At long last, Paris!

I know I've been promising this for a long time, but I've finally gotten all of my pictures together from Paris in order to create this lovely blog! I realize that I'm about a month behind in my posting so you're hearing about things a month after they happen, but after I hand in my last assignment tomorrow I've got a whole week to get ready for my first exam so I'll try to post a couple times in there and catch up a bit! Maybe even write a bit about stuff that's happening right now! How novel would that be? Anyways, on to Paris. Over our fall break I decided to go to Paris. I was prepared to go alone, but I was looking around to see if anyone was interested too, and one of my fellow IFSA students, Mary, decided to come too. So Saturday morning we began the lengthy and painful travel procedure. The order was this: bus to train station, train to Glasgow Queen's Street Station, bus to Glasgow Central, train to Prestwick Airport, plane to Beauvais airport, bus to downtown Paris, tube and walking to hostel. It was great times. A long day, needless to say. Here we are early in the day, on our first train I think.

When we first got there, we were hungry, but feeling lazy and cheap so we just stopped in at this little quicky mart convenience store and grabbed some sandwiches and such to make a little picnic on our bed!


I unfortunately bought more food than I could eat that evening (cheese and meat) and didn't want it to go to waste, so I invented a fridge in our sink! They had taken the plug for the drain away so that guests couldn't accidentally flood the building, so I wrapped on the of the little round bars of soap in a bag and stuffed it into the drain as a plug, and then double wrapped the food in bags and floated it in the cold water! It was pretty effective actually. Mary thought I would make a good boy scout.


The next morning we went out intending to just wander in the general direction of the Eiffel Tower and Arch de Triomphe. Luckily we didn't jump right on the tube or we would have missed this open air market that had sprung up! Tons of amazing looking food and fish and cheese and breads. I wanted to try some cheese but was scared of them and too hungry to risk getting one that I didn't like, so I ended up grabbing a nice authentic french Falafel! Mary got some huge grapes that we ate for the next couple of hours.


After the market, we decided to hop the tube over to the tower since the day was getting on already. When we got out from the tube station it was just a short walk until we were staring straight at the tower. A pretty impressive structure, if I may say so.


One of the many "hey, everyone else speaks french, lets just take pictures of ourselves" photos.


Here's a shot from almost underneath. As you can see, it was a very nice day out.


The lines to get up were pretty lengthy, and one of the legs was closed so we had to wait maybe 30-45 minutes to get into the tower itself. In that time I managed to become more impressed by the architectural aspects of the tower. The whole thing is basically a custom made erector set. All the pieces were pre-made in a factory a ways off and then moved to the site and assembled with tons of plates and rivots. As far as I could see, no single piece was much longer than 10 or 12 feet. What's really impressive to me is that when you're building something 100's of feet wide and many times taller than that, and you're doing it with 10 foot sticks, you really don't have much margin for error! A slightly incorrect angle of length at the base would become more and more emphasized the further up and away you went. So, the amount of designing that was required to make the tower absolutely astounds me. It also makes me wish that people would build more things these days that are just attractive or meaningful, but not necessarily practical. (Not to say the tourist trap that is the Eiffel Tower isn't practical, it just makes me think about it's origins.)

Anyway, here's a view to the north-west once we got the first level of the tower. You can see Trocadera plaza and all the roads radiating out from it. Pretty cool.


Over here is the Arch De Triomphe. Now it's basically a giant roundabout but you can still see the spokes of the roads, and it's easy to imagine the road having gone under it at some point. (More on this later)


And finally, a panoramic view off the north-east face of the tower. I don't remember what a lot of that stuff is, but it's pretty and so is the Seine river.


This is us on top of the tower. I held the camera out through the safety grill and took a picture back at us. It seemed amusing at the time.


This is the only picture of the tower that I took that wasn't identical to all the 50 billion photos the other tourists take every year. From the top, looking down, the sides almost seem to run parallel to each other! I think it's a pretty cool optical illusion.


When we were done enjoying the excitement in the Tower, we headed down to the Arch de Triomphe. It was just a short walk away, and when we got there we found a little plaza area with a bench right next to the arch. We sat there for a while and chatted and watched the people go by and admired the Arch.


It was pretty awesome to see the change as the sun went down and the lights turned on around the Arch.


It was also at this point that I noticed the pattern running around the edge of the Arch. Having just finished with Metamorphoses over the summer, I immediately recognized it as a Greek Key. I'm not sure why it was there, and the research I've done doesn't indicate any serious meaning for it. I think that it was simply a copy of old roman architecture, and they used the Greek key without really intending to. But I'm probably wrong.


By now we were tired from walking and standing all and went back to get some sleep in preparation for a full day in the Louvre! The next day we got up early and took the tube to the Louvre (there's actually a tube stop that leads directly into the complex under the Louvre). I don't really know how to describe it other than saying that it was absolutely overwhelming. First of all, the building it's in is amazing. The glass pyramids, the water, the architecture. That's all enough to warrant a visit, even without being full of the most amazing pieces of art!


Here' the picture made famous by The Divinci Code. Where the two triangles meet. Unfortunately, underneath it is a food court, not the tomb of Mary Magdalene. What really impressed me though, (I don't know if you'll be able to tell from the picture) was the fact that none of the diamond shape plates that compose the pyramid are touching each other! They are all suspended about half and inch apart by the internal frame. Just one of those little things that I enjoy noticing.


So, on to the art. This was the first room I went into. (Obviously the picture was taken later once I had worked my way up.) It's just a big open courtyard full of the most amazing statues and sculptures. Seriously, almost started crying when I walked in here. To see so much art and talent and beauty all at once really takes your breath away, quite physically.


On the other end of the wing, there was another sculpture garden. I don't think I realized quite so clearly before my visit to the Louvre, but I really prefer sculptural art to painting and photographs. I think it just has to do with the way my brain works and I can relate better to the act of carving and chiseling than I can to the act of painting.


Speaking of paintings though, I really liked this one. It's a classic virgin and babe painting, but I really liked the way that Mary was looking out towards the viewer. It impressed me a lot.


This is the "Winged Victory of Samothrace." I actually had to look up the name. I recognized it and was familiar with it, but I couldn't remember what it was called. I seem to do the same thing with people though, so I don't feel too bad.


These next two are photos of "Eros and Psyche." By now I'm thinking there's a trend to this trip as this is the second direct connection to Metamorphoses. Not only is it cool to have these strange connections, but I really like this piece. The curves, the arms, the wings, the empty space. Etc etc. Now I feel like an art critic, haha! Oh well, I still liked it.




There was obviously a ton more that I saw, but in some places I couldn't take pictures, and even if I wanted to post all the pictures I did take, it would take way to long to comment on them all. We went back around 6 and just crashed. Funny how exhausting wandering around looking at art can be. That night I also realized that my iPod was running out of batteries and I would be a very sad Quentin if I didn't have my book on "tape" to listen to on the way back. I also realized that I didn't have a European adapter for my charger. Out came the boy scout in me, and I went on a mission to solve the problem. The only thing I had with European prongs was a power converter, but it didn't have the ground line, and the sockets were recessed into the wall, so I couldn't plug the thing in. (It's the brown thing in the picture.) So, I ran down to the convenience store and grabbed an extension chord for the European plug, brought it back up, sawed off the plastic buffer on the end, and plugged everything in. The last problem was a loose connection between the iPod charger and the converter, but a couple of connected twist ties looped around solved that problem too! The end result: a fire hazard that also charges iPods! Woohoo!


The next day we went to see Notre Dame, which was cool, but once you've seen a couple cathedrals, they all start to seem a little similar.





After that we just wandered around and bought some postcards and had some delicious crepes with cheese and chicken. Soooo yummy. And they made them without cheating too. They would just pour the batter onto a flat round hotplate, and then spread it around with this crazy wooden wide and flat hoe-shaped thing.

I kinda wanted to go out that night and see what the night life in Paris was like, but we had to leave kinda early the next morning to catch our flight and Mary didn't really want to go out, and I wasn't too keen on going out on my own much either, so we ended up hanging out and reading Harry Potter and listening to music / book.

So, that's it! That was my trip to Paris! I hope it wasn't too disappointing after talking it up so much for the last month. Next I'll post some pictures from Elyse's visit, and then I'll try to get some pictures of campus in the fall and maybe even a few of the SUDS kids and our performances or parties! Speaking of which, I auditioned for the next show, The Prime of Miss Jane Brodie, and there's an American in it, so I might actually have a chance! They post the cast list tonight, so I'll try to get back on here and let you all know if I got it or not. Until then though, I love you guys and was thinking about you on Thanksgiving. We all got to have some T-day food, but it was a little too formal and restauranty when we were all comparing it to a nice evening with our families. Still, it was nice to get out. And at least I'll get to be with a family for Christmas! That will be nicer than ending up in a hostel somewhere. Love you all, and happy holidays!