Week 22: A Weekend in Paris

I have been traveling quite a bit for work lately, and headed back to Beauvais, France this past week. Jason and I decided to take advantage of my work trip and spend the weekend in Paris. I took Friday afternoon off and visited the Musee d'Orsay before Jason was able to arrive early on Saturday morning. The museum itself is quite a site. It is an old train station and has a fantastic interior. A great place to sit and people watch.

I was especially excited to see their Van Gogh collection, as earlier this year there was an episode of Doctor Who which revolved around Van Gogh. There were at least two paintings featured in the episode that I saw: The Church at Auvers (I was unable to find the demon in the window, but I think that happened in an alternate timeline) and Bedroom in Arles (the third version--oddly enough, this painting also appears in my German textbook, in the section where you learn the vocabulary for furniture). I was thinking that Starry Night was there as well, but it turns out it is in MoMA.

Resting my feet next to the Seine

I met a friend of mine for dinner that evening. We were both on time (or close to), but managed not to find each other at Place Saint-Michel for about half an hour. Luckily we didn't give up. We had an excellent Tapas dinner, then walked around a bit to find some ice cream.

Jason arrived on Saturday morning and we planned out our day, wanting to hit a few things few things we didn't see on our last trip to Paris two years ago. Our first stop was the Catacombs. Under Paris were a number of limestone mines, which resulted in a vast series of tunnels. As the city was expanding during different points in its history, a forgotten graveyard or mass grave would be found. Instead of halting construction, the bones would be moved to the catacombs. Here you can see *piles* of bones from different points in Paris's history. There are plague bones and revolution bones and...and...and...lots of bones.

Jason and some bones

We walked around a bit and our next stop was the Pantheon. It is a very cool building and we arrived just in time to take a tour to the top of the building where you can look out, see all of Paris...and eat it.

The best part about Europe: The opportunity for forced perspective shots

Our final stop before resting up for the evening was the Pere LaChaise Cemetery. No, baby-boomers, we did not see Jim Morrison's grave. We actually wanted to, so we could compare the level of vandalism there to that on Oscar Wilde's (see below), but the cemetery was closing, so we couldn't make it. We'll look for it on our next trip. Oh, and we ran into Chopin's grave quite by accident. It was a quite lovely place.

So much lipstick...

 Saturday turned out to be "Blanche Nuit" (White Night; a slang term for an all-nighter), where Paris had many of its museums open late into the night and had a variety of public art exhibits set up across the city. Everyone was out and the weather was beautiful. We saw a couple video installations in churches, but otherwise just walked around and enjoyed the crowds. It was a great time.

We wrapped up the weekend by again meeting with the same friend I had met for dinner earlier that weekend. We all saw an exhibit on Giacometti and how he was influenced by Etruscan art (the Etruscans were in Italy before the Romans--the Romans thought they were weird, and they had a different language, customs and technologies from the Romans, plus no one knew where they came from; we decided they were either aliens or time travelers; add your vote in the comments). I only knew of Giacometti's work by sight and had very little knowledge of the Etruscans, so it was a beneficial exhibit to see on two fronts.

We had a great weekend and were back home in about 3 hours (2 hours by TGV and 1 by car). We'll have to make some time to do it again in the future!