Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Paris, In One Fell Swoop.

Paris casts a spell on anyone with an artistic heart, I think. To me, it's perfect. I idealize it. It was my third trip and I want more.

Maybe part of it is that the city caught me up in its endless neighborhoods and histories and museums, and kept me spinning so that after four days, I was left with only vague memories and an impression of falling in love with the places my footsteps fell.  I'm happy that I take a lot of pictures, because without them, I find myself questioning if I was really there at all. 

It was raining until our last day, but even that helped it feel more like Paris, the fabled city of lights and dreams. Ian and I are lucky that we kind of grew up outside so we didn't mind the weather, and I'm lucky that I somehow associate umbrellas with being cultured and romantic. I love that when you walk into any shop or restaurant in Paris, it's polite and expected to leave your umbrella in a stand by the door. And I love that the French pace of life is such that, when the clouds break, even Parisians with umbrellas simply stop under the closest doorway or awning and simply wait out the storm. In France, the moment you arrive is exactly when you should have gotten there.






This trip we focused on museums and macaroons mostly, and spent several hours one morning wandering the Père Lachaise Cemetary to see the graves of Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, Edith Piaf, and Jim Morrison. We staged mini-memorial services: we played Piaf's 'La Vie en Rose' and The Doors 'Hello, I Love You,' by their respective graves; we read Stein's 'Sacred Emily' next to where she is buried with her lover; and we stood next to Oscar Wilde's granite tomb and recited as many of his cynical quotes as we could think of.






We went to the Museé de l'Orangerie and Museé Marmottan and saw countless Impressionist masterpieces by Monet, Manet, Degas, Renoir, and Picasso, and I fell in love with the work of Marie Laurencin, a woman I can't believe I haven't heard of before.


(I wish our museums looked like this)


(I know. I'm sure you all would rather see a picture of an entire Monet, but instead just marvel at his brush-strokes and layers)


We avoided the metro as much as we could and wandered through miles&miles of cobblestones instead. That meant we got the see the vineyard that grows on the hill behind the Sacré Cœur, and we somehow stumbled upon the crêperie I ate at four years ago with my ex-fiancé.





In Bastille, we almost got swept up in a celebration of the Paris rugby team (complete with riot police), and Ian found a shop that had four bottles of limited-supply Belgium-monk-brewed beer (he bought them all for 13,90€ each). On our last evening, we sat in front of Notre Dame eating Pierre Hermè macarons before we went in to hear the opening hymns of evening mass being sung to the stained-glass windows. 






It was all beautiful, and it was all a little sad. It's impossible to deny the romance of Paris, but sometimes I wish I could. 







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