Aéroport Charles de Gaulle
McDo's in the airport -- it says: Mystic Chicken...the myth has returned! It's always fun to see what different stuff they have in McDonalds overseas. They used to have what amounted to a McCroqueMonsieur (a ham and cheese sandwich).
My flight arrived a few hours before Agnès' so I dragged my stuff over to Terminal 2 and had a real Croque Monsieur at a café and a cup of coffee before meeting her flight, and then we took the RER into the city together to find our hotel and check in.
Hotel Muguet
The Hotel Muguet (I don't know how to pronounce it without sounding like a cow mooing) was not bad for a two-star hotel; I had a tiny slice of a view of the Eiffel Tower from my tiny slice of a balcony. The walking space between my bed and the desk was a tiny slice of what was left of the floor space, but the room was clean and there was free wifi. The only downside to the place was that the elevator was broken on the day we checked out and we had to carry our bags down five flights of stairs. If the stairs hadn't been curved, and if there hadn't been a very real possibility of the bags killing someone on the way down, I would have seriously considered just kicking the cursed things down each of the five flights and the devil be damned.
Père Lachaise
Did not realize you could get kicked out of a cemetery, but it does actually have operating hours, and we got there with enough time to visit Colette and Jim Morrison (not as many stoners and hippies hanging around as you've been led to believe), but not enough time to find Oscar Wilde before the shrewish lady on the motorized scooter started rounding up the stragglers to tell them to get the hell out before they got locked in with the zombies. Huge place. Don't buy one of the maps outside the Métro because they are complete crap. Don't kid yourself that you can do the place in an hour or two. All the tombstones look the same (hey, a gray stone is a gray stone) and nothing is well marked (one cobblestone street looks like every other cobblestone street). Could not help thinking how les americains would have turned Death-Disney into a theme park (this way to Edith Piaf...! with a big white hand on a spring) with equal parts shame at this bit of national notoriety and regret that they didn't get the contract. Also wondered if there was even a scrap of earth left to wedge one more famous person in here if they managed to make one last final request.
The Champs-Élysées
Met up with some friends at an African bar, the Impala Lounge on rue Berri, perpendicular to the Champs-Élysées. Everyone wanted to go see the premiere of Sex and the City, but it was sold out, so we had to settle for tapas and drinks. I had something called a dandy (which seemed appropriate, given the SatC theme).
Institute du Monde Arabe
The cool thing about the building is the light screens on the south side which are made up of 1600 high tech metal screens that filter the light entering the building. The design is based on moucharabiehs (those carved wooden screens you see on the outside of buildings in Morocco). Each screen has 21 irises that are controlled electronically and open and close in response to the amount of sunlight detected by photosensitive screens. The central irises adjust their size with interlocking blades; the peripheral irises link to one another and to the central iris and open and close in unison.
I'd always thought the exterior of the building looked very cool and modern and but had never thought to go in, even though I knew the place was supposed to be a sort of mini-United Nations, built more or less to foster culture and understanding between the Islamic world and the West. Agnès said you were supposed to be able to have really good tea in the cafeteria on the premises, and there was supposed to be a great view of Paris from the building, and that sounded okay to me. Arabic hospitality is supposed to be legendary, and I had heard that Arabic tea is also a famous custom. We had about two hours or so before we wanted to get to La Manufacture des Gobelins for the tour of the tapestry factory that I was hoping to see on this trip. What could go wrong with tea?
Of course, relations between Arabs and the Americans couldn't be worse right now, but I figured that people are usually just people, but even if it got down to somebody making a big thing out of it, it would probably break down something like this:
Inside the Institute du Monde Arabe, it's like the airport in that you immediately have to send your bag through an x-ray machine and walk through a metal detector so they can make sure you aren't bringing any weapons into the building. Those guys were very nice, and so were the folks at the ticket counter, who assured us that we didn't need to buy a ticket just to go up to the top floor where the restaurant was located (we could also have had tea at the cafeteria on the ground floor, but there was a view promised at the top, on the 9th floor).
Upstairs, there was a self-serve cafeteria, and a ritzier restaurant with the promised view of Paris, although the outside terrace was being renovated, but it wasn't very full, so Agnès asked the maître d' (a young, charming Omar Sharif) if it was OK if we had tea and he assured us that that would be fine, and had us seated by his brusque waiter who shuttled us over to a corner table where there was no cutlery, although he opened a couple of menus to the dessert page in case we were interested in dessert with our tea.
I flipped back a few pages and saw that they had great-sounding appetizers (hummus...! with lamb...!) and thought that would be very nice instead. However, when Mr. Personality reappeared to ask us what we wanted and I ordered (in French), he took offense. You want to EAT??? he asked (in French) as if I had just said that I wished to to take a sh** on his nice white tablecloth. I just looked at Agnès, baffled. What was the problem? I didn't see the difference between serving us dessert and bringing us appetizers. However, this was clearly a major faux pas. He made this big deal about taking us to a different table where there were real place settings set out, and then asking whether I wanted water with fizz or not, and just generally acting like a major prick.
After that, he wanted nothing to do with us. We were served by a robotchik waitress who seemed to have been lobotomized (who poured Agnès' tea with great ceremony, from a great height so that it splashed big tea stains all over the snow-white tablecloth). My order arrived -- the wrong order -- and when Agnès asked the robot to have him come over to tell him we'd gotten the wrong order he insisted that that was what I had ordered.
What is his problem? I asked her. He was clearly fawning over his other customers, one of whom was obviously an American woman, who was wearing a purple t-shirt and was heavier and slobbier than I was (I'm sorry to have to say). Agnès wanted to blame herself for wearing flip-flops, but I didn't see how flip-flops that nobody could see under the table could have twisted this guy's undies into such a knot. We weren't dressed up, but it wasn't like we were dressed way down either, and we weren't showing a lot of skin. What was the deal? He was a waiter -- we order things, he brings them to us. That's how it works. What possible difference could it make to him whether we ordered desserts or appetizers?
Maybe he's offended because I ordered a kir? I asked her. We were trying to imagine that maybe he was a deeply religious Arab man and it was freaking him out to serve alcohol to women. But no, the fat American woman at the other table was drinking wine.
Maybe he was a Saudi man and he suspected that at home, I drove a hot red sports car and it was just killing him to have to bring me anything but a cup of tea?
Maybe he was a polygamist and I reminded him of the wife he most detested? The one who produced nothing but girl children and ran off with the Turkish rug merchant? We just couldn't figure it out. But he just couldn't have been more rude to us.
Revised list, which this waiter should have consulted:
And besides, sometimes one of them is a Canadian (Agnès).
I was really pissed off when I got the bill and realized that the water he'd pressured me into buying cost 10 euros (about US$14). Agnès wanted to get out of there fast so we wouldn't miss the tour of the Gobelins factory, but I wasn't going to let it go. Just write something on the comment card and mail it in, she said. No way, I said. Some French waiters are just rude, she said.
I said, You can't visit a place like this and be treated this way and not say anything. It's like a slap in the face of World Peace. The more I thought about it, the more it upset me. (Besides, I also think that most French waiters are nothing like this guy at all.) So I stopped to talk to Omar Sharif at the entrance. I said to him (in French) Our waiter treated us very impolitely and he offended me.
Omar Sharif was very disturbed by this, and wanted to hear all about it. He said to me (in English): I am very concerned and listening to you now. He wanted me to sit down and tell him everything. I told him I didn't have time to stay and have the coffee he was offering me (I did have goblins waiting after all), but I told him about being shoved off into the corner, about our waiter not wanting to serve us, about being served the wrong food and being blamed for it, about being bullied into ordering water I hadn't asked for (he was outraged by this in particular), and he seemed genuinely aggrieved by his waiter's behavior and apologized to me. I know if I hadn't had to leave he would have made our waiter come out and apologize, and I would have gotten some satisfaction on the bill I had had paid, but I didn't have the time to resolve it to that degree. I just wanted to leave that building without feeling that Arabs were jerks and that I had been badly treated there -- it would have defeated the whole purpose of the place. Omar Sharif was a real gentleman :) I'd rather think about him representing that place instead of the other guy.
La Manufacture des Gobelins
The Gobelins tapestry factory is over in the Jardin des Plantes quarter, and if you can manage to navigate the tour through the factory (conducted entirely in French), you can watch the weavers as they make enormous tapestries and carpets (they don't let you take pictures though, except in the main exhibition hall, without a flash).
The name of the place came from some brothers named Gobelins who had founded a dye works in the mid 15th century. Louis XIV bought the manufacturing plant and the place was run as a royal tapestry and furniture works for years. Even today, the tapestries from Gobelins are only made for markets within France, although there was one commissioned specially for the Queen of Denmark, who is married to a Frenchman.
The tour was very cool -- we got to see the weaver's looms (enormous) and how they transferred the patterns to the threads, all the way around the threads, not just on one side, because sometimes a thread will twist, and you need the marking to be visible, so they draw with their special pens all the way around it. The factories were very well designed to take advantage of natural light, set up so that the light streamed in facing the tapestry workers, but the rug makers worked with their backs to the light. I liked the more modern Matisse-cutout looking designs the best. The manufacturing plant still tries to maintain the old methods of the traditional art of weaving so that it doesn't die out (so it doesn't dye out?) but of course, like everywhere else, government funding for the arts is always at risk, and they are always needing to attract new apprentices to the trade in a world where all the young people are being lured into more technical and lucrative careers.
Of course, it's the name of the place that I love -- and the implication that somewhere in one of those ancient nooks and crannies, with some secret recipe, using newts and frogs and puppy dog tails in some giant cauldron somewhere that used to be used for dyeing wool, they are somehow manufacturing actual goblins :)
Gobblin'
Met up with Agnès' friend Charlotte at Madeleine, and walked to the wine bar L'Ecluse. Afterwards, took the #14 Métro, which is unique in that is has no driver (nice when there is a strike, because the train runs regardless), to meet up with her friend Tulay, at a restaurant near the Louvre called au Gourmand.
You have to love France for its fabulous food...! And for waiters who go into the profession not because it's a stop gap until they make it as actors, but because it's a job they pursue deliberately. I think French waiters are among the best in the world -- as if serving fine food is an art form of its own. For instance, you never even touch the wine bottle, because they anticipate your empty wine glass before you do -- and even if you've chosen the most inexpensive bottle on the wine list, they always pour the bottle so that the label is visible, as if ElCheapo is the finest vintage that Madame could possibly have chosen :)
Alésia
When the weekend came, Agnès went to visit friends in Burgundy, and I went to visit friends in Reims. When we returned to Paris, this was the B&B where we stayed. Glorious, fabulous, spacious (there's a word you don't hear very often describing accommodations in Paris), with free wifi and laundry access and fluffy down comforters on the bed and a flowery terrace and a Monoprix around the corner and free phone calls to the United States...! I never want to stay anywhere else in Paris ever again.
Musée Orangerie
They finally opened the Orangerie Museum, which has been closed for these renovations on every other trip I've made to Paris. The star exhibit is the panorama rooms they created to house the huge Monets that the painter created with the intention of displaying in this big format (how did he know they'd make him a huge museum just for this purpose?) It's a little like standing inside an aquarium, if only the other fish-people would get out of your way.
Bercy
I wanted to visit the Cinémathèque Française in Bercy, but it was closed on Tuesday, our last day in Paris. Strangely, except for keeping up with my online classes, I didn't get any work-related stuff done on this trip at all.
Musée Bourdelle
Antoine Bourdelle used to be a marble carver for Rodin, so a lot of his sculptures look like Rodins. He obviously had a crush on Beethoven, because a lot of his stuff looks like Beethoven, either intentionally or coincidentally, or maybe he just liked sculpting the crazed hair. When I got to the museum (not that easy to find, although it isn't far from the ugly tower of Montparnasse), a group of schoolkids had just arrived. My initial reaction (oh nooooo) was replaced by what luck...! because all of the people who usually stand around looking suspiciously at people like me who might be tempted to touch the sculptures or get too close to the paintings were now clustered around the little hooligans (who were really rambunctious and were being herded around by teachers and chaperones who kept hissing SHHHHHH!!!!) and nobody was watching ME (hehe). Literally, nobody was watching me at all...! I could have walked right up to the sculptures and objets d'art in Bourdelle's studio and licked them if I wanted to (I didn't). Had the place to myself. It was awesome :)
Les Halles
This was the neighborhood for "les shops gothiques" -- I found several stores crammed from their velvet dress hemlines to their spiked dog collars with stuff, everything from Marilyn Manson t-shirts to motorcycle jackets with trim that looked like red cheetah print, but on closer inspection turned out to be bunny skull prints :) One of the salesgirls was wearing a headband with cat ears; when I left the store she called out, "Bye baby!" to me.
The big head outside Saint Eustache. Someone thought he needed green lipstick (it wasn't me, in case you were wondering). In the Forum at Les Halles there is a Vidéothèque (I didn't have time to explore it), also about a zillion movies to choose from in the regular cinema.
A goth girl on the Métro wearing a velvet maxi coat. Yes, it was June.
Place des Vosges
Spied a wedding party as they were departing from their ceremony while having a drink at Nectarine. We were tipped off that something was going on by a very chic woman in a Chanel suit and a very stylish hat walking by with her two kids -- one in her arms and one holding her hand wearing a tiny tuxedo (only in Paris...!) She outfoxed the bride, who had only a full-sized man in a cream-colored tux (ugh) to lead around by the hand, and no stunning headgear at all.
Chat et Souris
Agnès and I went to a play called Chat et Souris (Cat and Mouse) the last night we were in Paris. It was a comedy, very much like watching Three's Company or another American slapstick sitcom, about a man with two wives trying to keep them from finding out about each other. Went out during the intermission and didn't go back because it wasn't that good. Went to have French onion soup at Le Grand Café on boulevard des Capucines (also duck for me and chicken for her).
Alas, the week ended too soon and it was time to leave Paris. Until next time, mes amis....