A Weekend in Paris

We spent our second weekend in Paris, this time on the Right Bank. Our hotel was near the L'Arc de Triomophe, in fact, we could see it when we walked out the door! La Cecilia was a nice hotel, friendly and helpful staff (once again), decent sized rooms (Paris hotel rooms can be quiet small) and a good breakfast. We walked over to the Arc de Triomphe shortly after we arrived. Luckily there are underground passages that take you to the Arc from the surrounding streets, so they do not add pedestrians to the crazy mess of traffic circling the Arc. It's a free-for-all, no-lane-lines-needed mess. On the Left bank there was a rotary near the catacombs, and I thought it was bad. I was shocked that families biked through it. Families with kids. Maybe it's the kids they don't like much, still I was surprised. The traffic around the Arc is 100x worse. On the up side no families were biking through it.






[L'Arc de Triomphe]

The Arc itself is huge. You can buy tickets to go to the top, which we didn't do, and the people at the top look like teeny tiny specks from the ground. The carvings are amazing, and it's crowded with people and really hot in as the sun beats down (yes, another sunny day, in the 80s! Where did we fly again? And I need water...).

We walked from the Arc towards La Defence, a modern office area, that has a modern arch, but we were distracted by a Super Marche where we went to seek out water.

White night was kind of a bust for us, there were random displays in various squares, but they were not easy to find. We ended up going back to the hotel and getting up early for the next day.

First we headed for the Louve, but there was a line. A long line. In front of the pyramid, there were formal line markers, the line went back and forth a bazzilion (rough estimate) times, then out into the courtyard, then around the court yard, then through a doorway, down a hall around another court yard, through another doorway, then out almost to the street. I have never seen such a line. Apparently seeing the Louve, when it is free, is NOT a good idea. Kevin thinks if we lined up the night before, we might have had a prayer of being towards the front of the line. Instead, we abandoned plan A, and instead headed to the Musee D'Orsey.


[Musee D'Orsey - Statue in front of the museum]

This was a much better choice. There was virtually no line, and we went straight in to the museum. It's a renovated railway station, and it's an amazing museum. Smaller then the Louve (I know, that's not hard), they have an amazing collection. We spent all morning there and came nowhere close to seeing even 1/2 of it. We had a yummy lunch in their restaurant, where my only complaint was that the 'crunchy' cheese that came on my pasta, really wasn't crunchy and was sort of hard to eat, in that it was to large to eat in one bite, and liked to bend instead of being cut. But other than that, everything was very good.

After the museum, we headed over to Montmartre to hang with the artists. We rode a funicular to the base of Sacre Couer and then did the official tourist walk of the basilica (press a commemorative coin to your left, shop is on the right before you exit, don't mind mass, no pictures please). The views are incredible, and we saw numbers street performers, an art show, and a wind mill! All in all a good trip!



[Sacre Couer in Montmartre]




[Street in Montmartre]

We finished off the day with a river cruise. It was just the thing for tired feet...


[Louvre from the Seine]





Now, we are about to arrive in Strasbourg! This post is being ended abruptly so I can disembark from the TGV!

We hope everyone is doing well, we'll see you soon!



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Paris to Strasbourg

Bayeux

So, the train north dumped us in Paris and we took the Metro to the right bank. We got off at Opera station, and stepping outside was a bit of a shock. The left bank is definitely a city, but it's similar to Boston. Busy in some areas, quiet in others. Les Eyzies is a tiny town, very small and very quiet. Stepping out of the metro into La Place Opera is like stepping out onto time square. Cars were everywhere, people were everywhere, there are fancy shops and vendors and general chaos. It took us a bit to find the hotel, which was tucked down a relatively quiet side street. We were so tired by the time we arrived, that we just wanted showers and a bit of food and a good nights rest, before heading out the next day for Bayeux.


[Back of the Paris Opera house]

Our hotel, Hotel Gramont Opera, was perfect for this. The staff was very friendly and helpful, the room was nice and clean, and in the ,owning, the breakfast was very good. They had a large selection of breads and croissants, yogurt and cheeses, meats, juice, eggs, cereal and fruit. It was very good. After breakfast, we headed out to the train station, St Lazare, and went North to Bayeux.

Bayeux is a medieval town in Normandy that survived WW II largely untouched. There are about 15,000 people who live there, but with tourists, and all the small houses on small midieval size streets, it feels a lot larger.





[The streets of Bayeux]

The town has two claims to fame. First, it is home to the Bayeux tapestry, which is an amazing piece of embroidery which tells the story of the battle of Hastings. Second, it is home to Notre Dame de Bayeux, an amazing Cathedral the same size as Notre Dame de Paris, but with a lot less people, so you can get closer to everything and you really have an opportunity to enjoy the place.




[Entrance to the Bayeux Tapestry museum]




[Notre Dame de Bayeux]

We enjoyed both of those sites the day we arrived. The next day, we toured several of the WWII memorials in Normandy. The kind folks at our hotel, Hotel D'Argouges helped us to schedule. It was a long hot day, it has been in the 80s pretty much since we arrived in France, but it was a fascinating tour. Our guide, Francis, was knowledgable and had many interesting stories to tell. He took us to major sites, but also told stories and took time to show us smaller sites along the way. We stopped by the village of Isigny, a teeny tiny town with something like 50 people, and he told us two brothers from that town, Hugh and Robert, I think, in 1066 left to fight with William at the battle of Hastings. No one had last names at the time, so you were either known by your trade, or where you were from, so they were known as Hugh D'Isigny and Rober D'Isigny (Hugh and Robert of Isigny). They made it to England with William and stayed there. Eventually, their family made it to America, I think Francis said in the 1700s, by then the name was corrupted and had become Disney.

He also pulled into a road between two fields, he was telling us how the allies had spread a wire mesh on the field to make it into a landing strip, then he showed us the fence for the field to the right, it was made from that same wire mesh. Apparently fences through out the French country side are made from the mesh that was left in the fields.

It was an amazing tour, very educational and sad. The memories of the war are all over Normandy, from the churches to the beaches, gardens and fields. The places are peaceful and quite beautiful now, but there are memorials everywhere.



[Omaha beach, at high tide]

We left on the tour at 8am and didn't get back until 6pm, and were very tired. We decided to end the day with a walk in Bayeux public gardens. They have a 140 year old weeping birch there, which is incredible. The onlynsad thing is, it's a grafted tree, and the weeping branches have become too heavy for the tree to hold, so, they had to add supports to help it hold it's branches!





[Weeping Birch at the Public Gardens in Bayeux]

After our stroll in the gardens we headed back and had dinner at a cafe near the hotel. It had the stupidest cow logo, which cracked me up because we were in Normandy, which according to Mary's friend Paloma is cow country. It really is. There are cows everywhere. We did also see some horses and one pony, but mostly fields with corn, or really large cows. Oh! And hay. Some of the hay was wrapped in green plastic, which was very strange. I guess that's what happens if there's no one around to paint them! I almost forgot, the highway we travelled North on, had actually once been a roman road! How cool is that? It has a couple of years on our Post Road.

South again to Paris! It's time to see museums, and hopefully the weather will cool down just a bit! Though I've no real complaints, blue skies every day, it's truly wonderful!

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Location:Bayeux, France

From the South To the North

Les Eyzies is quite an amazing place. In the evening after the cave, we wandered over to their mideval church. We had actually briefly seen it when we arrived and promptly headed the wrong way out of the train station. We walked back to the train station, then around the other way, looped back onto the road that led to our hotel. At this point we made an unfortunate discovery, the hotel was actually right next to the train station. If we had cut across the tracks and past one building that was cleverly built to hide our hotel, we could have walked there in one minute. Instead it took almost 20 minutes. On the upside, we did not call Les Eyzies Taxi (05.53.06.63.06) which was advertised in the train station parking lot. That would have been embarrassing.



The church, called Le Tayac It was built as a church and a fortress sometime in the 12th century. The front entry, pictured here, faces out on a small country road and towards the rail lines. The church is very plain, as can be seen here, but, in the back, there are windows with decorated tops that resemble celtic knots.


Back of Le Tayac, the church-fortress of Les Eyzies.

After visiting the church we walked along the river back into town for dinner. We ate at this little cafe, I had a delicious tomato and goat cheese salad, followed by pork so tender it just fell apart and creme brûlée for dessert. Jeffy had vegetable soup, steak, and chocolate mousse. The cafe has a lovely terrace you can sit on and for some reason they have no bugs. I thought I saw a bug, but Jeffy told me to look closer, it was actually a miniature humming bird no more than 1/2 an inch big. It was so cute.

The next day, we had to head out on the train, the north and south trains arrive at the same time, so the train station goes from completely dead to vaguely bustling for about 1 hour each day. Before the train, we had time to stop by Abri Pataud (a working archeological dig site where they have already discovered over 6 million artifacts).




If you look closely, you can see the grid layer out under the protective roof. It was so cool!

Just after noon we jumped on the train, and started north on out 6 hour train ride... Read, read, snooze, read, repeat...

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Location:Somewhere between Paris and Bayeux

Font de Gomme, aka Here thar be Cro-Magnons

After visiting Paris for the weekend, we took a train, through the land of the OCD to Les Eyzies. There are so many prehistoric sites here you could stay a month and not see them all, especially if, like us, you do not have a car. Les Eyzies is a beautiful, if a bit touristy, town with more Fois Gras and Vin then you would need in a life time. It has one of the few remaining medieval churches, which we had the opportunity to enter. I also made Jeffery trek over hill and dale looking for an abandon castle. We never found it, it wasn't even in the last place we looked and dad told me whatever your looking for would always be there. We did see signs for it, but I now suspect they were planted by a prank playing poodle. On the upside we did have a nice walk today, probably about 10 miles. We did find a permanent blind setup over a field where reindeer cross. We were very quiet and saw some domesticated cows. We also saw a donkey that spoke French. But the best part of the day was Font de Gomme, a cave with paintings that are about 15,000 years old, and the last cave of its kind that people are still allowed to visit. The tour guide was amazing and so was the cave.




Entrance to Font de Gomme

The walls were covered in paintings of bison, reindeer and horses. They were incredible. The artists may have been Cro-Magnons, but they were also very talented. The drawings have been covered by calcium deposits over the years, and because their black, red and brown coloring is hard yo see in the dark, they were not even discovered until 1902. Unfortunately, by then people had carved their names into the soft stone, so some were destroyed by the graffiti. Still as the guide lit each cavern and started pointing out the paintings, they became clear. All over the walls bison had been painted. And they weren't just painted on the wall, they were painted with the wall, the natural rock formations became jaws and stomachs and leg muscles, adding depth and a sculpture like quality to the paintings. For several paintings, they also carved the eye out of the stone, leaving a small raised pupil. They used shading and three colors, which is very rare, black (manganese), red(iron oxide), and brown. The brown is uncommon in any cave, and they're not sure what was used to make it. It's rare to see so many colors in cave paintings, but at Font de Gomme, there is the additional distinction that all three colors are used in a single painting.

They also have the rare distinction of having a painted scene, in addition to the march of the buffalo. The scene is two reindeer, one black, the other red. The red one is kneeling and the black reindeer is sniffing or licking the red reindeer. It is remarkably clear in the cave, and the tongue of the black reindeer is carved out of the stone, but we were not allowed to take pictures. I did purchase a book about the cave, but unfortunately the details are hard to see in the book photograph. It really helps when you can actually see the paint and the stones. Here's a rough idea of what it looked like:



Partial reindeer painting from Font de Gomme





My best attempt at indicating the reindeer.

It really is much easier to see in the cave, and the memory of what I saw in the cave helped me find the clues in the picture of a picture that I posted here. For example, the jaw of the red reindeer was formed by the rock, and the red antlers are very pale. The tongue of the black reindeer was also carved from the rock.

The clearest images in the cave was a series of five bison, which were cleaned of calcium and clay deposits in the 1960s. They were incredible. The details were so crisp and clear it was amazing. However our guide explained, it may be amused blessing. We should enjoy them now, because w/out the protective layer of calcite, no ones sure how long they will last. All in all it was an incredible experience.





And to finish off this post, here's a picture from when we were lost roaming the countryside. "Monet, where are you Monet? We found some hay that needs to be impressioned!"

Posted using BlogPress from my iPad (so please forgive typos or any down right weird phrases, everyone say Thank You auto correct).

Location:Les Eyzies, France

Great Backyard Bird Count Weekend!

Another post with info from Mara - it's Great Backyard Bird Count weekend!!
Take 15 minutes of your weekend and contribute to Science!!!
For details see: http://www.birdsource.org/gbbc/whycount.html

So, go out and count Robins and Cedar Waxwings and lots of other birds you can't identify without the help of the internet or really smart bird watching co-workers.

Google's Amazing Art Project

My friend Mara just sent this site to me.  This is the coolest art site, it has high resolution photos of paintings from several major museums.  It lets you walk around the museum and zoom in on paintings.  It's truly amazing, check it out:
http://www.googleartproject.com/