Actually, it was mostly raining rain.
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| The Space Inader invades! |
Grandma’s gone to scope out the neighborhood for dinner. (“Oh look, there’s a Chinese place.” “As long as it doesn’t serve Japanese rice.”) I was going to do homework but 1) reading Brave New World is like banging my head against a wall scrawled with vocabulary words to see if I can somehow memorize them that way, 2) it’s too early to learn Romeo and Juliet and 3) I’ve been researching for the past few hours my Histoire des Arts project. No more. Please, no more.
Now, all this “rain” business makes it sound like this day was slow, depressing and quite, quite rainy. However, it was nothing like that. Well, except the rainy part.
I was awoken this morning at around 8 o’clock. I know it’s not that early, but it felt early to me. I guess my brain still works in Ottawa time, where it was 2 am. Grandma, seeming to have adjusted fairly well, had already been up for a couple of hours. That’s Grandma for you.
We ate our croissant, grapes and cranberry juice breakfast and took off for the metro. As the instructions said and after an uneventful metro ride, we arrived before a green-ing statue of Charlemagne in front of the Notre-Dame Cathedral at 9:30. We waited and waited whilst watching a male pigeon in mulish pursuit of a female. (He never succeeded—1 point for women!) After several minutes, the tour guides arrived.
Now before I go any further, I would like to confess something that I’ve discovered about myself during this trip. Although I live around them every day, I am terrified of French people. I don’t mean that at the sight of one I scream and run away, but there’s just something about the way they speak, the way they look at people that just makes me feel uneasy. When I’m talking, disdain seems to coat the air between us, as if I were not worth their time. But that might be just me. I imagine a lot of these things.
Yes, this does relate to my day, because… We were French-free! The tour guides, two men, were—wait for it—British, and the two other couples were American. The only interaction I had with a French person today was when I told a friend of one of the guides, François, a man working at a sandwich stand where we stopped for lunch, that “parain” in English was “godfather”. He was really nice. Perhaps I have this whole French people thing wrong…
Now, back to my story. After being acquainted with the guides (David and Alex), we went down into a parking lot and retrieved the bikes. Green and advertising “BIKE ABOUT TOURS”, they (I was happy to discover) adjusted perfectly, and we were off. And that’s when I realized I hadn’t ridden a bicycle in about 2 years.
Winding through narrow streets through “The Marais”, named so for previously being a swamp, we stopped frequently, where they told us little facts about the location. A house where a bishop used to live (complete with the hole for dumping boiling oil onto assailants and a cannonball embedded in the stone from an attack during the French Revolution), the apartment where Jim Morrison died (The plaque had been removed because of the profuseness of candles and flowers from fanatics, but one fan had scrawled on the wall in black marker “WE LOVE YOU JIM MORRISON”.) and Victor Hugo’s dwelling. This last stop was also where Henry IV and his wife had resided—both living in separate wings, of course. (“He had a strange sense of marriage,” David concluded, British accent and all.)
We were also introduced indirectly to—duh duh duuuuuuuuh—The Space Invader. (Cue dramatic music.) This is some anonymous artist who goes around putting up tiny mosaics of aliens all over Paris. There are around 1,000 of them, according to Alex. At one spot where someone had painted a fake alien on the wall, the real Space Invader had come and put one on top. Earth has been invaded… Well Paris, anyways.
We visited a memorial where all of the names of the Jews and the people helping them stopped by the French police during World War II were inscribed on a wall. We went for lunch, as I mentioned before, at Francois’ sandwich stand. He was really funny—whenever David tried to speak English to him, he would respond, “Je ne comprend pas l’anglais,” when he could clearly speak English quite well. Along the Seine, we biked through a sculpture park, where we were pointed out the nudist beach on the other bank—don’t worry, it was much too cold for anyone to actually be there—and the famous restaurant “La tour d’argent”. To attract customers, they pay for the Notre-Dame to be lit up at night for the view. According to David, an ordinary dinner there would cost about 450 euros per person, and if you get the duck, they will offer for you to buy the carcass of your duck at the end of the meal for the prodigious amount of 6,000 euros—Now what you would do with a duck carcass nobody knows, but people mostly do it to sign their name on the prestigious list of all of the people who have bought it.
Stopping on one of the many bridges in Paris, I learned about the lover’s locks. Apparently, it is a tradition when you come with a loved one to the City of Light to engrave your name on a lock, lock it on the bridge and throw the key in the river, proving your undying love for each other. There are a few problems with this issue, however; 1) sometimes, the bridge gets so full of locks that the city comes and chops them all off, and 2) what if you break up with your loved one? Some people seem to have found a solution to this last problem; we found quite a few combination locks hanging on the bridge.
From the bridge we had a great view of the Notre-Dame cathedral. Something I did learn about it that I had never known before was that there are thirteen (My lucky number!) statues at the top: 12 apostles, and can anyone guess the thirteenth one? Anyone? You’ll never get this: Upon completing his work, the architect finished the cathedral by putting up a statue of himself facing the church and covering up his face—blinded by the beauty of what he had just created. Self-centered much?
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| Look for the architect "shielding" himself from the beauty. |
Finally, we stopped briefly at the Centre G. Pompidou. It’s a modern art museum and, I have to confess, the building itself if pretty cool. There are colourful tubes running along the outside of it—every colour represents what is inside (i.e. water, heating, electricity…). We’ll have to go visit it some time.
Well, I’ll keep the tale of the rest of our day short—we went to a Starbucks’ to get our bearings (I know, of all of the little coffee chops in Paris where we could go, Starbucks’ is where we end up.) and decided to go to the Centre G. Pompidou. Piece of advice, in case you ever visit Paris: ALL MUSEUMS ARE CLOSED ON TUESDAYS. This we only found out after we had taken all the trouble getting there and waiting in line with some other people (What were they waiting for, anyway?). As my hands were freezing, we stopped at a department store to get me some gloves—which they didn’t carry—and ended up buying this really cool bag (Thanks, Grandma!). After getting lost and un-lost over and over again, we finally found a metro station and went home.
I did my homework, Grandma went out and we finally decided on dinner. French food? Nope. That’s right, we went Chinese.
We ate ha-kao (which, honestly, I thought was pronounced har-gao) and siou-mai and wonton soup and broccoli. And noodles. A fly kept buzzing around, and I went all Karate Kid on it. Unsuccessfully. I’ll have to take ninja lessons when we get back. We didn’t even order rice, so we never found out if they did such a crime as to serve it Japanese in a Chinese restaurant. Maybe we’ll go Thai tomorrow night.
And day 2 is over. Wow, and I thought yesterday’s post was long.
Still apologizing.
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