11 posts tagged “paris”
After posting a couple of my Notre Dame pics, I went to Bloglines and saw this article (on the Craft magazine blog) about this guy who made a miniature replica of Paris. From cinder blocks, baby food jars, soup cans, and other crap.
I am truly in awe. And I was impressed with Mini-Graceland.
Archuleta is the new VFTW pick. Admittedly, he has been stinking up the place a lot lately, but I can't bring myself to cheer on the overpimped butcher of Elvissongs. Because THAT would make him Lord Thingy's favourite "Idol" candidate of all time.
Make it stop!
In honour of recently departed VFTW darling Jason, I ripped some Bob Marley songs onto iTunes. Including "I Shot The Sheriff." "Idol" needs more reggae. I thought that, if Sanjaya had made it to "Inspirational Crap" week, he should have sung "One Love." (He said that, had he made it that far, he would have sung "Wind Beneath My Wings.")
When I was in Paris, I watched "Star Academy." It's an "Idol" knockoff (the French "Idol" show is called "Nouvelle Star"), and it's louder, cheesier, and more garish than any of the North American "Idol" shows. But it seems to allow a wider range of musical styles and genres than "Idol" does. I think I saw a folk singer and a rapper. No heavy metal types, though. It also had its own version of Chicken Little -- a guy named Ludovic. Ludo, I guess, was ultimately voted off prematurely - TRUQUÉ!! (Or so he said.)
The Star Academy format is a bit different from "Idol" in that it looked like someone (who had performed the previous show) was eliminated quickly, and then the remaining contestants performed. It also showed more of the "behind the scenes" stuff, like Top Chef or Project Runway.
Yannick Noah, a former professional tennis player turned pop star (no, I am not making this up) was guest mentor/ performer that week. He sang better than "Idol" mentor Rod Stewart, anyways, Unfortunately, he obviously has not aged gracefully, and he has horrible fashion sense; he went on the show wearing a Hawaiian shirt that William Hung would have envied.
Show us an unforgettable memory from 2006.
Well, better late than never, I guess. (I couldn't post it on the day the challenge was issued because I was away from my computer and Vox didn't work that well with the one I was using.) Yes, I know it's a cliche, but I still found the Eiffel Tower pretty impressive.
Show us something sparkly.
Submitted by CareaBearaSara.
Take a look behind Homer. The other 2 balls are bamboo.
The yarn was purchased from La Droguerie in Paris--the store at rue du Jour--along with one of their pattern books, and will eventualy become a scarf. The book's in French--at least I have an incentive to keep up with the French classes.
While I was sleeping, Flickr increased the monthly upload limit from 20MB/ month to 100MB. So I managed to get some more Paris photos up on the site.
I guess I can summarize the trip as "Trying to Max Out The Paris Museum Pass." The Paris Museum Pass allows the holder to visit any of the 60 participating museums/ monuments as many times as possible for the duration of the pass (2, 4, or 6 days). Passholders also don't have to worry about queuing up for tickets. I made the monumental error of trying to see as much as possible while my pass was still good, and burned out seriously by the last day (I had originally planned to visit Versailles, but couldn't stand to look at another museum, so I went shopping instead).
When I was taking French classes, we did this exercise that involved naming the members of this fictitious family and where they were in relation to each other in this family portrait (a wedding picture, to be most precise).
The picture hangs in L'Orangerie, an Impressionist art museum. The artist was Le Douanier (a.k.a. Henri Rousseau). At least the dog showed up in the photo (sort of). It didn't show up at all in the copy we got in class. Anyway, I wonder if the people in the picture were really named Bongrain (and Gaillard).
This was one of two pictures I took in the museum. (The other one was Maurice Utrillo's rendering of Notre Dame, which I will post when I post about my visit there.) There's an entire room (actually, two rooms) devoted to Monet's Water Lilies.
There's even more Impressionist art at the Musée d'Orsay, and a smaller painting of Water Lilies. This particular museum is really cool--it was once a train station. I only took a few photos. This was the only one that turned out okay (and I admit that I took it because it appealed to me, and I could shoot the photo while sitting down).
The sculpture is Les Quatre Parties du Monde Soutenant La Sphere, by J. B. Carpeaux.
Show us something by your favorite artist.
Submitted by Miss Parker.
Well, I don't know if Picasso qualifies as my favourite artist. (I honestly don't understand cubism; I liked running writer Don Kardong's comment that Cubism is taking a perfectly good nude and making her look like Mr. Potato Head's prom date.) Anyways, I saw these pictures at the Picasso Museum and was very amused by them. The first two paintings are of Picasso's mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter and their daughter Maya. The family resemblance is astounding!
The next time I take a lot of pictures, I am going to really make the effort to take better notes. Because no, I'm not going to remember (and these pictures weren't on the museum's website, either.) Fortunately, Rick Steves' Paris 2007 (it's in my Paris Trip collection on Vox) and the Online Picasso Project really helped jog my memory.
Another month and 20MB more photos to upload to Flickr! (I think I'm at around 40% of my limit right now.)
Anyways, some more Paris pics.
My hotel was on Rue Cler, within walking distance of the Eiffel Tower (to the west) and the Rodin Museum and the Hôtel des Invalides. Imagine leaving the hotel and walking straight into Granville Island Public Market.
I started the day off by walking to the newsstand (le kiosque à journaux), buying the paper, and heading over to the café for breakfast. Actually, if I hadn't felt so much pressure to get my money's worth out of that Paris Museum Pass, I would have spent more time here. (Nice omelettes, BTW. And the bread and croissants came from the bakery kitty-corner to the café; I saw someone deliver an armload of croissants once.) I think I managed to get my daily routine down pat: café allongé, breakfast, another café allongé....Did I mention after a week of coffee in Paris, Starbucks tasted relatively weak? (Maybe I'll run out for an espresso.)
This is actually one of several vegetable/ fruit stores (this one was closest to my hotel). The raspberries looked particularly good. I still wonder what clementines are, though; are they like mandarin oranges?
This is part of la fromagerie next to the hotel. There's more cheese in the store, on the other side of the sidewalk. This is a great place to begin Dogbert's all-cheese diet, or then there's the other fromagerie down the street....
And I couldn't forget pictures of la boucherie and la charcuterie. Homer would particularly like the name of the latter. I mean, how can you not love a place called (en anglais) The House of Ham?
And, here is la poissonerie.
I'm hungry.
While I'm trying to arrange my notes/ photos into some sort of coherent narrative, I thought I'd post a few more pictures. Homer came to Paris with me. While he spent most of his time at the hotel (watching volleyball and quad-skate roller hockey on RAI Sport, no doubt), he did get out for a bit of sightseeing:
He also got to visit the Arc de Triomphe (avenue des Champs-Elysées is behind him).
He thought of visiting Notre Dame, but declined after finding out that he wasn't going to get to see any football.
Incidentally, in France, donuts are called beignes, and I think you can get them at Starbucks. (At least it looked like there were donuts in the pastry case.) I walked by several Starbuckses in Paris, but didn't go in. I really should have -- it would have been interesting to see what sort of pastries they served. When I went to Starbucks in London two years ago, I noticed that a Cranberry Bliss Bar in London was completely different from a Cranberry Bliss Bar in Vancouver. In Vancouver, it's a gingerbread bar (dense, like a brownie,) with dried cranberries sprinkled on a cream cheese topping; in London, it's more like a gingerbread cake with cream cheese icing. And dried cranberries.
Hmm. I feel like going to Starbucks right now.
While I'm still trying to decide what to put on Flickr (78% of monthly upload capacity), I thought I'd write some more random notes. Today's entry will be on all the television I watched. The hotel had a lovely flat screen T.V. with France 1 through 6, TVE (Spanish T.V.), RAI Sports (Italian sports channel), and CNN International (the only English language channel).
The first show I watched was "Malcolm in the Middle," which is simply titled "Malcolm" in France. It was a rerun of the episode where the boys volunteered to help with the donation bin at their church. (Since when did those boys go to church?) They eventually started selling items from the donation bin to kids at their school.
Later that evening, I watched an exhibition soccer game between the French team and the Greek team at the Stade de France. It looked like the stadium was packed to capacity; there was certainly a sea of blue (or would that be bleu) in the stands. It also looks as though Taylor Hicks has given up his dreams of pop stardom and is now playing goal for the Greek team. (How do you say "Soul Patrol! Soul Patrol!" in Greek?) I fell asleep during the second half (jet lag). Incidentally, France won, 1-0.
The next evening, I saw a bit about O.J. Simpson on CNN. Apparently, he has written a book on how he could have killed Nicole Brown (his ex-wife) and her friend Ron Goldman. I actually thought that Tonya Hardiing and the Menendez brothers did it. O.J. sucks. Meh.
Spongebob Squarepants (Bob l'Éponge) and Dora the Explorer are also broadcast in France, as is Arthur.
My camera battery died after a fun-filled morning at the Rodin Museum on Friday (the 18th), so I went back to the hotel to recharge it. While waiting for the battery to charge, I flipped the channel to RAI Sport and watched Italy play Turkey. That Italian guy who was the recipient of Zidane's headbutt in the World Cup final fell on his ass and put the ball in his own team's goal. (To be fair, it looked like it was wet--and cold--that day; the area in front of the goal was completely muddy.)
For an Italian T.V. station, RAI Sport really didn't broadcast much soccer; I only saw three games. (I watched Eurosport while I was in London two years ago and dubbed it the All Soccer All The Time Channel. I mean, this was a channel where you could watch Qatar play Saudi Arabia in the Really Obscure Middle Eastern Country League That No One Really Cares About.). I think I mostly saw volleyball on RAI Sport. And cross-country skiing. And roller hockey. With quad skates. I seriously hope that Italians don't consider poker to be a sport. Over here, poker and sportsfishing are both shown on sports channels.
I hit pop culture pay dirt (sort of) on Friday night, when I landed on Star Academy. It's like American Idol, only poppier and cheesier. However, SA seems to be open to a wider range of genres--since when were folk and rap allowed on American Idol? There doesn't seem to be an equivalent to RandyPaulaSimon on that show, and the host is considerably less annoying than Ryan Seacrest. Oh, and the show has its own version of Chicken Little (well, Ludovic kind of reminded me of Monsieur Covais.) It looks as though the performance show and the results show are combined in one broadcast.
I wonder if Vote for the Worst has come to France? It seems that Star Academy has its own, uh, voting issues.
The only other T.V. shows of note that I watched were the France-New Zealand rugby game (on the 19th) and a couple other soccer games (the Marseilles-Valenciennes pregame show and the Lyon-Real Madrid game). The Marseilles-Valenciennes broadcast was kind of weird. It was on Canal +, one of the channels that we didn't get on the hotel. The pregame show was broadcast, but the actual game was blocked out.
Uh, did I get that right? This is obviously something I should know - which verbs are conjugated with être and which verbs are conjugated with avoir - but my brain is malfunctioning right now.
Anyway, I returned from Paris on Wednesday evening to find that the water supply had become turbid thanks to all the rain we've been having and that the city was on a boil water advisory. Yeesh. I want to get back on that plane.
The trip went very well. Here are my observations:
Overall, I got this impression that Paris felt very crowded. Then I went to the Carnavalet Museum (it covers the history of Paris) on Sunday and saw a model of Ile de la Cité in the 1500s. Seems like the city was crowded back then, too. The streets are very narrow (relative to North America) and the buildings are set quite close together.
The drivers could be a bit intimidating (the concept of pedestrians having the right of way doesn't exist); maybe narrowly escaping being hit by a car making a left turn (the week before I left) was good training. I noticed that cyclists and occasionally motor scooters (like Vespas) travelled on the sidewalk from time to time. Cyclists don't wear helmets.
I took an airline shuttle to CDG on the day(s) I returned to Vancouver, and was quite impressed by how quickly it got there. Traffic seems to move fairly efficiently, given the layout of the streets. And once the vehicle gets onto the highways....
Many of the sidewalks (off the major streets) are pretty narrow, too. One pretty much has to walk single file along them.
I haven't had a chance to go through all the pictures from the trip (some didn't turn out--merde!), but will upload a few more over the next few days. I think I've used up about half my bandwidth limit on Flickr. That's what I get for not reducing the size BEFORE loading them to the site.
Random thoughts:
- There is a worse place than Heathrow Airport across the pond, and it's called Charles De Gaulle Airport. That place is big. And confusing. And, it seems, currently under renovation. (And I couldn't get my euro coins to work in the vending machines, which made it very difficult to quench my last Orangina fix.) I took the Roissybus into central Paris from CDG and then took the Metro (subway) to my hotel. No problem.
- Coffee=espresso. The closest thing to a Caffe Americaino is a café allongé. After a week of coffee in Paris, a regular caffe Americaino tastes like water. (I've been drinking espresso since I got back, which reminds me that I really need a coffee right now....)
