two plans for saturday - the sunny day plan, and the cloudy-day plan. it was sunny.... so.... out to the suburbs to see the 'countryside' villa savoye by le corbusier. it's another architecture student thing, but this house was amazing... i think everyone should go to it and be astounded by the perfection modern architecture can bring to a living environment. I actually do feel rather polemical about it - this house was a joy to walk through. hmm more later 
finished off tours in the morning, free louvre friday night with tony - many more sculptures, greek artifacts, french painters - i think i will go every friday night i'm here, it's very worth it. and saves eight euros fee.... after that we did the 'reading in a paris cafe on a rainy night' very parisian.... haha guess what i had to drink.... mmmm.... more cloves in the vin chaud this time, and stuck in the orange so uncultured me couldn't eat it.... very nice chill day.
Barbes, Le Gotte d'Or, and Chateau Rouge were the last three neighborhoods. We actually split the walk into two parts and did the last two Thursday morning. Barbes was yet another fabric district - blocks and blocks of winding street with bolts of fabric, inside and out. The other two were more immigrant districts, with Le Gotte d'Or being Algerians, and Chateau Rouge other Africans. They weren't tourist districts, more just places for people to live, a little run down, but lots of markets and street shops. A few cool modern and new buildings in Chateau Rouge - saw probably the only empty lot in Paris there :). Tried some baclava and a wierd orange funnel-cakish thing at a bakery - the baklava was exceptional, don't be tempted by the apparent orange sugary goodness though.... it tasted of sweet'n'sour chicken breading, solidified.
Haha - Pigalle is the sex district of Paris. Garish neon lights all up and down the street for the "Sexodrome" and multiple shops and cabarets, and of course the Moulin Rouge (which is suprisingly tiny)..... was more funny, and a little sad, during the day. Really does get mentioned all the time in tourist books, etc. A little bigger then i expected, about 4 full blocks on both sides of the street, funny when you turn the corner off and it's just little normal shops - a lot of people just going around their everyday business here too.
Monmartre is really the tourist district - "old preserved village Paris" and it's really pretty well done, the souveneir shops and caricature vendors are pretty distracting, but it's a charming place. It was a huge place for artists for a long time, and a lot of their cabarets are around here. Hmm - more later, i'm feeling ambivilant about presenting this one right now.
Today was fun - early class, presenting maps, another fabulous lecture on urban wandering as an art form with Fluxus, land art, and urban interventions. We were then sent out to explore the different neighborhoods in the 18th district.
nd ate mussels and fries. the mussels were awesome - much better then i even expected them to be, but i tried them out of adventuresomeness - i need to stop that kind of when referring to culinary things, i get some wierd bad stuff sometimes... but this was a happy experiment. good wine too, but the fries were a bizzare addition to the mussels - really felt like they wanted a salad to break up the heavy protein seafood.
so - today was boring, all studio. this is the map i presented from the passages, it's quite big in person (they have a beamer=projector) to display these with, so we can keep things digital.
wandered the 8th district again in the morning looking for english bookstores - a good few were closed, a few more were apparently nonexistant, we finally found a great one though, so many cool books, much better then a barnes&noble or borders - but english books in france are quite expensive, so we didn't end up getting anything anyway.
no martin luther king, jr. holiday for private college students, so classes started today. at 1 though, so tony and i headed to the 6th for art supplies in the morning. the sennelier store we wanted to get to (they are the best manufacturer of watercolor paints and pastels, and put out sweet notebooks) was closed, as apparently nearly everything is on monday mornings. kind of neat that everyone just takes it easy, unless you're trying to accomplish something. had a back-up in mind though, so we wandered around the district, walked through the Luxembourg Gardens (so formal! but beautiful already, will go back in spring to see the gorgeousness) and then to a drool-worthy art store. dropped a fair amount of money on school and sketching supplies - ink, some fantastic sketchbooks, and pencils and pens. hopefully will use up most of the sketchbooks - tis a goal.
rode the metro to the champs-elysees - tried sketching there, pretty hard, the thing is HUGE and the proportions just wouldn't be right on paper...sigh. by that point it was night and getting quite cold, went into some shops to warm up. wandered our way home - paris is fabulous for wandering, instead of a grid of streets to look down and never see anything, all the streets interconnect at wierd angles and are often designed to highlight an attraction - church, palace, department store hehe... so it's very possible to walk just a little bit and discover something else to wander towards - very much fun if you're not in a hurry to get somewhere. we did very much of that on the way, finding st. augustin church, the gare st.lazare, and eventually stopped at a little cafe for vin chaud (pronounced vahn show - the hot spiced wine that is now my favoritehot thing to drink, if you hadn't read that post yet) and to sketch the trinity church outside the windows. the sketch turned out pretty well
oo time for a big first in my life - my first Corbusier building!!!! (if you get this, you do, if not - he is one of the most influential architects in existance - next to mies of course ha - and highly revered and taught and praised. seeing his stuff is a big deal) i knew the Cite de Refuge (salvation army building) was a little run down, and that was all i could think of at first - what a dump. we were allowed inside just a bit, everything concrete, neat entry sequence though. couldn't see the rooms, it's a homeless/transition shelter, so understandably they were private. spent some time sketching the exterior, and the building really really grew on me. very ship-like, with the entry functions completely separated from the housing blocks. the penthouses had unexpected undulating curves that really added grace to the building, and the little block in front was interesting from all directions, kind of a three-dimensional Mondrian. the cite was not very far from the bibleotheque, so tony and i decided to walk to a more distant metro stop to experience more of this off-the-end of the world suburb (actually not a suburb, we found out later, but it felt like it in comparison to the downtown we're staying in). was pretty boring, a few cool buildings we found later in a "modern architecture in paris" book, but a nice walk on a sunny day. had a meal in the crappiest restaurant to date: moldy ketchup (apparently something they keep around only for foreigners, i'll stick with mayonaise after this), a hole in the floor men's bathroom, and greasy sandwich.
traveled way out to the 14th district to see the Bibleotheque Francois Mitterand in the morning - amazing building, very unconvincing in the glossies, incredible in person. it has four L-shaped buildings forming the sides of an enormous boardwalk plaza - so large that in the middle there is a cut-out with a sizable forest inside. i'd say the site was at least a block by a block and a half large. the building was quite a ways from the main city, right by the river, and the plaza was so large that it felt like a completely different location - completely silent, and empty (even though the bookish french had formed lines probably 300 people long to get in at the opening time). very still, very large, very quiet. the picture shows a little of the sunshading - books don't want too much sunlight, so these panels open up just to allow light when people need it, and they close and allow the space to suck heat out of the building when the light isn't important.
walked along the river to the arab institute, a suprisingly cool building by a jean nouvelle i hadn't heard much of before, but i'll definately look up more of his things now... very cool building, the south facade (picture) is light sensitive - the holes are like apetures of a camera, they close when the sun is brighter to keep a constant interior illumination. couldn't get inside to see, will at some point I hope.
after the 4 hour expedition we dropped everything on the floor of our apartment and went to a party at the louvre - which ended up being not too much a party, but an free evening with live art events (feather-clad girls, and a nude guy posing like a statue, would have been more effective with more. they were playing cool music though, and there was a choir walking around the louvre with bells and they sounded most excellent together.) spent a lot of time looking at the statues, sketched a few. time after was spent at a small cafe south of notre dame drinking my find of the night (possibly of the whole trip, they have to have this somewhere in the states or i will cry (or start a business)), vin chaud - hot spiced wine, served with an orange... tres tasty, warm, and perfect for the night and conversation.
ikea did not steal my soul, i guess. it actually provided both of us, for $122 euros, "magical" :)down covers and pillows, fleece blankets, a matress, full sheets, bathroom rug, and candles. so good deal. boring colors, such a horrible thing. long train ride and busses out and back, i heard hotel california and was very disappointed at advanced european taste... the european suburbs are very much just suburbs - kind of disappointing, really. saw a ford fiesta in the parking lot and was really excited for dad. saw more a few days later, and an advertisement for a 2006 Ford Fiesta on a bus stop - first was most exciting though.
oo friday the 13th... wandered up to the sacre-coure in the morning - fun ascent, un demi-baugette, beautiful church. came in during mass - in french, but i pretended it was latin. sketched, no pictures. church was "neo-romano byzantine" thick arches, small stained glass. since it was from the turn of the century the stained glass was very stylized - the big windows were pretty traditional, but some of the little rose windows were very cool, and the little chapels in the back had a wierd type of leading that made them look more like they were sketched rather then sharpie-marker lines. also a great deal less color, and words - neet. sat and sketched for quite a while, had a priest come up and try to talk to me, but the french just was't happening for me. sketched outside, froze, wandered a few tourist streets of monmartre - rediculous tourist trap, sad. one square was a regular art bazaar, with people pretending to paint hoping you'd buy one of there things on display, a million portrait-drawers (actually quite quite good, but there were too many). the streets were fascinating, steep or strait, and a good many connecting flights of stairs. it was freezing out, i was walking with my hands muff-like in my sleeves and some random local teased me about looking cold, was funny. tony called when i was by the abesses stop (it was gross inside) and we headed off to ikea ha.
met tony and jack to put in the rest of the money for the apartment, then we were off to the louvre. it was a very cloudy blah day (as a preface) and i wan't initially very impressed with the pyramids. (the picture is from a later day, when it was beautiful, and the pyramid worked a lot better in the sun, and at night) inside was a differnt story - a very nice space, beautiful limestone, the waffle ceiling is a little dated but forgivable and actually a very nice effect. saw... the mona lisa (underwhelming) but the antique italian paintings leading up to it were exciting - i've done enough studying on painting that i recognized quite a few - so neat to see them the correct sizes, and brush strokes, etc. the mona lisa did have a very nice glow, but that really was the style of the period, shrug. the winged triumph had a fantastic approach up several flights of stairs, all lit up, and it was very effective. venus de milo, blah blah blah :) many gorgeous statues, then we went into the antiquities sections. (many as a prefix to all of these) actual egyptian scrolls, wall fragments, sarcophogi, statues of gods (one panther-headed god was particularly effective - scared me...:P) and jewelery and etceteras galore. the greek section was pretty small. the babalonian section was probably interested me the most this day - the entry pillars to the babalon were reconstructed on the wall with shaped glazed bricks with raised animals - the colors were still vivid and the animals believable - far before greek civilazation, not so much egyption, but there's still so little told about them. a column cap 15'x15', from a building of 100 of those columns, delicate stone pottery and other statues. water break for jack's sake - not quite as into the art as the geeks... blah blah blah danish painters - an enourmous hall full of reubens frescos - kind of cool i noticed a pair of lions painted excellently by him... copied (poorly) pose for pose on a set of paintings in the next room... hmm. napolean's apartments, outrageous, stuff, overdone, resplendant, etc. got shooed out, actually as we were leaving the huge copper security doors slammed shut right in front of us - false alarm, interesting happening.
woke up and out of the hostel by 8:45. lugged luggage down to the basement for safekeeping during the day and reserved a bed/mattress on the floor at the hostel for another night. plan was to walk and sketch notre dame and take the first tour of the day, but in trying to stay away from roads walked yesterday strayed a little further west. was fine, came on the centre pompidou from another angle right after buying an orange from the fresh produce stores that are everywhere, ate delicious citrus while staring at the building. still wasn't open yet, cleaning crews everywhere... The building definately comes as a shock after the rest of Paris. Paris is basically all old, close to the same design, with variations in the detailing, and uniformly dense. Even the parks are small and dense enough with trees that they don't really inturrupt. the large open paved... field running down a story to the opening is therefore a dramatic change, and feels unneccessarily abrupt. However, it was excellent to see the row houses from a straight-on perspective, impossible walking when walking down the streets. the inside-out, apparent jungle of thin spaceframed structure and huge, obvious, color-coded mechanicals forming the facades is a brassy shout to paris's pleased chatty whispers. in itself, quite impressive, neet, and all that. contrast very interesting, i don't know how it adds much to the paris dialoge except to throw it in sharp relief. i guess the comparison to the very visible vent stacks in rows on every building is much the same thing. I think I would need to see the inside to form a better opinion, the spaces looked fascinating, in a very mechanical way. um.... i wrote a ton in this post... time to crop :)
the metro was amazingly clean and big, found out later it was a suburb commuter train, that explained it. eiffel tower - huge. massive. much bigger then you think from looking, and quite a bit more impressive then I expected it to be. the base easily would span a football field, i'm thinking more like 3/4 of a block each side. fun to walk underneath and look up into the webby mass. except for the outmost strand, none of the pieces are wider then 3 inches... some 3-inch l sections, but overall very light. paid the 10 euros to get up, meh, very smooth ride. you could see the old amusement-park hitches, very glad the technology has advaced past that. only up to the second level, the top will be open in february. started to get a little chilly up there, hadn't noticed prior. beautiful view, so much different then looking down at an american city. the mid-rise blocks with courtyards in the middle were basically the only building type, very uniform except for monuments. we were at an angle where the streets weren't totally obvious, but you could follow some of the traffic patterns. all the high-rises are quite far from the main historic-touristy-political area, in La Defense. Will have to make it there, didn't see anything too intriguing though. saw many big domes, some gold colored, some cathedrals, some i'll figure out later.down, home on metro, saw the real metro trains and stations, not quite as nice, but nicer and quieter and faster and more logical then chicagos (looking at the map it's scary, but not once you're in the station - much better then) transfers are nearly always necessary, but also nearly always painless. very nice to have a stop always within 2-3 blocks of you. read the guidebook a little before falling asleep, very easily after 45 hours awake (wow. it didn't actually feel that long, the nap on the airplane really did do me some good)
continuted walk, saw les halles in the night - the whole area seemed very nice/upscale. rather trendy. companions wanted to leave after seeing the center (it really was quite a long walk) but i saw the notre dame towers and wanted to keep going, and they kept me company. i am kind of glad i got them to go, the brother was some sort of stone-cutter and was tres impressed. as would anyone, but he had a cool connection to it. Right before Notre Dame (before the river) was what we thought must have been a palace, but really it was the Hotel De Ville. HUGE, elaborate, many many windows, decorations, large square in front with ice skating, something I should do sometime. Notre Dame was gorgeous, we just missed closing hour but i'll see it another time, not with that type of company. got some cool shots of the moon in between the spires. weird that it was clear then, haven't seen the sun yet (3rd day).Got off of the Ile de la Cite, admired a little of st. germain-du-prez looking for the metro to take us to the eiffel tower.
walked down different roads into the central part of town, not really following a map after initial orientation. beautiful narrow 'typical parisian streets' lined with stores (really narrow, one lane of parking and one for driving, if it wasn't blocked off entirely) once we branched off the kind of dumpy large street we were on. found out later that really isn't a tourist district at all, explains it. found the belmont tatoo area, about 15 stores down one street. some of the streets do seem to be mono-purposed like that, we also noticed a children's-clothing street, and i found the fabric street later. i'd like to again, some of the fabrics were very beautiful and unusual. saw the Centre Pompidou, by accident almost, looked around a corner and oops, we missed it. i was trying to aim for it, so at least i was close enough. was closed, as it is every tuesday, some big gas magnate throwing a party, MANY black-tie patrons and guards. got to talk to a geeky-cute foreigner to france, a struggle for both us to understand. talking = 5 sentences each maybe, but he was very pleasant.
flight to paris uneventful, watched a silly Reese Witherspoon movie, cute, wish i hadn't stayed up through it. slept about two hours. disembarking was a little wierd - we were early so we got off the plane onto the runway and into a bus. my luggage was slow to get off, probably because i was transferring, but i helped two older people find there way to the train station. i didn't mind, but they were quite slow walking. wierd note - instead of straight ahead being an up arrow in france, it's down. easy to get used to, confusing right away.
