Bill found an Eric
Kayser boulangerie this morning, hooray. Are their croissants and
chaissons de pommes and baguette any better than any other? We actually have no idea. But we are very happy to consider the
question, mouths full of flakiness and jam.
Our Paris
Museum Pass is a wondrous thing because it lets us skip all kinds of lines but
not the ones at Notre Dame and Sainte-Chappelle. We wait 30 minutes at the latter, and of
course it is totally worth it. A staple of Art History classes, the 13th
c. Sainte-Chappelle is the apotheosis of Gothic style, all light and color and
glass and seemingly nothing holding up the starry ceiling. 70% of the glass is original! A nice thing is that you can stay as long as
you want once you are there so we gaze and gaze and get cricks in our necks and
gaze some more. It is mesmerizing.
Jumping
forward six centuries, the Musée d'Orsay is, like most museums, jammed in the
popular spots like behind the great clocks and less so in the interesting but
non-popular spots like early 20th c. Nordic decorative arts. The
Impressionists halls are packed, natch, but the contextualizing and
chronological ordering is actually great and it is of course a completely fab
collection so you learn a lot even amongst the masses. Bill makes sure
that we do not miss a special exhibition of Italian Design 1900-1940. He was
right. Again. And it takes Izzy to help me understand the
funky 3D profile of Il Duce.
Do yourself a
favor and eat in the fancy restaurant in the former station buffet, as it is
not more expensive than the resto behind the clock and it is one of those rooms
that you find only in Paris: completely
ornate and gilded and elegant and why doesn’t anyone build anything like this
today.
La Musée de la
legion d’honneur, right across from the Orsay, was open so we stopped in.
This is a slightly weird and warm and quite empty museum of medal-ry.
You can see Medals of Honor from pretty much any country in the world,
and they are beautiful! The French take service to France very seriously,
so of course all kinds of people like Jean-Claude Killy and Julia Child have
received Legion of Honor medals. If you
aren’t French, you can’t actually be a member of the order, but you can get the
medal.
The Centre
Pompidou also affords AC (it is hot today) and splendid views and a short
lesson in the moderns. Turns out Izzy is
not as in to the Impressionists as you might think for someone who loves color
and dance, she is more of a modern art girl (should have seen this coming at
the Italian moderns earlier today). She immediately found her fave
Kandinsky at the Centre Pompidou and was off from there, discussing what art will
be in her tree house and sculpture garden. She likes art that she can
find things in, that aren't so much about technique or just showing life.
Aunt KT helps us find the weirdly wonderful in one sculpture that a
passing-glance might dismiss as a little scary but maybe is just about seeing
something different.
Tom and KT
really get around and take us to another of their fave dining spaces, Georges,
at the top of the CP. Dinner here
affords splendid views of tout Paris amid the setting sun and a lesson in how
you might look if you a) were 20 years younger b) never ate anything and c) could
tolerate very high heels. The haricot verts and champignons de Paris were
exquisite, and KT explained the very fine dessert of café gourmand which is a
coffee with whatever teeny dessert the resto wants to give you. Here it
was a teeny panna cotta, a teeny fruit salad, and a teeny quatre-quarts with
blueberries.
On the way
out, we watch an old man feed approximately five million pigeons that hang out
here at the CP. Apparently there is
another pigeon guy, and he came once when Tom and KT were here, and there was a
fight about who gets to feed these pigeons.
KT initiates
us into Hot Nights in Paris. Damn you, now it is an earworm.
No comments:
Post a Comment