The hilight of today was Dad coming home. The other hilight was finishing a long overdue article. It was quite overdue, in fact, and I was feeling rather bad about it. Dad came home from a two week long boating trip that was unfortunately mostly raining. He did manage to go fishing and crabbing and even found some oysters. The crabs were still alive when they got home and we killed them for dinner -- really fresh and yummy. The oysters are amazingly large, though he insists they are only a medium size, and are currently shrinking in the oven. Mom claims they taste better that way. We also had wine with dinner, which we've never tried before. Dad really does turn red with just about two mouthfuls...even the soles of his feet. I'm quite thankful I inherited the alcohol dehydrogenase from Mom.
Linh and I stayed with her aunt, Kim, and uncle, Michael (pronounced Michelle) in Paris. Dinner was always really nice. There was always bread and cheese at the end, which was interesting. Cheese is really good. I think my favorite turned out to be the Camembert. Bread is really good too -- crunchy outside but amazingly soft and fluffy inside. The other good food was dessert, which is a rather broad category, but I don't think I ever ran into a dessert I didn't like. Come to think of it, I don't think I ran into anything there I didn't like. The croissants were particularly good. Somehow they're breadier and crispier and not as oily as the ones in the US. The raisin ones come in swirls with a bit of custard. Surprisingly, I liked these more than the chocolate ones. (Sorry Jessie.) Oh, and I also got a nice tart pastry recipe from Kim.
The first day we spent wandering around, pretty much. We started at the Eiffel Tower, but it was so crowded that we didn't go up. There were four lines which were so long we couldn't actually tell where they ended. After snappping a few pictures we walked to the Arc d'Triumphe and from there proceeded down the Champs Elysees to Musee d'Orsay. It was going to close in an hour or so, and there was another amazingly long line out in front, so we decided to walk to Notre Dame. The rose windows there were just amazing. I remembered this crochet pattern for a rose window sitting in an email account, and really wanted to start making it. We stayed to listen to a sung mass which sounded good. I think it might have sounded better because it was in French and I couldn't understand a word, but the roof was really high and everthing sounded really resonant.
Let's see...the next day we spent at the Louvre. A day really isn't close to enough. First we saw the Egyptian collection. One of Michael's interests is Egypt, and he studies his interests very thoroughly, so he was able to recommend a good order in which to view the collection as well as mention some hilights and pertinent dates which were helpful. After lunch I looked at a lot of statues. I'll post pictures of some of them later. The statues, or at least a portion of them, are displayed in the area under one of those pyramidal skylights, so it's really enjoyable to just sit and look at them for a while. I always want to reach out and touch one to feel the texture and contours, but I know I shouldn't. The museum people must have predicted these sorts of urges, though, because they have a touching gallery populated with touching-allowed replicas. At night, we went to what was advertised as a concert at Notre Dame but was really a documentary on the construction of the church with music in the background. The only thing that really sticks in my mind is that 21 acres of forest were used to build it and the roof has 270 tons of lead. Well, it's between 200 and 300 tons. I'm not sure if it's exactly 270. Man, if those 21 acres of forest were to collapse under the 270 tons of lead...
The next morning was spent at St. Chapelle, which is just amazing. They call it a chapel without walls, and when I got there I could see why. It's all stained glass and everything looks colorful and brilliant. We sat there for a while and tried to decipher the Bible stories told in glass but our knowledge of the Bible was not up to the task and we didn't really get anything from the Exodus until the New Testament. Also, we couldn't really make out the figures in the upper panes of glass. The stained glass was supposed to help the illiterate learn the Bible, but how could it help them if they couldn't see it? And they didn't have glasses either, so near-sighted people must have really been screwed. Granted, St. Chapelle was just for the upper class palace residents who could probably read anyway, but even at Notre Dame, it was hard to see the stained glass in the top. And then your neck starts to hurt from looking up for so long. Afterwards it was raining, so we sat inside a cafe and drew out lunch for a long time because it looked really bad outside. People were dressed in long raincoats and hunched up under umbrellas while struggling to control those umbrellas in the wind. When we finally walked outside, though, it was barely sprinkling. Those people were so misleading. Anyhow, we walked to Musee d'Orsay again and this time went in. Musee d'Orsay is a museum I could spent a long long time in. It's funny to think that before this trip I didn't like museums, and disliked art museums in particular. I went to see the artists I was most familiar with -- Degas, Monet, Manet, van Gogh, Renoir, etc. and with the time we had just barely manage to finish looking at them. There's still a large portion of their collection that I would like to go back and see at some point. I took a glance through their sculpture and would definately have liked to go back to take a more thorough look.
Friday we spent shopping, sort of. We walked down Champs Elysees again. I think we were mostly preoccupied with bakeries and ice cream places as well as an art gallery.=P Everyplace was having a sale, it seemed, and later we found out that the government mandates when sales are, so these six weeks, all the stores have sales.
Saturday, Michael gave us a day long tour of the Chartres Cathedral. This cathedral is one of his interests (his third one is snakes) and he is extremeley knowledgable about it. He talked about the intelligent use of gothic architecture to allow high ceilings and windows at the same time, religious arithmatic and how it shows up in the cathedral, the spatial distribution of iconography, and the content of iconography. He can read the stained glasses exhausitvely (and brought binoculars so that we could see what he was talking about) which I thought was amazing. He can explain everything on the facades outside of the cathedral too. Later I found out that he usually gives a two day tour as a basic starting point, and that after tours of various surrounding cathedrals, he'll also give day long tours on more specific topics, such as women in the iconography at Chartres. If you ever are in Paris and would like to tour a cathedral, I highly recommend you look him up, as he is really good at giving these talks and enjoys it himself as well. For dinner we went to Michael's brother's country house. They have so much surrounding land that they had to get a tractor to cut the grass. On a portion of the land they have a garden with fruit trees. We tried some fruit straight from the garden. Dinner was good, but everyone spoke French so I just sort of sat and smiled and felt awkward. I had actually though that dinner with Kim and Michael would be awkward because I speak English and Cantonese (which helped not at all except for the occasional Vietnamese word), Linh speaks English, Vietnamese, and a little French, Michael speaks French and English, and Kim speaks Vietnamese and French, but it turned out to be better than I thought it would be because Kim's English is actually pretty good even if she says it's not.
Sunday we went to Giverny to see a Museum of American Artists trained in France and Monet's house and garden. It was warm, sunny, and generally an ideal day to see Giverny which is a quaint little town full of tourists about an hour and a half drive away from Paris. The Museum of American Art surprised me because I didn't expect it to be so good, but it definately was. It was also pretty much empty which made it even better, probably because everyone also expected that a Museum of American Art in France couldn't be much good. Monet's gardens were as beautiful as I expeceted them to be from Monet's paintings. Everything was in bloom, bees were buzzing around, and an occasional bird flitted by. There were even turkeys and the oddest chicken I've ever seen. At night we went to Eiffel Tower to see Paris lit up at night. The Eiffel Tower was lit up, dazzling, and spectacular and even did a bit of sparkling at about 11. The view was a bit of a disappointment. We saw the night lights, but we also saw this layer of smog which was kind of gross. Also, it was not very high, as highest platform was closed. The moon was an interesting orangy color that night.
Monday we went to Montmatre, the highest point of Paris. The cathedral there whose name I can't really spell but perhaps it's Sacre Coeur? is pretty modern, and the stained glasses and decorations look pretty modern as well. I would say the view from there beats the view from the Eiffel Tower. While we were there a harpist was performing in front of the cathedral. It's got to be the best place to play a harp. Under a white square umbrella with a cloudless blue sky and Paris skyline as a backdrop and a brilliant white cathedral in front of you. We got to listen to some Spanish and Italian sounding music, Canon in D, the theme song of Godfather, and some Beatles while enjoying the scenery.
So that was Paris, or at least what stands out at the moment. Pictures will hopefully follow soon.
