I went to Paris. It was cold, which was not such a good thing for me. There was a transit strike which was a good thing for me, because I was really sick while I was in Paris and if I’d had to walk and take the metro to see all the stuff we’d planned, I’d have dropped dead somewhere near Notre Dame, which could only be a good thing, since dying near national cathedrals puts you at the front of the line for admission to heaven, right?
My boss decided to take a long weekend and ship the office to Paris for a study tour. Please note there are no quotes around the phrase study tour. When BDP took us to Paris it was a ‘study tour’, which translated into the Irish means ‘free weekend in Paris to drunkenly tear around the city’. This tour, however, we had a mini bus and a chauffeur to take us to our appointments to see various projects. Studying was done, as was much swilling of wine and inhaling of food. I am not, however, any heavier than when I left Dublin and I consider that a great failing on my part.
I’d been feeling a bit sick in the days leading up to Paris and thought that I’d be ok if I dressed for deepest winter, so out came the wool tights, the thick socks, the turtlenecks and the thick sweaters. It wasn’t enough. By the morning of day two, I hit the pharmacy for medicine and was hopped up for the next 6 days. I was hoping to be proposed to again but I guess my cough was more ‘I have TB’ and less ‘I’m a sexy smoker’ which the Parisians are fine with. God, they smoke everywhere. I thought the British were bad… When Melanie and Hippie and I were in England, we would hang our clothes out every night so we didn’t contaminate our clean clothing after a night in the pubs. After the first night in Paris, I realized the Brits have a lot to learn from the French about lingering smoke.
Our first day we landed at noon and after checking into the hotel immediately went to lunch. Evidently I caught the waitress’s fancy, because I was the only one she’d look at, smile at, or speak to, and I speak no French what so ever. I did manage to get my food first though. I’m not stupid, I’ll smile pretty if it means my crème brulee comes out of the kitchen well in advance of everyone else’s and still steaming from the mini blowtorch. Hey, she was beautiful, so it was hardly a hardship post. And my crème brulee was really good.
After a very long lunch, we went for a walking tour of central Paris, part in twilight, part by the light of the moon. It’s a beautiful way to see Paris. We stopped in Notre Dame just as Mass started, which featured an all female choir. That was worth the trip to Paris for just that. Beautiful sweet voices ringing through the cathedral, echoing off the gray stone pillars, lit by candles and chandeliers so high up they appear as candle light.
It’s not the first time I’ve seen the mass in a foreign language and I stand by my observations from Italy the first and second time; it is a strangely hypnotic performance art piece. I know what is happening, I understand the rituals and yet, because I cannot understand what they are saying, the effect is mystical. I understand why Christianity held such sway over people for so long; the mass was in Latin for thousands of years and only a very few could understand it. Every week, the same mysterious rituals followed by a harrowing sermon delivered by a powerful man dressed in finer clothing that most of the population would ever see, let alone own. It must have been a powerful spectacle. It is now.
We stepped out of the cathedral after about 20 minutes and continued our tour of Paris with no real agenda but to end up near the new opera house for dinner. I’ve never seen the new opera house but I know the stories. It was a competition; the winner was an absolute nobody who won only because the judges thought it was a hastily designed entry by Richard Meier. They assumed the design would develop after he won. Unfortunately, it wasn’t Meier and it didn’t develop after the competition and so Paris has an opera house that looks like a telecom headquarters in the tech suburbs of Dallas. At least it’s off my list of things to see in Paris.
We had dinner, we tried unsuccessfully to get taxis back to the hotel, thus we walked a very long way home. I went with my French coworker to meet her friends for drinks after we returned to the hotel, which was rather stupid on several fronts. For one, I was in no mood for yet another drink, let alone to inhale more secondhand smoke into lungs that were already protesting. Secondly, her friends don’t speak much English and having me at the table, with absolutely no French beyond the pleasantries of hello, please and thank you, meant they had to converse in English. It’s not a great way to catch up with long lost friends. I’ve never been so happy to see those tiny glasses of wine they pour. I gulped it down, bid them good night and then fell happily into my bed where I had bizarre fever induced nightmares.
The next two days we were in the mini-bus, being driven around Paris both past and present. It was my only salvation for the weekend. Mini-bus means you can sleep between sights. Metro means you cannot. Our itinerary for the weekend was this:
Maison La Roche Jenneret by Le Corbusier
Villa Savoye also by Le Corbusier
Parc Citroen by people I cannot recall
Musée du Quai Branly by Jean Nouvel
Bibliotheque Nationale de France by Dominique Perrault.
I’ll be posting more architectural comments on these projects in a later post, when I manage to get around to it (snore) which means this post is really just about the fun ‘let’s go eat!’ part of Paris with some buildings thrown in for good measure.
We started the tour by visiting Maison La Roche Jenneret in a very pretty suburb of Paris. It is one of the place we had an appointment, and with the transit strike (I’m unclear how this works here) there was very little traffic on the road so we had 30 minutes to kill before we presented ourselves. One would think the congestion on the roads would be worse with no bus/metro/taxis but no, Parisians do their own thing once again.
We found a little café nearby and went for a coffee. It was an odd little place on many fronts. Firstly, it featured the best selection of Scotch I’ve seen outside a whiskey shop. All my favorites were there and it was only 10am. Secondly, Next to the massive keg sized bottles of Veuve Clicot, signed by, presumably, the dinner party that consumed the champagne, was a vintage Guinness sign. The Irish are indeed everywhere. Thirdly, the man seated behind us muttering to his paper, and occasionally shouting at it, was dressed head to toe in pumpkin orange: orange turtleneck, orange button up, orange trousers. We tried to sneak a photo of him since he didn’t seem the type to pose for me.
One quick coffee later and we were walking into my first Le Corbusier house. We’d studied it in undergrad, everyone does, and I was sort of excited to take photos and send them back to my friends from those days. Bragging is, of course, the main reason I travel. My obversations? It’s tiny. Which I suppose for an urban lot is to be expected, but all the photos I’ve ever seen and the drawings had led me to believe it was this grand white mini-mansion in the city. It’s the size of an average house. Also, serious lack of detail on the house. Nothing really finished in any way, edges were rough and just sort of banged out. I was shocked by the rudimentary detailing but chalked it up to the amount of years it was abandoned and in need of renovation. However, Jeanne, my French co-worker, and I had a conversation about her dislike of Corb for exactly that reason. All grand gestures, no detail. Great entrance space though, nice day light in the rooms. But overall, I left thinking: I am not a fan of Corb. And that, my non-architecture friends, is a heresy, a grand one.
From there we went to Parc Citroen, which is, as you might, imagine, associated with the car maker. I believe the area was a car factory and then a munitions factory and then abandoned for many years only to be re-adapted as a park in the 90s. This one I studied in grad school and was quite excited to see what the hell my professor was so inarticulately trying to describe to us. The only things I remembered from what he was telling us was the following list: palm trees, black stone, water and trees. It’s an interesting materials list. It was an interesting park. I now understand what he was talking about and will be inarticulately trying to describe it myself in the future.
It’s a very modern park, designer park if you like and it really is best seen in plan to understand how the elements relate to one another, especially the diagonal slash thru the entire park. Luckily, there is a hot air balloon in the park that rises 150 metres in the air for some amount of time to do just that. For the bargain price of 12 euro a person, the viewer is treated to stunning views of the city of Paris and the park below. I can only assume this, since I was on the floor of the balloon trying my best not to burst into tears. I was unsuccessful. I have both a fear of heights and vertigo and I have never been so terrified in my life. I don’t know what made me think I could do this but I know I rationalized it thusly:
Is this one of those experiences you’d regret not trying, because of a stupid fear? How would I feel listening to everyone talking about how cool it was after the fact? Would I then wish bitterly I’d gone? It is a once in a lifetime sort of experience. The balloon is attached to a cable, which allows it to go straight up and down. If I look straight out to the horizon and don’t look down, I’ll probably be fine. The floor is solid, as are the sides, so it will probably be ok. Just do it!
I hadn’t factored in the air currents and the fact the balloon would sway and rock and creak. About 1 minute into it the ascent, I started to panic. At around the 75 meter mark, I was in a full blown panic and gulping for air. At 100 meters, someone helped me sit down so I could curl up and breathe deeply so as to not hit my coworkers who were, lovely people, laughing at me. And taking photos of me. I don’t think they quite grasped how serious the situation was for me.
They all sort of zoomed around the balloon taking shots of the various view of Paris, stepping over me and offering words of comfort like: it’s not that high, we’ll be ok, these things are usually safe. When they all ended up on the one side and the balloon tilted, I burst into tears. Mercifully, I couldn’t feel us descending, so when I saw the tops of the trees, I hardly dared believe my eyes. We landed, most disembarked, and Suraya, Carmel and Sandra helped me off the Balloon of Doom and onto the Bench of Salvation. When they saw I was shaking too badly to walk, people ceased laughing and no one mentioned it until much later when I was able to laugh about it.
You know the best part of it all though? I paid for that. Nearly $20.
Stupid Nike slogan…
From there we loaded up and drove thru the streets to our last visit for the day, the new Jean Nouvel museum, Musée du Quai Branly. On my last trip to Paris, only the administration building was finished and while the intent was obvious, the plantings hadn’t quite taken root, so the building was a bit weedy. The façade of the building is essentially a garden, planted with native species, irrigated and tilted to the vertical rather than the traditional horizontal we mere mortals are familiar with. I was quite excited to see how it looked 2 years later. Garden as building. It was amazing and shocking and beautiful. Which sort of describes most of his projects. The final part of the museum has been built and the entire thing is open. We went, we saw, I tried not to 1- steal the café chairs, 2- stalk the fireman strutting thru, and 3- laugh and point at Jeanne who got busted by a guard for smoking, outside, in the grounds of the considerable landscape which were plants native to Africa. I managed the first two. Plus Laura and I played Top Model on the café chairs, which had to have amused the patrons inside the café. Kate Moss is losing no sleep.
We didn’t stay very long, since it was closing shortly and the driver was double parked, so back into the van to the hotel where we could rest before dinner. That was a very welcome thing. Unfortunately for Jeanne, the restaurant we booked was so far away, we had no way of getting there, so she spent the break trying to find some place that could take 10 of us for dinner in a few hours. I spent the break sleeping.
Dinner was a lovely affair in a tiny restaurant called La Rough Poisson, the Red Fish. It was the favorite of the trip and for a last minute replacement, absolutely perfect. They have amazing little chocolate melty bundt cake things. That’s about all I remember. That and watching the very cute owner read a newspaper at the bar because he was bored. Actually, I remember a lot of the restaurant and the patrons but little of my colleagues because I wasn’t really able to participate in the conversation much. Being hopped up on cold medicine will do that to you. I remember the menus were all written on fish shaped chalk boards and that I decided it was less than effective since no one could read the writing, let alone decipher the French. I ordered something with polenta, which I then had to explain to the group, since they didn’t know what it was. There was beef, there was polenta, I was happy. There was a very cute brand new baby who was fed at the table next to us. The table right in front of the door. So anyone walking by or into the restaurant would have a view of new mother breast feeding. From the street, it must have been quite a show because more than one man slowed down for gander as he walked by. Eh, what are you gonna do? Me, I had the chocolate melty thing and some more wine.
The next morning, furthered by loads of sleep and even more medicine, we drove to Poissy which is a town outside of Paris notable for only one thing: Villa Savoye, my second Corb house and definitively The Icon of the Modern Movement. Not really looking forward to it after my first brush with Corb, especially since it was bitterly cold and foggy, but it was instantly better upon arrival. Perhaps the celebrity of the project had something to do with it, I don’t know, but crunching up the drive, I was excited to see it.
Two things I did not remember about the project: there is a guardhouse/garage at the entry and the front door is at the back of the site. I find that odd, so it makes me wonder if I ever realized the front door is in the back. Who walks the entire way round their house to enter it? It hadn’t occurred to me there was no sidewalk. The Savoy family was a very wealthy family who were driven to their country home by their chauffeur who would drive under the overhang, round to the front door, drop the family, and then proceed back to the gatehouse. It was never intended for any other purpose than to have rich people dropped at the door. I am not rich and so would not have gleaned this fact had the docent not explained it to us on our tour.
She was helpful, despite only speaking French. Jeanne reluctantly translated, since the transit strike kept our promised English speaking docent in Paris. We had room in the mini-bus; had they only told us, we would have happily collected him. It was a Great tour in which she explained a lot that I did not know about the house. Or perhaps I’d known at one point in architecture school but forgot in all the sleep deprivation. Very glad I got to see it; I was the first one in the van again.
From there we drove back into Paris to see our last project: Bibliotheque Nationale de France by Dominique Perrault. I slept all the way until Yves Montand interrupted my sleep. It was actually the chauffeur, on the microphone, serenading us with an Yves tune that he’d been hyping for days to the Spanish girls. Karaoke and unlimited Kleenex supplies, he was a bargain that man. The fact that he didn’t know his way around Paris… was trifling really. The group then asked me to sing some Sinatra for them to which I replied, rather politely, no way in hell. I went back to sleep. When we got to the library, I remember the daylight was golden, the bridge was interesting and the towers were large. I took some photos and then went inside to sleep in a chair in the hall.
Not the best trip to the library for me admittedly. From there we went back to the hotel, and had a long lunch before the first half of the group went back to the airport. Jeanne was adamant that everyone be on time for the shuttle bus to the airport because he would not wait for anyone. He was allowed to be late, we were not. Don’t be late for the shuttle to the airport, there aren’t any taxis if you miss him and the airport is an hour by car outside of Paris. That’s a very long walk with luggage if you miss the shuttle. Don’t be late.
Who was late for the shuttle then? Jeanne. We had split up to do some shopping, she went to visit friends and we agreed to meet for the late shuttle to the airport at the hotel. She rushed in just in time.
It was a sad ride thru the streets of Paris, seeing all the cute restaurants and shops we wouldn’t be in, the nice bars yet unexplored. As we passed Per Lachaise cemetery, my heart sank. Going back to Dublin has never been so sad.
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