In Defence of Sightseeing

The air was heavy. A red mist began to rise around my head. I had a vision of myself vaulting over the child below. What kind of stupid man would block the bus exit with his buggy and refuse to budge? If one cannot respond to a kind request, I fumed, what hope is there for humanity?

Then it happened. I tutted. Loudly.

My mind flashed back to a similar bus situation, four weeks earlier, as the blue-rinsed commuters telegraphed their disapproval of one woman's pram-wrestling boarding of the number 81. It struck me: I had become a little old Parisian lady.

This kind of self-discovery, to my mind, puts Marco Polo to shame and is the holy grail for the introspective travel writer. Especially as it's about me. Except for one thing: all of the above took place in the shadow of the Sacre Coeur.

Thousands of independent travellers share a horror of the overfamiliar; we want to emphasise our thorough appreciation of a place and its culture, gain an insight into the people - and we would not be caught dead up the Eiffel Tower. It seems self-evident that the worst parts of any destination, the most money-grabbing, tourist heaving aspects, will be found in impressive proportion within viewing distance of any major monument. Much of it gives the impression (not entirely inaccurately) that tourist are a bottomless pit of money. At Notre Dame one may enjoy waving bits of paper before the nose if one stands still for more than thirty seconds, the aforementioned Tour Eiffel boasts unrivalled queuing, while at the Louvre a prospective admirer of the Mona Lisa will no doubt appreciate the tranquility afforded by four hundred jostling elbows. Worse still, we find ourselves surrounded by pale imitations of ourselves in the form of novelty T-shirt wearing, socks-with-sandals sporting, tacky fridge magnet purchasing tourists. I choke on the word.

The disappointments and inconveniences of major tourist sights are well documented, and the reasons for avoiding such tourist-crammed areas are considered and well-meant (as well as a little snobbish). When one wants to gain a deeper understanding of the local people and their lifestyles, there really isn't a lot you can do about it when yelling your crepe order over the heads of an idling tour group.

In a city like Paris, however, non-touristy sights are thin on the ground. Nowhere in the world have I encountered such a density of - gulp - attractions, but the annual turnover of tourists within its twenty arrondissements more than compensates. More to the point, had I gone to Paris as a student and not visited any of the tourist destinations, what would I have missed?

I may have missed out on the beautiful Pantheon with its confused ecclesiastical heritage, or the view from the Pompidou Centre. When you've got postcards to send anyway, why not buy them at St-Michel with everyone else, where genuine Parisian students hang out and you can witness a political demonstration or two?

There's a reason that the Musee D'Orsay is a popular destination - its collection - and while Versailles can be downright unpleasant with its surfeit of tourists, once you get past the gritting of teeth and grumbles of, "Someone should really do something," the apartments really do provide an insight into the ambitions of Louis XIV. While travellers may be justly disinterested in the doings of the tourist masses, there's little point in getting snobby towards those who have a genuine interest in and knowledge of local history.

People travel for all sorts of reasons. I find it quite wrong to suggest that going to "see things" is in any way an invalid proposition. There are good reasons for travellers to be interested in people and character, but many of us have more physical interests, particularly those with a passion for architecture. In the style and decor of a church many travellers can read insight not only into the current population, but into the priorities and preoccupations of long-dead designers and craftsmen. In this spirit I chased down the Lavirotte-designed public toilets at Madeleine - perhaps off the tourist trail themselves; certainly under it - and the Opera Garnier, my spiritual home and favourite building in Paris. And I don't care if it is crawling with tourists. It's magnificent.

Much is dependent on outlook. One can find oneself immersed in a city, speaking the language, surrounded by locals, and still gain no insight into the society. Equally, one can queue for the Louvre with a thousand tourists and be motivated by a love for their extensive collection of pre-19th century art, ancient Babylonian decor, or Levantine religious sculpture. Is this wrong? Is it shallow to be concerned with anything beyond the local community, or to be primarily interested in other things? An interesting question.

I confess that I do own quite the tacky fridge magnet collection - but I still haven't been up the Eiffel Tower.

Final visits and comfort tourism

Ladies and gentlemen, the Opera Garnier.

Most of you know now that I have returned from Paris due to ill-health. This makes the last few days very chaotic and haphazard, so I will condense the weekend's events into things I actually did. For the most part, that means the Friday. I was in a lot of pain and didn't go to class that morning, but in the afternoon as I considered my options I decided to indulge in a bit of "comfort tourism", and gravitated to my favourite building in Paris.

The Opera Garnier was built by Charles Garnier in an original and extravagant style which he dubbed "Napoleon III". Here's the bust of the architect outside.

Inside, there is a lot of decoration, but I don't find it over-the-top. I mean, it is over-the-top - it's opulent and involves a lot of ornamentation - but it's anchored by simple, sweeping shapes and columns and the colour and detail is tempered by an expanse of pale marble. The facade alone looks monochrome, but is, in fact, constructed from 23 different types of marble.

It is also, of course, the inspiration for Gaston Leroux's novel about the phantom. When you see the level of detail and ornamentation reflection in the proliferation of mirrored surfaces, one can understand

Now, that's a candelabra.

The grand staircase from below.

See that statue just to the left of the central opening? These are its casual feet.

I love it. And there's nothing quite like an auditorium, especially an opera house like this one, in which most gallery seats are in boxes. From one such box I saw the ballet La Dame aux Camelias last summer.

The ceiling hosts a spectacular and Parisian Chagall mural, controversial not, as you might think, primarly because of its incongruous style, but because it's pretty much glued on over an earlier one and, as far as I understand, no one knows how to remove it without damaging the one underneath, but they also know that the glue will need to be replaced at some stage.

Talking of spectacular ceilings, I think my favourite parts of the opera house are the following two ceilings in very small anterooms off the main ballroom.

It's like someone packaged up my aesthetic and gave me it for Christmas.

Now the view from the terrace over the Avenue de l'Opera. This, to me, is Paris. Home sweet Paris.

Even being really tired on the Monday night (yep, we're jumping all over the place in the timeline), having eaten with Matt and Alissa, when I changed buses by walking across this square I felt quite at home.

This is the very shiny grand ballroom.

And from above, as it is best seen, the grand staircase again.

Many mysterious and unexpected sights to be seen! Wow, I feel like I'm writing a terrible 30s children's book.

The costume department has a display by the entrance.

I have one just like it at home.

Then on the Friday night I had the most wonderful French meal with Alissa and Matt - steak frites with sauce bearnaise, crepes and chocolat chaud.

Not everything in Paris is sophisticated. This, for example, is a disturbingly inexplicable advert for a summer horror film festival. I had to wait for a bus here every day.

Finally, this is the view over the cemetery - from my bedroom!

Chilling in every sense but the literal

I've been taking it easy as much as possible, which of course means that I have walked a lot further than I have been intending. It's also started to get hot - today and tomorrow are supposed to clear 30, after which we'll get a storm and a bit of relief. Roll on le bon weekend, je dis.

These people look familiar... on Tuesday, after class, Mary and I had arranged to meet Matt and Alissa for undefined activities that involved the words "sit", "garden" and, for some of us, "beer". Here we ran into them as the university offered un petit cocktail to its students.

After a brief discussion, we split into two groups - "me" and "the rest of them" - to acquire some lunch (I already had a sandwich) and to reconvene at the corner of the Jardin du Luxembourg for some civilised lounging. This is a building right on that corner.

We sat in the shade on benches and metal chairs and hid from the sun. I was apparently as attractive to a passing wasp as the mosquitos which feast on me constantly in this city, as it hovered for several minutes, only deflected when I walked up to a distracting flower bed and ran away quickly, saying, "ow ow ow ow ow" all the way.

In due course Alissa was dispatched for some wine.

I had quite the adventure on the buses - in the bad way - as the others went off to St Sulpice. I took a bus down to Gare Montparnasse thinking I could pick up the 88 to go home from there. Unfortunately I realised after some wandering around looking for it that the 88 passes the TGV terminal rather than the main station. Having schlepped down there, and I mean schlepped, I still couldn't find the stop, nor could I find where I was on my trusty Paris Circulation in relation to the terminal. I couldn't work out where the bus had stopped the other day, on my way home from the 15th. I had to walk all the way home from Gare Montparnasse, when I was already tired and dehydrated and not sure how far it really was. :( about sums it up.

Sore and tired the next morning, I managed to dress inside out and had to run back to change! Even with one considerable delay, I arrived quite early and found an open pharmacy. I can't tell you what a miracle that is at that hour of the morning. Mozzie cream! In any case, I wasn't sure that the word I thought meant mosquito was actually the right word (it was), so I launched forth into an explanation of the "little animals that find me delicious". Apart from making the pharmacist double over with laughter, it didn't achieve much as I had to give up and go to class. I present to you, however, a photo of just one of my many bites in case you think it was not worth the trouble.

Afterwards I ran into Matt, and subsequently Alissa by some extraordinary coincidence. Alissa took care of the mozzie cream problem as she needed some too and was far better prepared to explain. Then I introduced them to the cult of the pizza en cone, having preached it vigorously the day before.

If you enlarge it, note the sign in the background that suggests that convenience is yours as you can eat it anywhere - on the metro, while walking, in a taxi, on a bike...(?)

Afterwards I went to the very hot Tuileries to try again for the Orangerie. The white dust that covers these parks (and some tourist spots such as the Louvre) is very unforgiving in the heat, and I felt like I was baking. Here's the view in both directions down the Grand Axe, that lines up the mammoth monuments from l'Arc du Caroussel at the Louvre to the Arc de Triomphe and now La Defense.

After lounging in the gardens trying not to dehydrate, I went in to visit the waterlilies (nymphea in French, which is much prettier) by Monet. They were lovely with some really intense and unexpected colour, and gave a good sense of the late impressionist influence on later painters like Chagall. I took a picture while the gallery was temporarily deserted as I was hoping to capture the depth of the blues, but I failed.

There is a lot more wonderful art, I'm sure right up my street, in the museum, but I was completely wiped out and thirsty by this point and since I'm a student here I get in free. I can always return. It was a pleasant place to spend an hour and a half, just gazing into the eight huge Monet canvasses.

LOST (in France, sans polar bear)

[Friday's blog is coming. There are certain unfortunate events to which I wish to do justice but cannot at this late hour. Bedtime is fast approaching.]

Sunday... the first Sunday. The day of rest. I slept in and got the first really good night's sleep here before heading off to church at a leisurely hour. En route I passed the Tour St-Jacques:


Church was in Tamil, which was really interesting and since everyone spoke English, unsurprisingly, it was not that difficult. I was also a bit dumbstruck to find that I actually knew two of the songs, lyrics and all. I have led a varied life. Apparently.

After church I stopped in a cute little unassuming cafeteria (producing a line in choose-your-ingredients pasta and panini) where I ordered a turkey ham panini that I'm pretty sure was just regular ham. Paused to consider where that would leave me in relation to Leviticus, but hopped off that train of thought before arriving at the station marked, "Welcome to Madness: Population, YOU."

I would not necessarily note lunch in such detail but for the remarkable bathroom which lay behind the unpromising green door at the rear of the cafe. Shiny, no?

A mentally-resetting conversation with a German family later (I took comfort in the fact that they were really impressed that I was Scottish, studying in Paris and speaking what, in the context of bus directions, seemed to pass for fluent German), I arrived at Place de la Concorde.

The picture above is looking across the river to the Assemblee Nationale building, with the dome of Les Invalides in the background. On the bigger version you'll be able to see the twin spires of St Clothilde and, as always, Tour Montparnasse.

Place de la Concorde is pretty much a glorified roundabout these days, but it is so vast that there is a remnant of tranquility about it. The one drawback is the lack of seating, which turns the square into a giant tourist grill on hot days. Despite the name, though, it has a violent history, as the scene of many executions during the revolution and subsequent terror. It's very strange to walk across the square and to find yourself standing in the box that marks where Louis XVI was guillotined. Ugh. There's a lot about the revolution I don't approve of, much of it centred on the hacking and chopping.

Here's an odd thing: the lamps are supposed to put one in mind of things maritime, but to me this just looks like a cactus.

I mean, it's even green.

How powerful do you actually have to be before you can choose your own antiquity to have installed and gilded in your honour?

These statues at the four corners symbolise major French cities. I think Strasbourg has a bit of an ego problem here.

Several generations of monoliths.

On rue de Rivoli. I had decided to go to Place de la Concorde to visit the Orangerie on free museum Sunday, but having seen the queue stretching the breadth of the gardens I decided that my legs were worth more than €6.50 to me. Instead, I set off along rue de Rivoli for a few streets.

Then began a lengthy tour through the 15th arrondissement as I ended up on an unusually rattly bus that drowned out the stop names, so I missed my stop, got out at the next one intending to find my way back before realising that I had no idea (even with two maps) how to get back and unable to find myself. I waited for the next bus in the same direction, and, as the route looped instead of backtracked, had to go to the terminus at Porte de Versailles before changing onto a bus going in the opposite direction and eventually finding my way. Here is where I first got lost:

And here is where I found myself, at last waiting for the 88 bus to take me home.

My other unfortunate experience was down at the terminus of the other bus, as, when he pulled the bus forwards, the bus driver and I had a slight collision. i.e. my head with the wing mirror, which is just too low for the high modern pavements... Incident summarised thus on facebook:

So Monsieur Quatre Vingt Huit goes WHACK with the wing mirror on my head and
he's all "je suis desole!" and i'm like "hnnnn?" - True story.

That's about it for the day!

The curious cat was a victim of drowning; or, an illustrated lesson in button-pressing

Hopping on our local 88 bus and changing more or less as planned, we arrived at school in excellent time to have a look around before our oral tests. Now, these are not exactly high-pressure examinations - just a wee chat to see which class we will end up in. On the way in we ran into Aaron, another St Andrews student, and subsequently Matt and Alissa who were recovering from a demenage (removal - that's French!) immediately followed by a day on the train getting to Paris.

I had a test of bizarrely short duration, which on reflection I attribute to the fact that Stephane, my teacher last year, had taken detailed notes on the progress of his students and they pretty much knew where they were going to put me, which is as he said last summer.

Here's a picture of the courtyard that I really like, so much so in fact that I poached it from last year.

We had to pick up our bursaries - I know it's not the school's money and certainly not that of those handing it out, but I still felt awkward taking that much cash and counting it out as they requested!

Right outside the office there was an accessible toilet. I embraced it, not literally, but almost, given the extremely low loo in our flat and the fact I am missing my toilet frame quite badly. The seat was angled and high and my curiosity was piqued by the various buttons next to the seat. After flushing as normal I decided that the thing to do would be to test these buttons, in the spirit of science and experimentation. History rewards the thinkers but celebrates the doers, I felt.

There was a bidet function which was predictably squirty at a low level, accompanied by a bottom drying button that blasted air upwards for brief periods. All very sensible and toilet-appropriate. Then there was the button marked "shower". I pressed that one and stood well back, just in case. This little nozzle whirred forth and water began to flow down into the toilet bowl. Bemused by the description of this function as "shower", I leaned forward, at which point a jet d'eau that would rival Geneva's hit me right in the face and continued right up the wall.

I am told that from outside, my squeals and eventual soaked appearance were quite funny. I am sure I am going to suffer some sort of post-trauma and develop a fear of toilets, showers or buttons in due course.

In the book shop at reception they were advertising this book, which to my mind asks a very important question.

Just up the rue d'Assass is a very fine establishment into which we wandered, seeking sustenance. The proprietor, as it turned out, spoke fluent English and was interested in us as Divinity students. Not for a moment did I imagine that my first long-ish conversation in France would consist of someone asking if I knew whether Murphy-O' Connor's books on Paul had been translated into French, and someone who not only knew that he taught at the Ecole Biblique but who had known him growing up. If that sounds like enough of a small-world anecdote, you would be mistaken, as it transpired that he had lived in Israel for many years and was taught by Carmelites, something which made him vaguely aware of the community in Haifa in which Mary worked.

Something else that I discovered in this cafe I have taken up with evangelical zeal. I do not want to give too many details of this original creation, lest it be appropriated by too many who would not appreciate its wonder, but let me just say: Pizza. Cone. Veggies. Mmmm.

After a short ride on the 94 bus, we joined the upper tour at Madeleine. Passing the Opera again, I took this picture of the cafe at which we stopped the day before.

Ah. Trinite church was a favourite site on the commute going back home last year, but was under renovation at the time. Now it appears that you can go in, so I must do that this year. Best seen, in my opinion, up the street below.

A glimpse of Sacre Coeur from the Blanche area.

A really interesting frieze on a building by the Barbes-Rouchechouart metro station, which I kept trying to locate last year.

A couple of destination-representing statues on the Gare du Nord.

The commentary looped a couple of times here, and we heard part of the story about the siege of Paris in the Franco-Prussian war, during which the Parisians had to eat rats and Maxim's served elephant from the zoo. Apparently it was hoped that large hot air balloons could be sent outside the city and returned with cattle to eat. Unfortunately, we never heard if they got their cow. Seems a long wait for a beefburger, to me.

Below, to my shame, is a perfectly decent picture of Place de la Republique avec my finger. Oops.

Around the St Martin area, in the east,

Gratuitous Opera picture, because I like it and will bring it up given the least cause.

Before hopping on the final section of the loop, we stopped for refuelling at St-Michel again. Here's a picture of the rue de la Huchette, which I frequented last year but never once photographed.

I had my first crepe with nutella and banana, while Mary tried the nutella and whipped cream.

Here's Mary's photo out the window.

Before we left, we had a partially intelligible conversation with the Greek table attendant. We spoke to a lot of Greeks the first couple of days.

Walking back from Denfert Rochereau, a task for which I was entirely too tired, I spotted this broken mirror out on the pavement and decided it was there just for the benefit of passers-by with cameras. Welcome to the rue Victor Considerant, slightly fragmented.

Just like the photographer. I slept ten hours after this.