Blogger did not work on Thursday night...such sadness. Therefore, I couldn't blog that night, and last night, I got home too late to blog. So I'm writing to you now from my lovely room back in Berlin with a recap of my time in Paris. (Heads up: I uploaded 76 photos for this blog post. It's gonna be loooong.).
On Thursday morning, Ariel and I headed to the Louvre. One of the first things I saw was the upside down pyramid, which reminded me of Dan Brown's book, The DaVinci Code.
As I made my way through the sculptures from ancient Greek, Roman, and Etruscan civilizations, I saw a familiar piece that confused me. This sarcophagus seemed exactly like the one I'd seen at the Museum of Etruscan Art in Rome in 2008. From AP Art History/Western Civ in high school, I remembered it as a famous piece of art history. So which one is the real one?
After the initial confusion and disorientation I felt at the beginning of Rick Steves' audio tour, I found my way to the Venus de Milo. It's one of only a handful of ancient masterpieces that is originally Greek. Most other famous ancient Greek-inspired statues are actually Roman copies.
Wandering further along on my tour, I made my way up a gigantic set of stairs that led to the imposing statue of Winged Victory (or Nike of Samothrace). It used to be on the front of a ship, and even though it's head is now missing, it's still quite impressive.
Nearby, Nike's hand was recovered and placed in a glass box next to the stairs. I never realized they had found it. Looks like she's giving us the finger now...
In the adjoining room, I looked up to see "Icarus bungee-jumping from the ceiling" or something like that. That's what Rick Steves mentioned in his audio tour. Regardless, very neat painting.
In the same room, there was a plaque put in by the people who brought the Louvre Museum to life—those same revolutionaries who brought us the guillotine.
The Louvre used to be a palace, so some of the rooms are kinda extravagant. Like this one with paintings of famous French individuals on the walls, including a few kings. The crown jewels are in a glass case further along.
I made my way to the next part of the tour, which featured a number of famous paintings, mainly in this hallway.
One such painting is this one by Raphael. His style was so popular many others copied it.
In a side room, there hung this massive canvas with Veronese's Wedding at Cana. I remember doing a presentation on it in AP Art History class, but I never realized how huge it is. There are roughly 130 figures in the painting, including Jesus in the center, Veronese himself painted as a musician, and the bride and groom way on the left.
Directly opposite this huge painting is the Louvre's most famous resident—the Mona Lisa. I had always heard it was smaller than you'd expect, so it was no surprise to see a single, small frame encased in glass and surrounded by guards and a 10-foot roped off radius.
This part of the Louvre was probably my favorite though as I really love paintings. Jacques-Louis David is one of my favorite artists, and his painting of Napoleon's coronation is one of his best. Note from Rick Steves: Napoleon's mother is painted into the center of the painting as the proud mother watching over this ceremony when in fact she was too ill to travel to the event.
On the other side of the hall was one of my other favorites among David's paintings, The Oath of the Horatii. His Death of Socrates was also supposed to be there, but either I completely missed it or it's been moved.
Also in the gallery was David's Intervention of the Sabine Women. Man, I love his paintings.
Another art history piece I remember from class was La Grande Odalisque by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. Basically, he painted a concubine.
Continuing with the highlights of AP Art History hallway, I found Théodore Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa, which reminds me of J.M.W. Turner's paintings, who apparently was inspired by Géricault too.
And last but not least among these highlights, I saw Eugène Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People. So epic.
I finished that tour in about an hour and went to meet Ariel as we had agreed to meet up after an hour. Honestly though, I could've spent another hour just sitting in front of those paintings. One hour is nothing in the Louvre, even for someone like me who doesn't really like long museum visits.
From there, we moved on to the apartments of Napoleon III. They're pretty lavish.
By the time we finished that, we were very hungry, so we went to look for cheap falafel. We found our place in the Jewish center of town, and I was pleasantly surprised to pay 5€ rather than the 6,50€ as advertised.
Yum.
Ariel's suggestion had been to take our falafels to eat while staring up at the Centre Pompidou, which is a building built inside out (see picture to figure out what I mean). But I was so hungry that I pretty much finished it all on our walk there.
We decided to head toward the Arc de Triomphe, passing the Hotel de Ville on the way. Paris is truly a lovely city.
I was feeling pretty tired and my back was sore from all the walking of the past few days, but after a short break, we went up the Arc. No lift, just stairs.
Oh, we saw the eternal flame and the tomb to the unknown soldier there too. That's also the Champs-Elysée in the background. Fairly underwhelming for all you hear of it.
Another view of the Champs-Elysée from the top.
And one of the few photos of me in Paris. Now I have proof I was actually there.
After visiting the Arc de Triomphe, we headed over to the Eiffel Tower.
As expected, it was extremely crowded, so we walked around and then found a spot on the grass.
Looking up from underneath is pretty cool too though.
On the grass, I wrote a few postcards and promptly fell asleep for an hour. It was so nice out.
Ariel decided to go visit another museum, while I went to meet up with my old HIA buddy, Martin, who lives in Paris. He was a French fellow in our program and is also good friends with some of the other HIA Fellows I visited or met up with in the past month.
After sitting along the canal, drinking some beers, and eating some chips with Martin, I headed back to meet up with Ariel. We picked up some bread and wine and headed for her friend's apartment. Along the way, I saw these basketball hoops by the Hotel de Ville.
I was so fascinated by the hoops I didn't pay attention to where I was walking and tripped over the bottom of one of those fences you see above. One smashed wine bottle and bloody wrist later, here's what that looked like. A really nice lady on the Metro gave me a few tissues and some hand sanitizer, and Ariel let me use her hair tie to keep it all together. It really wasn't as bad as it looked, but it did look pretty gruesome when you don't expect to have blood running down your arm on the Metro.
After a lovely dinner at Ariel's friend's place (and a few too many glasses of wine for me), we met up the next morning at the Louvre again. I should explain: the museum has three major wings, and on Thursday, I really only spent time in one with the blitz-tour using Rick Steves' audio guide. On Friday, I decided to hit up another wing, which is considerably less crowded than the one housing all the art pieces I described above.
One of the paintings I saw was of Cardinal Richelieu, whom I only really remember from The Three Musketeers. Reminds me of the cardinals all wearing red in the new TV series, The Borgias.
One of the most highlighted pieces was Lucas Cranach's Les Trois Grâces. I'm not really sure why it's so famous, but it was in a glass case.
Strolling through a room full of Dutch paintings, I noticed this one and thought, "That's gotta be a Vermeer." And it is. So proud of myself. :) Vermeer's style is one that's quite easy to recognize.
Here's another Vermeer.
I was hoping to look at one of my favorite paintings, which is The Night Watch by Rembrandt. But it's apparently in Amsterdam (makes sense). Here's a Rembrandt in the Louvre though.
Further along, I found another familiar painting from AP Art History—Anthony van Dyck's Charles I, King of England, at the Hunt. Another of my favorites.
I finished walking through the paintings and then went to find Ariel in the Egyptian art section. Saw this statue on the way.
I saw in the map that the Seated Scribe was somewhere in the gallery, so I went off looking for it. It's much smaller than I had always imagined.
When we finally finished at the Louvre (having breezed through most of the major galleries but still plenty left untouched), we went looking for sushi. We went back to the Japanese center of the city (which is really a lot of Japanese restaurants run by Chinese people, except for a select few). The lunch menu was pretty good and definitely filling.
One of these had melted cheese wrapped in bacon though...not sure that's really Japanese. Is it?
After lunch, we made our way up to Sacré-Cœur. It's a gorgeous church atop a hillside and looks over all of Paris. My sister had warned me about the crazy people trying to sell you stuff (as had Ariel), so we took a side street up the hill—and voila, we avoided just about every street seller.
Couldn't take pictures inside the church (it's really nice), but we took some pictures of the crowds outside. Some French guy was singing for the rest of the folks. Nice.
One of my last things I wanted to do in Paris was climb Notre Dame, since my older sister had never gotten to. So I made my way over and used my Museum Pass to get in (by the way, 50€ for a 4-day museum pass is a great deal...I put it to great use and definitely saved money and time that way). Outside Notre Dame though, there was a little bread festival or something. Good stuff.
Ariel decided not to climb with me, so I went to the line and waited for about 20 minutes to get in. Met some folks from Houston too.
The climb itself is about 400 steps, and there is no lift. I took a good number of pictures up there though, and here are some of my favorites. They nearly all have to do with gargoyles.
He either is bored of having been there since roughly 1163 or he's still in love with the city.
There was a cage thing over all the walkways, so you can't fall. Unless you really really tried.
Those doors lead to the clock tower, where I imagined Quasimodo swinging around.
This might've been my favorite gargoyle.
From the very top, you could make out Sacré-Cœur off in the distance.
After my one-hour visit to Notre Dame, I met up with Ariel in the park behind it, and we strolled to another park where we just sat and chilled for a while. Having walked around so much over the past few days, it was nice to just relax. Plus there was Wi-Fi at this park!
In the evening, we bought some food and met up with Ariel's friend and her friends at the same canal I went to with Martin, but along another part. Really nice out. Great place for a little picnic.
After that, I ended my night at Martin's apartment, where he and a few friends had a party. We had a few beers, some good red wine, and some awesome pasta Martin had whipped up. I finally made it home right around midnight and fell asleep promptly.
This morning, I took off for the airport and made it back to Berlin around 3 PM. All in all, with my flight included, I spent less than 300€ for my week in Paris. Definitely my cheapest extended trip of the year yet. Love it. A special thanks to Ariel for hanging out with me all week and showing me around Paris.
My French did not improve much and is really non-existent actually. However, by last night, lots of words were coming back and listening comprehension had improved slightly over where it was when I arrived on Monday—which is to say, I really didn't improve my French much at all. Haha.
Tonight, I am meeting up with Ronny for a few drinks as he gets ready for his trip to someplace else in the world, and I think I'm meeting with a fellow Fulbrighter from Hamburg for dinner. She hasn't texted me back yet though, so I may start cooking pasta in a bit here.
Tomorrow, I head to Marburg early in the morning and will stay overnight for my medical appointment on Monday. Then it'll be back to Berlin and work for the rest of the week. Looking forward to getting back to my normal routine in Berlin—and grill parties!
Ok, ciao! Apologies for the über-long post today. Hope it was somewhat more enjoyable than usual.
Sam
On Thursday morning, Ariel and I headed to the Louvre. One of the first things I saw was the upside down pyramid, which reminded me of Dan Brown's book, The DaVinci Code.
I had downloaded Rick Steves' free audio tour, so I headed for his recommended starting point but not before getting a tad bit lost first. Honestly, the Louvre is the biggest and most labyrinthian museum I've ever been to.
As I made my way through the sculptures from ancient Greek, Roman, and Etruscan civilizations, I saw a familiar piece that confused me. This sarcophagus seemed exactly like the one I'd seen at the Museum of Etruscan Art in Rome in 2008. From AP Art History/Western Civ in high school, I remembered it as a famous piece of art history. So which one is the real one?
After the initial confusion and disorientation I felt at the beginning of Rick Steves' audio tour, I found my way to the Venus de Milo. It's one of only a handful of ancient masterpieces that is originally Greek. Most other famous ancient Greek-inspired statues are actually Roman copies.
Wandering further along on my tour, I made my way up a gigantic set of stairs that led to the imposing statue of Winged Victory (or Nike of Samothrace). It used to be on the front of a ship, and even though it's head is now missing, it's still quite impressive.
Nearby, Nike's hand was recovered and placed in a glass box next to the stairs. I never realized they had found it. Looks like she's giving us the finger now...
In the adjoining room, I looked up to see "Icarus bungee-jumping from the ceiling" or something like that. That's what Rick Steves mentioned in his audio tour. Regardless, very neat painting.
In the same room, there was a plaque put in by the people who brought the Louvre Museum to life—those same revolutionaries who brought us the guillotine.
The Louvre used to be a palace, so some of the rooms are kinda extravagant. Like this one with paintings of famous French individuals on the walls, including a few kings. The crown jewels are in a glass case further along.
I made my way to the next part of the tour, which featured a number of famous paintings, mainly in this hallway.
One such painting is this one by Raphael. His style was so popular many others copied it.
In a side room, there hung this massive canvas with Veronese's Wedding at Cana. I remember doing a presentation on it in AP Art History class, but I never realized how huge it is. There are roughly 130 figures in the painting, including Jesus in the center, Veronese himself painted as a musician, and the bride and groom way on the left.
Directly opposite this huge painting is the Louvre's most famous resident—the Mona Lisa. I had always heard it was smaller than you'd expect, so it was no surprise to see a single, small frame encased in glass and surrounded by guards and a 10-foot roped off radius.
This part of the Louvre was probably my favorite though as I really love paintings. Jacques-Louis David is one of my favorite artists, and his painting of Napoleon's coronation is one of his best. Note from Rick Steves: Napoleon's mother is painted into the center of the painting as the proud mother watching over this ceremony when in fact she was too ill to travel to the event.
On the other side of the hall was one of my other favorites among David's paintings, The Oath of the Horatii. His Death of Socrates was also supposed to be there, but either I completely missed it or it's been moved.
Also in the gallery was David's Intervention of the Sabine Women. Man, I love his paintings.
Another art history piece I remember from class was La Grande Odalisque by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. Basically, he painted a concubine.
Continuing with the highlights of AP Art History hallway, I found Théodore Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa, which reminds me of J.M.W. Turner's paintings, who apparently was inspired by Géricault too.
And last but not least among these highlights, I saw Eugène Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People. So epic.
I finished that tour in about an hour and went to meet Ariel as we had agreed to meet up after an hour. Honestly though, I could've spent another hour just sitting in front of those paintings. One hour is nothing in the Louvre, even for someone like me who doesn't really like long museum visits.
From there, we moved on to the apartments of Napoleon III. They're pretty lavish.
By the time we finished that, we were very hungry, so we went to look for cheap falafel. We found our place in the Jewish center of town, and I was pleasantly surprised to pay 5€ rather than the 6,50€ as advertised.
Yum.
Ariel's suggestion had been to take our falafels to eat while staring up at the Centre Pompidou, which is a building built inside out (see picture to figure out what I mean). But I was so hungry that I pretty much finished it all on our walk there.
We decided to head toward the Arc de Triomphe, passing the Hotel de Ville on the way. Paris is truly a lovely city.
I was feeling pretty tired and my back was sore from all the walking of the past few days, but after a short break, we went up the Arc. No lift, just stairs.
Oh, we saw the eternal flame and the tomb to the unknown soldier there too. That's also the Champs-Elysée in the background. Fairly underwhelming for all you hear of it.
Another view of the Champs-Elysée from the top.
And one of the few photos of me in Paris. Now I have proof I was actually there.
After visiting the Arc de Triomphe, we headed over to the Eiffel Tower.
As expected, it was extremely crowded, so we walked around and then found a spot on the grass.
Looking up from underneath is pretty cool too though.
On the grass, I wrote a few postcards and promptly fell asleep for an hour. It was so nice out.
Ariel decided to go visit another museum, while I went to meet up with my old HIA buddy, Martin, who lives in Paris. He was a French fellow in our program and is also good friends with some of the other HIA Fellows I visited or met up with in the past month.
After sitting along the canal, drinking some beers, and eating some chips with Martin, I headed back to meet up with Ariel. We picked up some bread and wine and headed for her friend's apartment. Along the way, I saw these basketball hoops by the Hotel de Ville.
I was so fascinated by the hoops I didn't pay attention to where I was walking and tripped over the bottom of one of those fences you see above. One smashed wine bottle and bloody wrist later, here's what that looked like. A really nice lady on the Metro gave me a few tissues and some hand sanitizer, and Ariel let me use her hair tie to keep it all together. It really wasn't as bad as it looked, but it did look pretty gruesome when you don't expect to have blood running down your arm on the Metro.
After a lovely dinner at Ariel's friend's place (and a few too many glasses of wine for me), we met up the next morning at the Louvre again. I should explain: the museum has three major wings, and on Thursday, I really only spent time in one with the blitz-tour using Rick Steves' audio guide. On Friday, I decided to hit up another wing, which is considerably less crowded than the one housing all the art pieces I described above.
One of the paintings I saw was of Cardinal Richelieu, whom I only really remember from The Three Musketeers. Reminds me of the cardinals all wearing red in the new TV series, The Borgias.
One of the most highlighted pieces was Lucas Cranach's Les Trois Grâces. I'm not really sure why it's so famous, but it was in a glass case.
Strolling through a room full of Dutch paintings, I noticed this one and thought, "That's gotta be a Vermeer." And it is. So proud of myself. :) Vermeer's style is one that's quite easy to recognize.
Here's another Vermeer.
I was hoping to look at one of my favorite paintings, which is The Night Watch by Rembrandt. But it's apparently in Amsterdam (makes sense). Here's a Rembrandt in the Louvre though.
Further along, I found another familiar painting from AP Art History—Anthony van Dyck's Charles I, King of England, at the Hunt. Another of my favorites.
I finished walking through the paintings and then went to find Ariel in the Egyptian art section. Saw this statue on the way.
I saw in the map that the Seated Scribe was somewhere in the gallery, so I went off looking for it. It's much smaller than I had always imagined.
When we finally finished at the Louvre (having breezed through most of the major galleries but still plenty left untouched), we went looking for sushi. We went back to the Japanese center of the city (which is really a lot of Japanese restaurants run by Chinese people, except for a select few). The lunch menu was pretty good and definitely filling.
One of these had melted cheese wrapped in bacon though...not sure that's really Japanese. Is it?
After lunch, we made our way up to Sacré-Cœur. It's a gorgeous church atop a hillside and looks over all of Paris. My sister had warned me about the crazy people trying to sell you stuff (as had Ariel), so we took a side street up the hill—and voila, we avoided just about every street seller.
Couldn't take pictures inside the church (it's really nice), but we took some pictures of the crowds outside. Some French guy was singing for the rest of the folks. Nice.
One of my last things I wanted to do in Paris was climb Notre Dame, since my older sister had never gotten to. So I made my way over and used my Museum Pass to get in (by the way, 50€ for a 4-day museum pass is a great deal...I put it to great use and definitely saved money and time that way). Outside Notre Dame though, there was a little bread festival or something. Good stuff.
Ariel decided not to climb with me, so I went to the line and waited for about 20 minutes to get in. Met some folks from Houston too.
The climb itself is about 400 steps, and there is no lift. I took a good number of pictures up there though, and here are some of my favorites. They nearly all have to do with gargoyles.
He either is bored of having been there since roughly 1163 or he's still in love with the city.
There was a cage thing over all the walkways, so you can't fall. Unless you really really tried.
Those doors lead to the clock tower, where I imagined Quasimodo swinging around.
This might've been my favorite gargoyle.
From the very top, you could make out Sacré-Cœur off in the distance.
After my one-hour visit to Notre Dame, I met up with Ariel in the park behind it, and we strolled to another park where we just sat and chilled for a while. Having walked around so much over the past few days, it was nice to just relax. Plus there was Wi-Fi at this park!
In the evening, we bought some food and met up with Ariel's friend and her friends at the same canal I went to with Martin, but along another part. Really nice out. Great place for a little picnic.
After that, I ended my night at Martin's apartment, where he and a few friends had a party. We had a few beers, some good red wine, and some awesome pasta Martin had whipped up. I finally made it home right around midnight and fell asleep promptly.
This morning, I took off for the airport and made it back to Berlin around 3 PM. All in all, with my flight included, I spent less than 300€ for my week in Paris. Definitely my cheapest extended trip of the year yet. Love it. A special thanks to Ariel for hanging out with me all week and showing me around Paris.
My French did not improve much and is really non-existent actually. However, by last night, lots of words were coming back and listening comprehension had improved slightly over where it was when I arrived on Monday—which is to say, I really didn't improve my French much at all. Haha.
Tonight, I am meeting up with Ronny for a few drinks as he gets ready for his trip to someplace else in the world, and I think I'm meeting with a fellow Fulbrighter from Hamburg for dinner. She hasn't texted me back yet though, so I may start cooking pasta in a bit here.
Tomorrow, I head to Marburg early in the morning and will stay overnight for my medical appointment on Monday. Then it'll be back to Berlin and work for the rest of the week. Looking forward to getting back to my normal routine in Berlin—and grill parties!
Ok, ciao! Apologies for the über-long post today. Hope it was somewhat more enjoyable than usual.
Sam
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