Just Returned

I have a confession to make. I am just back from a seven-day-vacation in Paris.

I did not see the Mona Lisa. I did not get to the top of the Eiffel tower. I did not get the paranomic view from the Pantheon. I did not pay the requisite Euro for a view from the little telescope that Amelie used in the movie at Sacre Coeur. And worse of all, I did not bring along a camera.

I had my little phone camera, of course, but the tiny pictures I took aren't particularly worth the effort of posting up, really. Alors, I have decided to post some sprinklings and provide you links to websites of people who brought big expensive cameras to the City of Lights and spent their time there clicking and adjusting little knobs.

So here I am on the second floor of the Eiffel Tower. It took a half-hour wait at a queue full of tourists before getting here, and would have taken me another hour to get to the top, I believe. My distaste for queues got the better of me, and we left the tower after only a little amount of time on the second floor. We did find out that the Tower was installed with a Hydraulic lift upon it's construction, a marvel of engineering in it's time and thus relieving me of the puzzle as to how tourists used to get up in the old days.

And then of course I must mention the Louvre. Queues for buying tickets to the most famous museum in the world are long, but the ticketing systems defy imagination, allowing for a pretty speedy entry - provided you speak and read the major tourist languages. Here I am trying to be funny an posing beside a Rennaisance bust, only one of many (many many) that I looked at for well over three hours without rest, and a little sick besides. No wonder that I got rather fed up with Art in the end and was distracted by the view outside. I managed to get a decent shot of the pyramid from inside. Didn't see Mona Lisa nor Venus, though I caught Napoleon's Coronation by David and too-many-Virgins for my own good. In the end the only thing that made me pause from my fevered dash to the exit was four paintings of a man's profile comprising of fruits from the differing temperate seasons. It was about as revolutionary as the Louvre got.

The Musee D'Orsay, on the other hand, was full of Impressionist and Post-Impressionists and I remember stumbling, fatigued, through rooms full of thick-paint-strong-brush-stroked Renoirs and Manets. The architecture of the ex-railway station was a wonderful contrast to the Louvre - visiting the two in the same day makes for some interesting comparisons to be made.

And here's the night view from Philippe's little balcony, a typical (I think) little apartment in the eleventh arrondissement. Paris property prices make Sigpaore's look reasonable by comparison, and the people in Singapore whoo complain of apartments being too close together and the resultant lack of privacy need to see what Parisian apartments are like.

I also visited the Pantheon, where the greatest French are buried for contributions to the State (AUX GRANDS HOMMES LA PATRIE RECONNAISSANTE - says the inscription on the front of the building). The bigger the contribution the better your eternal resting ground, it seems. Voltaire and Rosseau got nice ornamental tombs in an airy room to themselves (as well as being main exhibits) whilst the poor Curie couple had to share r tiny room with three other great people. This amused me slightly, until I saw the VIDEO ROOM:

With much insight, the Pantheon's managers have been able to grasp that it's history as presented in a Black-and-White video will not draw much viewers, and this presentation is made in a tomb-like room, with a single wooden bench for those interested enough to watch the french production from the seventies. I was barely able to suppress giggles of mirth at the elderly couple sitting there watching the vide as I took the picture.

Alright, for the rest you can go visit Absolutely Paris for some wonderful pictures of the standard tourist fare (by Frantisek Staud).

Despite my failure as a tourist (Yonglong would have been shocked) I enjoyed Paris immensely. Should have stayed longer, had my leave not been already almost-depleted and my (impression of) work in the office piling up.

Sadly, today was relatively free and I found myself thinking about Paris much too often. But one realizes one should not dwell too much on the past, for there is a bright future ahead.

Next!