Je suis ici, en Paris
Between Jenny’s excellent directions and the extraordinarily helpful elderly gentleman I shared a compartment with on the train, by 11:00 a.m. I’d found my way to Jenny’s office, luggage and all, without a hitch. I’m not sure if the gentleman was Italian or French, he spoke both, but he did not speak any English. Nevertheless, he insisted on helping me find the metro, purchase tickets, and get on the right train. It completely makes up for the incredibly bad breath that had been annoying me from the other side of the compartment all night.
After dropping off my bags with Jenny and promising to meet her again at 5:00, I started to wander. I went to Notre Dame de Paris and spent a lot of time there. It’s much nicer with the windows in tact. The last time I was there, several had been broken by a windstorm. After that, I just walked, took a bus now and again, and walked some more without really going inside of things.
Walking through Montmartre was kind of uncomfortable since it’s stayed true to the tradition of the Moulin Rouge and is mostly sex shops and topless theatres. However, one of my goals was to see the real Moulin Rouge, and now I have. The outside, anyway.
Paris feels so different from Florence and Rome, and not just because it’s much colder here. This is a working city, with a non-tourism based economy and all the hustle and bustle that entails. In Florence and Rome, everything in the city centers was based on tourism. Here, the tourism is superimposed on the actual business of being a city. Except in a few small areas, when I pass a person on the street, they actually speak the local language.
In some ways, the business like attitude of Paris is more relaxing to me than Italy was. They have their thing; I have my thing. We’ll all go about our own lives. In Italy, it felt like everywhere I went, we all had the same thing. Everyone was trying to get the perfect photo, to see the same sights, to find the perfect souvenir (or if not, to profit off of the herd that was).
I was at the Saint Madeleine church listening to a free concert by the Groot Nederlands Mannenkoor that I’d stumbled upon when I realized it was 4:20 and I’d promised to meet Jenny at 5:00. Her office is on Boulevard Saint-Germaine, on the other side of the river and passed Notre Dame de Paris from where I was. With the convenience of hindsight and Google maps, I know I should have just taken the metro the two miles, but instead I walked, got a little lost, walked some more, and eventually got to her office about 15 minutes late. When Jenny says I look thinner than my recent photos on Facebook, it’s probably just because I’ve had so many times in the last few days when I end up miles away from my destination and have to hurriedly walk back.
Anyway, Jenny and Yann have a nice and comfortably large apartment in Gendarme housing. Tehani looks and acts almost exactly like I remember Vainui, who has now grown into a little lady with just the right amount of tomboyish attitude. Tehani keeps calling me “John” because that’s the name of their Canadian teacher at school. Like most kids that age, she seems to find it unthinkable that anyone might not understand what she is saying, but I really have no clue as to what the rules she made up to play with marbles. I just know I kept losing last night.
Today was dedicated solely to the Louvre. I arrived around 10:00 and didn’t leave until 4:00. While my sore feet will attest to six hours being a long time, I could have easily spent six more without running out of wonders to see.
I can’t begin to describe all the treasures bought, stolen or pillaged from around the world housed in the former Parisian residence of French monarchs, so I won’t try.
I spent much of the day thinking about the role decontextualization plays in elevating works to the status of “art.” Seeing art all collected together and mounted on plain walls juxtaposed with seeing it in the churches, temples and palaces it was created for are such different acts. You can take a mass-produced urinal and hang it on the wall of a gallery and call it art, and it will be (as the Dada movement proved). Of course, the problem with showing things in their original context is you’d have to travel far and wide to see everything, and it would be harder to express the connection between different styles and artists. I wonder what Michelangelo or the ancient Egyptian artisans would think seeing their work in the modern contrivance of a museum.
Anyway, I’m fading fast, so I need to post this and get to sleep. I think tomorrow I will try sleeping in then find another museum. I think I can figure how to go downtown and get back without an escort.
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