel, stopping at a grocery store on my way.  I bought bacon crackers, I haven't seen those in a long time, and limonade!  They have really great, really fizzy lemonade here.  A 1.5 L bottle was .75 euros, about $1.25. I walked back to the hotel, only going up the wrong street once, but finding a Christmas store along the way.  I am hoping to go back to that tomorrow. I also saw a restaurant I would like to try by the Cluny/Sorbonne area.



I took a nap, watched the end of today's stage of the Tour de France, which they show live here and virtually commercial-free, but in French, obviously, so you can see the names, but not understand the commentary.

So far France has been very eye-opening.  It's cleaner than NYC, the people are polite, and quiet!!!  There is really not much noise here. Perhaps this is because many Parisians are on holiday out of the city, but I'm not sure. And almost everyone we have encountered speaks at least some English.

Eiffel Tower

Amy and I went to the conference reception last night. We talked with several interesting people, including George Hart. We then went back to our Hotel to drop off our stuff before going out again. Our plan was to head over to the Eiffel Tower.



We took the metro and walked through the big park at the base of the tower. There were lots of people, lots of alcohol and lots of street vendors with roses, trinkets and flying-light-up toys. We walked from there to Rue Cler to have dinner. This is a small, intimate street with shops and local people all out eating. You wait in the narrow street for a table where you want to eat. We waited for Cafe du Marche and got a table fairly quickly. It was 9:00 at night, the prime time for eating in France. I know now why it is not highly recommended to eat beef in Paris. The salad was good. Parisians are notoriously slow eaters - dinner is an occasion. We were hoping to finish and get back to the park to see the Tower "glisten" at the top of the hour (lots of lights that strobe all over the tower at the top of every hour for five minutes). We didn't make the 10:00, but meandered through a grocery store for chocolate, water and cookies. Then we walked through the sea of humanity under the tower and over the Seine and up to the Trocadero for the 11:00 lights. It was worth waiting for, but the photos do not do it justice.






We then took the metro back to the hotel. We were careful to go the right way, unlike Amy did earlier in the day. After following my lead and walking for about 5 minutes, Amy recognized that we were in fact not going in the correct direction. (The dinner wine was that good). We did get headed in the right direction and found our way back to the hotel.