The Giverny Expedition

Friday led Adam and I to Giverny, the quaint village of Claude Monet’s country home and meticulously manicured gardens. After nearly diving into the train as it was departing from Gare St. Lazare to not be left behind, we found ourselves wedged between two fellow North Americans, a Canadian law student en route to Tanzania and a kindly Alabaman whose background was never disclosed. Obviously, this combination recalls nothing less than Fantastic Four ideals, but, sadly, Adam and I were terribly unimpressed by our chance company. The Canadian woman seemed to have an uncanny ability to judge nearly every city in Western Europe by the amount of hours needed for one to fully appreciate each regions’ unique history and culture. For example, Nice and Cannes could each be “done” in half a day. In her eyes, Eastern Europe was a completely irrelevant land of one toothed eighty year old Slavic women, grimy streets filled with puddles of Chernobyl residues, and, if I’m not mistaken, the entire geographic area is surrounded by a barbed wire fence to keep the goats in. She was a bit more concise, matter-of-factly stating, “There’s no reason to go to Eastern Europe”. Alabaman was missing his accent and was one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. His downfall/super power, depending on if the glass is half empty or not, was his masterful ability to bore you to death in a matter of minutes.

Anyways, the train arrived in Vernon, a small city about 6km away from Giverny. That’s probably the best thing about this city, but more on that later. To actually reach Giverny one must take a coach (English for bus) from the train station, walk, or rent bicycles at a very furry gentleman’s restaurant across the street. We opted for the bikes and were off to Giverny, following the Seine through its gorgeous Norman meadows and surrounding foothills. In no time we reached our destination and found ourselves amidst a sea of tourists largely consisting of old people and German and French school groups. Not to shy away from crowds, Adam and I hopped in the queue and anxiously fidgeted about as if Mickey Mouse himself was on the other side of the wall signing autographs and time was running out before his cigarette break began and we would miss our chance to get our notebooks signed. Before entering Monet’s estate, one is forced to meander through the gift shop. I didn’t mind this so much, as I always enjoy seeing how an institute identifies itself through typically useless and overpriced nic-nacs. I would say Giverny shot about par this round, give or take a small handicap. Not a problem because, after all, the gardens are what we came for and not calendars and scarves.

Monet’s Giverny Gardens

Monet like dis one

hon hon hon! oui oui!

the great one himself

house and gardens

The gardens were quite nice despite the crowds and cell phone boomboxes that seemed to resonate throughout the estate. Orchids, roses, and other flowers of beauty whose names escape me filled row after row of colorful blooms and leaves. It really is a stunning sight at first glance, and while the beauty remains upon further inspection, the crowds and commercialization of a place intended for quiet isolation and reflection detracts from the magic of the place. We walked through his home, several rooms filled with average furnishings and more crowds, finding a small ray of sunshine amidst the gloom in a sublime photo of an unassuming Monet standing surrounded by massive canvases of the famed water-lilies in his living room. We then rejoined the lines shuffling through the gardens (“the ants went marching one by one, hoorah, hoorah!”) and made our way to the water-lily ponds, eerily similar to the paintings but for the man in a boat fishing out dead lily pads with a net. Overall, a charming village and a well managed estate befitting a man of Monet’s stature, but personally it was more plastic than organic and not the place it must once have been.

The bike ride back to Vernon was splendid and a needed escape from the claustrophobic Jardin du Monet. The Seine is gorgeous in this part of France, about a two hour train ride north of paris, and the fields of red poppies reminded me of driving through the English countryside only a week or so earlier. Our arrival in Vernon found us with stomachs growling and, with a more efficient mode of transportation underneath us, a need to explore this potentially charming town of Vernon. Though exploration was a priority, our “hunger pains were sticking like duct tape” and so a quest for comida took precedence. Little did we know we would be forced to pedal our way through every nook and cranny of the city center to actually find sustenance for ourselves as every restaurant in town was closed with no sign of reopening for at least another 3 hours. Our solution was hit up the local Monoprix, which I translate to mean Win-Dixie, and grab the usual horn of plenty: baguette; cheese; orange juice; water; and hommus. This was by far the least palatable rendition of this meal yet. We seated ourselves under a small tree on the corner of a nearby street and began to laugh uncontrollably at just how strange this town and its people presented themselves. Not a single restaurant open at 4:30 in the afternoon, nearly every man in the city had a shaved or greasy or sometimes both head with a sharp Romanian facial structure, women walked by with tattoos of small tropical islands on their shoulders, little children did not exist, and one out of every three elderly people had a small dog which they obviously did not want as noted by the dogs being dragged across the sidewalks leaving a trail of claw marks in the concrete with each pull of the leash. We took amusement in this city, but ultimately found ourselves weirded out to the point it was absolutely necessary we escape as soon as possible. The city responded to this request with a heaving “no.” Returning the bikes was simple, but we waited for at least thirty minutes for the furry man to return Adam his license. This was not too big of a deal for me because the restaurant had a tv and was playing Grease. It was the part at the end where Olivia Newton-John throws away her prudent garb for black leather pants in a final effort to get John Travolta to again desire her and everyone breaks out into song and dance and eats cotton candy. Our train arrived an hour later, as did our old friends from the ride to Vernon. In an effort to sit in silence, Adam and I split up so as to become less of a target for Canadian or Alabaman accompaniment. We returned to Paris and worked our way back to the Three Ducks to rendezvous with Rees for another dinner and a midnight viewing of the Eiffel Tower.

(Adam)For several hours each night, beginning around 9 and continuing until roughly 1 in the morning, the Eiffel Tower lights up with thousands of bulbs, and on the hour a 5 or 6 minute light show of flashing patterns renders the tower a shimmering beacon in the night sky. We went out to the Champ de Mars to discover it packed with thousands of French students, who had just finished their last exams and were celebrating in style. We sat on the steps of the peace memorial at the far end of the field and contented ourselves with splitting a bottle and watching the reveling French youth till the hour struck, this was not to be however. We were approached by two girls with the typical question, “do you have a light?” After responding no they began speaking with us, which was useful for me as I am constantly trying to practice my spoken French, but slightly strange for Tripp and Rees because there were frequent pauses to translate or ask clarifying questions. We learned their names were Pauline and Isaure, the latter being by far the more bizarre, trying endlessly to teach me various words of l’Argot (slang) and intermittently grabbing our bottle of wine, taking a huge swig and handing it back without breaking stride in her lecture on the ways we didn’t comprehend what she was trying to explain. After a while they wandered off, presumably to spread the good word elsewhere, and after being silently impressed by the lightshow we strolled back to the hostel for some sleep and puzzlement over the ramblings of the bold, bizarre, and ultimately friendly youth of France.

Duck, Duck, Tower!

Thursday May the 29^th saw us travel south of the river to take up residence in the 3 Ducks Hostel, which was quite different from the Woodstock. The 3 Ducks, while clean and cozy, is also sterile and to be blunt, packed with Americans who delight in transporting their own culture across the Atlantic, rather than absorbing that of the country they’re visiting. We (Tripp, Rees, and I) left our bags at the hostel and set out for a day of rest and recuperation, owing to the marathon sprint through several arrondisements the night before and our resulting sore feet. We strolled out to the Champ de Mars in front of La Tour Eiffel, stopping on the way to pick up supplies for our cornucopian midday feast. A ten minute walk saw us splayed out on the grass, staring up at the impressive, industrial tower and enjoying a wonderful dejeuner of bread, cheese, olives, and wine.

Malheuresement, the gods then decided that a nice day like that was prime time for a rain shower, prompting us to head for a sheltered bench to wait out the storm. Tripp and Rees read from their books as I struggled to write legible postcards on my lap. The spattering raindrops actually quite matched the mood of the day, recharging our batteries and gradually conquering our fatigue from numerous late nights and early mornings. Tripp decided that he would brave the rain in search of a bathroom and ventured out into the unknown. Luckily he returned and after the storm let up slightly we walked under the tower and stared up at its intricate ironwork, marveling at the accomplishment that the tower is and was, quite a feat of engineering. There were crowds of tourists wandering the square concrete field under the Eiffel Tower, which made for good people watching opportunities, but also encouraged some rather aggressive beggars to approach anyone they could find and ask the fateful question “speak English?” If the answer is yes they hand you a hand written note on an index card explaining the plight of their family and how desperately they needed your money. This was marked by a somewhat surprising indifference on the part of the young gypsy girls as to whether or not you actually were interested in them, rather they gave off the air of frugal shoppers comparing prices at a supermarket, dropping one can as soon as a better one (more likely to give money) came into view. However you spin it, their presence is a sad testament to the inequality that lives in every modern city today, including the so called “first world”.

We followed Tripp’s nose away from the Eiffel Tower, after being asked politely by an American tourist, “do you fellas know where the Loove is? I think its some kind of museum around here,” and hastily responding in Russian, German, and French as to our general surprise at his expertise on Parisian monuments. Our flaneur-ing led us towards an unmarked door leading down a stairway underground, which ended in a large parking deck. This then took us out somewhere behind what we eventually learned was the Musée Quai Branly, a museum that focuses on multi-cultural and ethnic artifacts and artwork. We were extremely impressed by the building itself, it masterfully created a large inner courtyard and yet managed to arrange the space somehow so that one was led along a path through gardens that semi-circled the building, presenting a different view of the building at every turn. The architect, Tripp learned, was a Frenchman named Jean Nouvell who had created a roof for the inner courtyard of intersecting red and orange triangles and then covered the outside of the museum building with structures to encourage hanging plant growth and protruding boxes of different colors over a background of translucent forest images on the walls. It was a very intriguing structure to walk around, and our wandering brought us to the far end of the space from where we had entered and a wall of overlapping transparent blue glass that was layered with greetings in various languages, most of which shifted in and out of focus depending on your individual perspective. As the museum was already closed, we contented ourselves with the outside of the building and walked back to our hostel. Hoping for a more traditional French meal than the night before we walked around our hostel’s quarter and stumbled upon a wonderful restaurant called “la cuillere en bois” (the wooden spoon), which specialized in galettes, similar to the thin pancakes called “crêpes”, filled with all sorts of savory goodies, such as goats cheese, fried eggs, mushrooms, and onions. The meal began with quiches and for dessert, an assortment of chocolate and fruit filled crêpes, Tripp mistakenly ordered a cup of applesauce. It was a wonderful foray into the delicious universe of French cuisine and feeling completely satiated, we decided to call it an early night and returned to the 3 Ducks to chew the fat and eventually get some well deserved sleep.

Capt Rees and His Birthday Extravaganza

Wednesday we aimed our sojourns closer to the river Seine and, after a hasty breakfast of bread and jam, set out for the Jardin des Tuileries, walking past the high fashion boutiques selling watches for 500 Euros. We found some seats next to a central fountain in the gardens and decided that rather than rush the experience of the Louvre and other museums we should appreciate the decent weather and recumbent chairs and vegetate for a spell. Afterwards Tripp and I agreed we felt much better, having shaken off the morning stiffness in our joints, so we headed for the iconic glass pyramid in the central square of the Palais de Louvre, designed by I.M. Pei and which is now the main entrance into the museum. We navigated through the throngs of tourists and after a brief period of discussion decided to wander rather than aim for specific works. This is actually quite prudent when dealing with a museum the size of the Louvre, the statistic that I found most telling about its vastness was that if you were to sped one minute in front of every work of art in the Louvre, day and night, it would take over 2 weeks before you had seen everything.

With that chilling fact in mind we entered the central of three huge wings that make up a large “U” shape and proceeded to marvel at all the beautiful and celebrated works around every corner. We saw the Venus de Milo statue, the Winged Victory of Samaranth, the wall size Jacques-Louis David paintings, and of course the Mona Lisa, which attracted the biggest crowd and apparently merited the biggest display case. Tripp marveled at the audacity and garish grandeur of the fifth “wall”, placed in the middle of the room and covered in glass, whose sole purpose was to house the Mona Lisa, a painting roughly a foot in length and width. I suppose that when Dan Brown thinks you hold the key to an unsolved mystery of Christianity, your already immense value as a work of art sky- rockets. We continued on, seeing many interesting works including one of my personal favorites by Ingres called the Turkish Bathers, a very voluptuous painting that somehow captures the feeling of a steamy sauna on canvas.

Wandering for hours and only skimming the surface of what the Louvre had to offer we settled on following our growling stomachs across the river into the quarter called St. Germain-de-Près, a very expensive arrondisement with lots of art galleries and beautiful facades. At different intervals this area of Paris was home to many of the city’s noted avant gardes, existentialist writers, and surrealist painters. After buying a baguette and cheese (yes and the obligatory bottle of cheap French wine) we marched straight back to the sunshine of the Tuileries to lounge and eat and drink to our hearts content. By this point the sun had come out and I was nicely full, so we decided that a nap was certainly in order.

After catching some rays and watching a group of about ten French kids play a spirited game of cache-cache (hide and seek), which was enough to wake us up, we hit the dusty trail and headed for the Musée d’Orsay, home to a huge collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings and sculptures. Walking through the well laid-out museum was very enjoyable and we were able to see many of the actual paintings that we are studying during this prolonged research voyage, including works by Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Monet. I was thrilled however to see what is certainly my favorite painting hanging there, Les Raboteurs de Parquet (the floor strippers) by Gustave Caillebotte, it really is a different experience seeing it in the flesh.

But why was this night different from all other nights? Because tonight Rees the great arrived from his adventures in Italy and the south of France to spend a week with us in Paris. It also happened to be his twentieth birthday so we made it a point of greeting him in style, by going out to an expensive Indian restaurant for dinner and toasting his health repeatedly. After dinner we dithered about how best to celebrate such a momentous occasion and settled on walking south till we found a club or bar worth checking out. Thus it was that the saga of Wednesday night began. Rees, Tripp, our mysterious roommate JP, and I waltzed along the streets of Paris, coming eventually to a bridge packed with groups of French youth making merry and playing music as the lights from the banks of the Seine twinkled like the stars that glistened in the water below. After marveling at the beauty and warmth of that view and the spirited raucousness of the locals, we moved on in search of an unnamed Jazz bar or other establishment, preferably with live music we agreed, and then came to the startling realization that it was just after 1 am and our hostel, which was half a city away had a lockout curfew at 2.

As the metro had stopped running we decided to hoof it back, but thanks to my phenomenal sense of direction and orientation, I was able to send us roughly a kilometer farther west than we should have been. It was at this point that Tripp took over directing us and, without a map, set us on the right track. Rees then saw that it was getting close to lockout time, so sprinted on ahead through the Parisian night, with Tripp and myself pelting along behind him shouting directions, unfortunately not aware that JP was not inclined to run after three crazy people he hardly knew and thus wasn’t following us. Somehow we came to an intersection and I saw Rees turn off to the left, which Tripp and I yelled to him wasn’t correct, but he was too far away at that point to heed our shouts, so Tripp and I jogged back to the Hostel, found it still unlocked twenty minutes after the curfew (so why the blazes did we run helter-skelter?) and decided that Rees would never be able to find the hostel since he had only been once to drop off his bags, and had admitted to us that he got lost that time as well since it was incorrectly marked on his map. What a wonderful birthday present to give someone, a night of wandering and running lost through the streets of a foreign city, topped off by sleeping on the street because you couldn’t find the hostel you paid to sleep at. However, miraculously, Rees then appeared at the door along with JP, who he had somehow run into (what were the odds?) and the night ended well with the three of us marveling at my horrendous failure to find magnetic north, and JP backing away slowly from his now clearly adrenaline crazed bunkmates. In the end, it wasn’t the night we had planned, but it was the night that transpired and it was quite an incredible experience.

Jazz for a Rainy Day

Tuesday it rained. Sometimes it stopped, but other times it kept raining. Mostly it rained. So, obviously, it was this most glorious of days Adam and I set forth to get our bearings on the city, particularly the northern end, and check out a few museums and figure out the location of the Moulin de la Galette, one of the sites we are researching.

Our first destination was Sacre Coeur, a massive cathedral constructed in the early to mid 19^th century just a few blocks from our hostel. Step after step, stair after stair we ascended the staircases towards our destined peak, the Basilica of Paris, with its vaulted roofs and magnificent stained glass. We were very impressed by the solemn glory of the gothic masterpiece and walked around the cathedral with the other tourists, in awe of the various statues and paintings hung near all the altars, indeed we were rendered silent by the might of the building itself and its commanding orientation at the peak of Paris. After surveying the Parisian vista for minutes on end we decided to descend from the mount and explore the rest of Montmartre while searching for the Moulin de la Galette.

The Moulin de la Galette served as a mill from about 1620 until 1873, at which time the family’s remaining son turned the site into one of Paris’s epicenters for elite, artsy soirées. It was the site of the Parisian Alamo, with the last of four brothers dying in one of the wings of the windmill while fighting “tooth and nail” (as the placard put it in French) against the invading Prussians. The man who turned the Moulin de la Galette into the hipster spot in Paris for Renoir, Van Gogh, et al was the son of that very brave last Brother, family name Debray. There is a famous painting of the interior gardens of the Moulin de la Galette by Renoir, but since the property is now a private residence except for a restaurant on the corner with its own windmill to attract ignorant tourists, and because our project deals with landscapes, we chose to focus on a slightly lesser known painting by Van Gogh of the buildings exterior and surrounding neighborhood. So, we found it, and moved along in pursuit of the Musee Nissim and Musee Moreau—sloshing through puddle after puddle of rain along the way. Actually, to be perfectly honest, I was jumping into them.

I discovered these two museums while reading a book about an American man’s twenty years spent in Paris titled The Flaneur. The Musee Moreau houses a collection of paintings, stained glass, drawings, and sculptures by Gustav Moreau, a contemporary and close friend of the poet Charles Baudelaire. Moreau once accused Baudelaire of attempting to change the world through flowers in his poetry. Baudelaire responded to Moreau questioning how he planned to change the world through paintings of jewelry. Gustav Moreau, to the best of my knowledge, was gay and loved both jewelry and the end of the world. These fascinations are equally represented through many of his works of art.

The Musee Nissim was established because of a daughter’s promise to her dying and severely depressed father. After bearing two children, his wife ran off with an Italian stableboy never to be seen again and as a result the newly-found bachelor became obsessed with collecting impressionist and neo-impressionist art and spent most of his family’s fortune amassing work after work by the likes of Monet, Manet, and Pissarro. After his son died as a pilot in the first World War he became a recluse and refused to speak with anyone except museum curators and his daughter. Just before he died, he told his daughter he wished to have a museum constructed to display his private holdings named in honor of his son. The museum was finally completed in 1935 under his daughter’s supervision. Sadly, because of the family’s Jewish heritage and despite their standing in French high society, the daughter and her family were all taken to Auschwitz in 1942 where they died along with the family’s name.

To get back on track, we worked our way westward from the Moulin de la Galette over to the Musee Nissim only to find it closed, with Adam and I left standing in the rain, two against nature. Luckily, the Parc Monceau was nearby with a nice little shelter to shield us from the rain. We took full advantage of this structure, ate the remains of our delicious English cakes prepared by none other than Lady Erica of Buckhurst Hill, and soon enjoyed the engulfing company of thirty or so Parisian high school children all on their lunch break and itching to both escape the confines of their educational prison and the buckets of rain falling from the sky. Because of the wonderful company/crowd under our hut Adam and I soon departed and began to navigate our way towards the Musee Moreau, which, upon arrival, we discovered to also be closed.

Thus it was that we discovered one of the great truths of Paris: all museums are closed on Tuesdays, and if not on Tuesday then for sure on Monday. Feeling that we had thoroughly wasted a day we decided to be true flaneurs and wander around Paris without a mission or a goal, which led us to the river Seine, which we strolled along for some time while marveling at the grand buildings on the Ile de la Cite, especially Notre Dame, which towers over its neighbors. Our loop then brought us back to the right bank to see the Centre Georges Pompidou, which houses the Museum of Modern Art, which was closed (mais bien sur!), but the unique inside-out design of the building is still worthwhile even from the plaza in front, becquae while the water pipes, heating ducts, and electricity wires are on the external surface of the building, the interior space is left free and open for virtually any purpose.

Later that night, after a homecooked meal of pasta and a baguette, word got round of a neighborhood jazz club jam session. Being quite the connoisseurs of jazz, Adam and I decided to check this place out. The club was a stone’s throw from the Moulin Rouge, in the heart of Paris’s red light district, but easily the most low-key street on the block. The jazz club was below the bar, in a sort of cave. Within minutes it became much more than a cave, transforming into a veritable cavern of treasure filled with mellifluous voices and some of the most cohesive jazz I’ve seen live and in such an intimate setting. Most songs were actually sung in English, despite a predominately French audience (15 of the 20 people in attendance), with interspersed periods of authentic scat. Requests were summoned and I gladly asked to hear “Corcovado” a song made famous by Tom Jobim, Stan Getz, and Astrud Gilberto during the height of Brazil’s bossa nova movement. The night lasted for hours, and without a cover charge at the door the prices of drinks seemed very reasonable, so it was that the music and reveling continued until the wee hours of the morning, at which point a need for sleep began to take precedence over a need for more music and it was time to retreat to a moth-eaten bed with itchy sheets and an obese, snoring Indian man as bunkmate.

Bienvenue a Paris!

We arrived in Paris on Monday the 26^th via the Eurostar, a train that travels directly from London to Paris and passes underneath the English Channel along the way. The train departed from London’s newly renovated St. Pancras Station around 3:30 and arrived a la Gare du Nord in Paris only 2 ½ hours later. After checking into our first hostel, Woodstock, we set down our belongings and greeted the city of lights with open arms. By greeting the city with open arms what I really mean is we found a place to eat. We settled on a small (petit) restaurant with a wonderful view of Sacre Coeur, a cathedral in Monmartre posied on one of the highest hills in Paris with glorious views of the city at sunset. Our vista was further enhanced by the “string hustlers” tugging at people on their way up to the cathedral. I refer to them as string hustlers because of their rather forceful halting of unaware visitors, particularly the male counterpart of a male-female duo, and assault them with string which would be hastily “French” braided to their wrists with remarks such as “it is beautiful,” “your wife will love,” etc. and then request the 2 or 3 Euros for their beautifully crafted wrist adornment. I’m sure it is an incredibly frustrating situation for both parties, but from afar I delighted in conjuring up my own conversations that were taking place which I won’t go into here. After the dinner and complimentary street performances we retired back to the hostel to post the remainder of our London bloggings and get an early night sleep.