Paris report Nov ’08

Aaah yes, here it is, my 16th Paris report since the beginning of this blog. 😛

The weather wasn’t that nice, we had the occasional drizzle (frequent drizzle if you ask my mum), but really not that bad either and what do you expect in November.

So, what did I/we do…
I arrived around 10am on Friday and went to the hotel. I was (yet again) lucky & our room was ready. I kinda fancied a nap – I had been up since 2.30am UK time – but then they were gonna change the bed from double to twin so I ended up going out after all.
I rented a bike of course! 😀 I rode around more or less aimlessly, admiring the beauty of Paris. I stopped at the Jardin des Plantes because I hadn’t been there in, like, ages.
Then I went back to the Hotel and they still hadn’t made the bed so I decided to fuck it and have a nap anyway. Which was nice. And then my mum arrived, and we went to the exhibitions we’d prebooked – Emil Nolde (which I’d been to last time as well and liked a lot) and Picasso et les Maîtres – which I wasn’t too keen on cuz I don’t like Picasso, but my mum wanted to see. It was ok. Didn’t change my mind about Picasso. :))

Saturday morning my mum went shopping and I went… cycling! I’d set my mind on the 16th Arrdt cuz it’s quite pretty (rich & fancy), but because it has little of interest (parcs, museums…) one tends to not go there much. Somehow I ended up on the Champs Elysées so decided to struggle up them (they’re uphill!) and ride across the Place de l’Etoile – it’s one of those things you have to do if you get a thrill out of traffic like I do. 😛 16th arrd’t was very pleasant, and I also saw interesting bits of 15th that I hadn’t seen before.

In the afternoon we went to see two Photo Exhibitions – A l’Epreuve du Monde on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (on the fence of the Ministère des Affaires Etrangères et Européennes – basically each article illustrated by one photograph), and Une Traversée Photographique du XXe Siècle (it’s weird cuz even tho I liked this quite a lot, I am finding it difficult to recall much of it). We finished the day at the Musée Carnavalet (one of our regular favourites) for Paris au temps des Misérables. I haven’t read the book (and certainly not seen the f… musical) and found this less interesting than I expected. We also didn’t manage to finish it before the museum closed (and I didn’t get to see my beloved Proust’s bedroom!!). I did learn about the Bastille elephant tho.

Sunday. We started with De Miró à Warhol, which was really rather cool, a pretty wild mix of 20th century art. Then I convinced my mum to try the bikes and she liked, so we cycled around a bit, notably along the Seine (voies sur berges which are closed to general traffic on Sundays), then down to Montparnasse where I wanted to show her that Market where I bought two paintings last time. Oh and I checked the name of the guy with the métro ticket drawings, he’s called Peter Eichner.

Theeen we went to the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson for an exhib about his (obviously) and Walker Evans’ USA photos 1929-1947. I could elaborate about the poignancy of these photographs in light of the current economic climate and the election of the most delectable and perfect Barack Obama, but I won’t. It was very interesting though. We walked back through Cimetière Montparnasse, saw Chaïm Soutine’s grave and Gainsbourg’s and some other peoples’.

Then my mum left. I saw her off at the station, which was fun since I had another day left, and I saw the inside of a TGV for the first time, and then I cycled back for free! 😀 :)) I had dinner on a terrace on the Ile St Louis, which is where I wrote the previous entry. Then cycled around some more. 😛

Monday I slept in cuz I could (expensive hotel means you don’t have to clear the hotel room til noon, hehe), then – surprise surprise – cycled around for a few hours (it was finally sunny which was most pleasant)! Up to Porte de la Villette and back. In fact I’ve worked out that the only arrondissements I did not set foot (or wheel) in on this trip were 13th, 17th and 20th. 😀 That’s probably a record. Oh and I found a place that rents out scooters so that’s totally what I will do next!!

Um yeah, then in the afternoon I decided I didn’t want to see Futurism at the Centre Pompidou, nor Jackson Pollock & Shamanism at the Pinacothèque. I did want to see Prévert & Paris at the Hôtel de Ville, but there was too long a queue. So I ended up at the Mémorial de la Shoah again for its exhib about the Reichskristallnacht (60yrs this month you see). They also had a haunting exhibition based on this book which I may well buy as a result, if only to get the answers to the questions the exhib raised.

That’s pretty much it. I had a late lunch which I dragged out for a while cuz it was cold out, then (cycled around some more and) did my essential shopping and collected my bags and caught the RER to the airport and caught the plane to Heathrow and caught the bus to Brighton and walked to my flat and went to bed.