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Europe France Research Grant

Paris, Pt 1: Monet’s Garden and Modern Art

Paris is special enough that it deserves two posts.

Here’s the thing about Paris: everyone romanticizes it.  You watch Midnight in Paris, for example, and see the city devoid of people, with tranquil, clean streets where everything is in its place.  And certainly, before I visited, that was my view as well.  It’s not quiet, though.  It’s a proper city, with noise and dirt and crowds of people moving rapidly through the metro and cars that honk all the time.  And I think if Paris was exactly like my romanticized imagination, I wouldn’t like it very much.  I love that it’s alive, bustling with movement and culture and even tourists.  It’s that atmosphere that draws me in and makes me want to keep returning.  Paris is the perfect blend of romantic beauty and realism, livable and yet still mysterious.

For those of you who have been following me for the past year, you may remember that I’ve already traveled to Paris, last November (x), and loved it.  This was the first trip I booked after the initial details for Strasbourg were taken care of.  Due to the timing of the quarter system, I arranged to spend my 21st birthday in Paris.  While I originally thought I would be alone, my oldest and very dear friend Christine arranged to fly in on my birthday, so I’m splitting these posts into my time before and after she arrived.

I arrived Friday afternoon by TGV and quickly made my way to my Airbnb, which was adorable but made me feel terribly out of shape with its seven flights of stairs.  I had done some research on reasonably priced shops in Paris since I had a lot of shopping to do for family Christmas presents, which led me to the 6th and then into the Latin Quarter.  I stopped by Shakespeare and Company, walked along the Seine, stopped in Notre Dame, and got a cinnamon crepe.  I ended up in Le Marais for the first time and went grocery shopping on my way back to the apartment.  It was so strange to see some of the places I had visited last November.  They looked the exact same but so much has changed in my life.  This time, I didn’t get lost in the Latin Quarter, and I even managed to find my old hotel… nice to know that mental map took 10 months to develop.

Saturday was a day trip out of the city!  Back when I visited Berlin, I took a bike tour with Fat Tire, so I had checked out their Parisian tours and found one to Giverny.  We all met up at the train station, and of course it started raining.  I apparently don’t have great luck when it comes to bike tour weather.  Our group ended up being me and nine Australians.  We all took the train to Vernon, where we went to a market and shopped around.  I wish the US had bakeries the way France does.  After we had all gotten our provisions for lunch, we headed to a picnic spot by the river.  It was gorgeous, and as I ate my bread and cheese and strawberries, our guide explained how impressionists were the punk rockers of the art world.  Although I’ve already learned about impressionism through DIS, I found the information about how art has evolved from these paintings very interesting.  For the first time, I actually saw something in a Jackson Pollock painting beyond meaningless paint splatters, so that has to count for something!

From there, we biked out to Giverny, which is a tiny town that seems to only have bed & breakfasts, art galleries, and one token café.  We headed to Monet’s garden, which was stunning.  I think if I lived somewhere like that, I’d take up painting!  It was split into two parts, the water lily area that contained the Japanese bridge and plants growing freely, and the area near the house with neat rows of flowers organized by their colors.  When it started raining, we headed into the house.  His studio was the best part of that because they had recreations of many of his pieces on the walls.  After we were all done in the gardens, we visited his tomb and then headed back to Vernon to catch the train.  During the course of the day, I had befriended an Australian family and they invited me to dinner with them, so we found a place near the train station between our two apartments.  It was great to have an intellectual discussion about our cultural differences; we talked about politics, education, art, and how our countries handled their indigenous people.  I learned a lot about Australia (which is still on my list of places to go!)

The next day, I left the apartment relatively early and went to a flea market, Marche aux Puces de la Porte de Vanves.  Side note, I’m terrible at restraining myself from buying breakable things… but I was pretty productive and got a lot of Christmas shopping done!  It was a nice little market, with a good variety of objects and decent prices.  Personally, if I lived somewhere that had markets like that, I’d never buy a regular dish again when I could get something beautiful.

I stopped back at the apartment to drop everything off and then I headed out again.  I finally walked around the two islands, starting with Île Saint Louis and then crossing the bridge toward Notre Dame.  I ended up finding Saint Chapelle, which I had read about due to its stained glass.  As anyone who reads this blog knows, I love stained glass, so I figured I should check it out.  After waiting in a very long line, I made my way up the stairs into the high tower.  Wow.  It was AMAZING.  Truly beautiful, and well worth the wait and the cost to get in.  As much as I would have loved to just sit in the stained glass room all day, my time in Paris was unfortunately limited and I had other places I wanted to go!

So I headed off to Centre Pompidou, the modern art museum in Paris.  I remember learning about the architecture in high school, about how they wanted to take the parts of the building that are supposed to be on the inside and put them on the outside.  The views from the top are pretty great, with views all around Paris.  I spent a long time wandering around the various pieces, trying to see what caught my eye.  A few I liked:  the strange reflective red glass, the three dimensional mirror, the teal stained glass piece, the dark carpeted room with a loop of rain sounds in the background, furniture aesthetic of the 80s.  The works that made me think the most were a series of pieces by a photographer dealing with the uncanny valley, where she would take mannequins and manipulate them to look realistic, and make models and celebrities and turn their photos doll-like; through the pieces she considered what makes people alive.  Creepy, certainly, but also intriguing.  After a meal at the café, I headed back to the apartment to repack and skype my parents, because the next day was my 21st birthday!

I’ll talk about that on another post, though.  À bientôt!

Categories
Europe France Research Grant

Bordeaux: Biking Through The Vineyards

I’ve always imagined Bordeaux as wine country, to the point that I was quite surprised to find myself in an actual city.  I took a walking tour my first day, where our guide explained how their current mayor had made an effort to clean up the city by incentivizing citizens to power wash their homes and the streets in the city center were transformed to be mostly pedestrian.  In fact, Bordeaux actually has the longest pedestrian shopping street in Europe.  I also learned that Bordeaux was under British rule for a while, the main bridge was built because Napoleon got angry about having to move his troops by boat, and whoever built the statues in Bordeaux was very into mythology.  Our guide was great, she brought us some pastries that Bordeaux is known for to try as well.  There were only 4 of us on the tour, so it felt more like someone showing us around the city as opposed to being herded around as part of a tourist group.  After visiting some of the monuments and churches on the tour, I did some exploration on my own.  I did a little shopping, saw a few more monuments, and got a pretty good sense of the city.

The next day was my bike tour through the vineyards!  This was the real purpose of my trip, and I had actually structured the dates around being able to go on this tour.  So my morning started early, meeting the tour guide at the office.  There were twelve of us in the group, and everyone I talked to was incredibly nice.  We took vans to St. Emilion, where we got our bikes and started off through the vineyards.  The countryside is stunning, and I can’t imagine a better way to see it.  The vines seem to stretch forever.  Here are a few takeaways about the Bordeaux wine region:

1. There are between 7,000 and 8,000 chateaux in the wine region.  This sounds a little fancier than it actually is, because a “chateau” is not defined by the fanciness of your house but by whether the entirety of the wine production is done on your estate, from the growth to the bottling.  Our guide said she was very disappointed at her first chateau because it was only a farm….

2. The naming system is super complicated.  It was explained to me several times and I still am not sure I understand enough to even attempt to explain it here.  Just know that there are a lot of rules and restrictions, including on the types of grapes you grow.  Additionally, each chateau can’t make more than one type of wine per classification, so their better wine is “Chateau [estate name]” and their lower tier wine has the estate name but is “jardin de…” or “plaisir de…” or something to that effect.

3. The best soil for grape growing is actually the least fertile soil.  This is because it forces the roots of the grapes to go very far underground to look for moisture.  Also, grapes for wine production are very different from the kind that you buy at the grocery store.  They want a higher ratio of the skin of the grape, which has more of the flavors they want.

We got to try grapes straight off the vine while learning all of that.  From there, we went to our first chateau of the day.  This one was a family-run place, so we got to tour the bottom floor of where the family lives.  With their library and Picasso collection… I can’t imagine having that level of wealth.  Then we toured the area where they make wine, where they explained how the process worked.  It was a bit of a review, since we’d toured a wine place in Spain (throwback to that time I almost got stuck there x).  This chateau was a much smaller operation, and a lot less industrial than the one I’d seen before.  After the tour, they led us out into the garden, where we had lunch and a tasting outside.  We tried both tiers of their wine, which were both very good!  We also had bread and cheese and ratatouille, so the whole thing felt very French.  It was lovely to sit in the sun with good wine, good conversation, and good food.

When our lunch was over, we got back on the bikes and headed back to St. Emilion.  Pro tip: if you drink wine before biking, rehydrate!  The bike ride back was a lot more difficult than it needed to be because I didn’t drink enough water.  But I was feeling better by the time we got back in the village.  We took a quick tour around St. Emilion, which is a charming little town that feels as though you’ve gone back in time.  From there, we got back in the vans and were driven to our second chateau of the day.  This one was corporate owned, so it was a bigger operation that practically oozed money… even the elevators had fancy benches in them designed to match the original style of the chateau.  They brought us to a fancy tasting table, which you can see in that photo above and literally lit up with a white background so that you can get the best view of the color of the wine.  They gave us two types as well, and I liked the second one we had better.  Once all of that was done, we were driven back to Bordeaux, where I had a nice quiet night with some pizza.

I spent my last day wandering around a bit more.  I went in a few churches, including Basilique St. Michel.  Fun fact about that one: something happened to all the original stained glass, so they replaced it in the 1960s.  With 1960s style.  Which is pretty great, because it totally doesn’t seem to fit with the church, which is a classic gothic cathedral.  As I’ve probably mentioned before, I think stained glass is really cool so it was fun for me to see a different style.  The St. Michel area of Bordeaux is the older neighborhood, so the streets are narrower and there are plenty of interesting squares with cafés and shops to explore.

All in all, a very nice trip.  I’m hoping to do a day trip in Colmar before my time in Alsace is up, and I’m definitely looking forward to my trip to Paris in a couple weeks!  I’m down to less than three weeks in France, and then it’s back to school and normal life…

À bientôt!