Paris Day 1

Alright, I’m going to have to talk about Paris in a  series of entries to avoid a post even longer than the Barcelona one. I think the best way will just be to go day by day. You’ll get more pictures that way too!

After an annoyingly long and detailed power point presentation from Brett on Thursday night, we had to leave Lacoste by 6:30 am Friday morning, which meant everyone was a little grumpy from lack of sleep. We took the bus from Lacoste to Avignon, then boarded the TGV in Avignon. The TGV ride was uneventful (if you don’t include the fact that we were rocketing through France at 200 mph) and quite smooth. I got about an hour of sleep during the three hour trip.

We arrived at Gare de Lyon in Paris, and after making sure we had all the students and their luggage, left for the hotel at about 11:00 am. From the train station, we walked for 30 minutes or so to our hotel (the Hotel Home Latin) in the Latin Quarter, just down the street from the Pantheon and only a few blocks from Notre Dame. The walk to the hotel was rather painful for a group of about 60 people (including professors) hauling their luggage through a crowded city, but we managed. After quickly getting settled into our rooms, we were given free time to go explore the immediate area and get lunch before our first excursion. Jamie, Miles, and I set out in search of a Vietnamese restaurant listed in Miles’ Paris guidebook, but we weren’t able to find it, so we settled for a little sushi joint. It was a good choice. For 8.50, I got miso soup, a salad, and a big bowl of sushi rice with various sorts of fresh fish (tuna, salmon, and mackerel are the ones I can remember) on top of it. Delicious! After lunch, we stopped into a bakery and got some giant merengue cookies that were really weird, but I enjoyed them. We then headed back to the hotel to meet up with the group to go to our first school-organized event.

The sequential art students went to see a private art nouveau collection, and I would have tried to go with them had it not been for the rather steep price of admission. Instead, I went with architecture and painting to the Ecole Nationale Superiure des Beaux Arts. I should probably explain now that because Le Corbusier is the only class I’m taking here that’s relevant to one of the three majors being offered, I am theoretically expected to go to the sites that the architecture students are required to go to, but that doesn’t always happen because that would be really boring for me since I am not an architect. In this case, the Ecole des Beaux Arts trips was being divided in half, with the painting students touring the main fine arts school and the architecture students touring the architecture school. I (along with several other students from Le Corbusier who aren’t architects) asked Daves if I could go with the painting students, which he agreed to as long as I would meet up with the group at Pavillon de l’Arsenal. Sounded fine to me. Upon arriving at the school, both the painting and the architecture students waited around in the courtyard for a bit, most of us taking pictures of the neat old building and its statues. After 20 minutes or so, the tour guide arrived (in a fabulous outfit, I might add) and began to show the painting group through a part of the school that wasn’t currently in use, but seemed to be storing quite a bit of old artwork. It was difficult to follow what she was saying, but I gathered that the art and the rooms themselves were being restored here. The school was founded at a different location in the mid-17th century, but the building itself had existed as a convent for some unknown period of time, and then as a museum of architectural and sculptural artifacts. It was made the location of the Ecole in the early 19th century, and many of the artifacts from the museum were incorporated into the design of the building.

After touring the parts that weren’t currently in use, we moved on to the main building, which had yet another magnificent courtyard. This building was also under restoration, but it’s still functional. I found one point very interesting about the courtyard: the columns inside it are cast iron and double as drainage pipes. Very clever, I must say. We went from the courtyard to their little public gallery, which currently had a show of ORIGINAL SKETCHES from Michelangelo and his contemporaries. Let me repeat that: ORIGINAL paper and charcoal sketches that have been around since the Renaissance. SO COOL. The gallery was really crowded and we had to rush through to stay on schedule, and I had every intention of going back, but sadly never made it. Anyway, after the gallery, we were shown some of the studios, where the students were working. Most of them were painting studios, but one was a fresco studio (yeah, you can major in frescoes there), where the students simply cover the walls in frescoes. Evidently, they tear it all off every couple of years and start again, but the studio was so cool. There were so many different art styles all combined together and displayed proudly in this one room that it was kind of mind blowing. We spoke for a bit with the fresco professor, who explained the process and what makes it so different from regular painting before moving on to some more studios and the main lecture hall. As we went through the studio areas, we noticed that the students were allowed to graffiti the non-historic doors and walls, which I thought was a great concept since the graffiti actually added to the building in my opinion.

The lecture hall was one of those circular rooms with the dark decor like you see in movies set in the 19th century, which gave it a really cool feel, but the real draw of the room was the massive mural around the back wall. It was similar to Raphael’s The School of Athens, but this was all French and Italian masters of art and architecture rather than great Greek thinkers.

As we made our way to the library, the tour guide told us about the school’s selective admissions process and requirements. All students must read and write French (seems obvious since we’re in France), they must be approved by a committee, and weirdly, they must be under 26 years old. The biggest surprise to me was that the tuition was only 300 Euros per year, but it is a federally-run school and is funded largely by the almost-but-not-quite Socialist government of France. For the record, no, I don’t think that’s a good thing. The library was very old-fashioned and unsurprisingly decorated with art that I presume was from the museum collection I mentioned earlier. It had a very Sherlock Holmes feel to it in my opinion, although all the books were about art.

After the library, we returned to the courtyard, but the architecture group was nowhere to be found and we were already late for our appointment at the Pavillon d’Arsenal. After some confusion, Craig (the painting professor) called Christine (the other architecture professor) and told us we were to just meet them at the site. Our print out that Brett gave us advised us to take the Metro to the site, which Jamie and I were ready to do, but the other stray students insisted that we walk. Turns out they should have listened to us as the walk was at least 40 minutes and probably more, but whatever. We got there to find the rest of the group sitting on the floor listening to the quiet Christine translate the equally quiet tour guide’s speech about the history of urban development in Paris. It was as hard to listen to as it sounds, and I was instantly bored, so I can’t imagine how the students who had been sitting through it for an hour at that point were even still awake. I finally had to get up and wander around the building, which was just a museum about urbanism in Paris. This is actually an interesting topic to me, but I think I would rather read a book about it than walk around a museum and read posters. Another 45 minutes probably passed before Anna, Jamie, and I got permission to leave from Daves, who seemed just as bored as the rest of us.

We started to head back to the hotel (with Melissa and Alex following along), but made a stop at a pharmacy so Anna and Melissa could get medicine and a patisserie so we could have a little snack before dinner. Anna wanted to also stop in Notre Dame, which was on the way back, but we went back and forth on the idea since we were all really tired. We had pretty much settled on not going until we crossed the bridge from which we could see the back of the famous cathedral. At this point Alex and Melissa were really far ahead of us, so we decided it would be okay to stop and take pictures. This decision eventually turned into stopping in for a visit (although it was too late to go up into the towers). Turns out it was a pretty good decision as we got to go inside while they were having service. Although I’ve heard a lot of people say that the Notre Dame isn’t that great, I was very impressed by it. Next to the Sagrada Familia, it was probably my favorite cathedral that we’ve seen. The inside wasn’t that ornate, but it was huge and the structure of it and the fact that the entire thing was built by hand was really beautiful to me. I also appreciated the intense blues used in the stained glass and the way the preacher’s voice carried through the building. It was at once an awe-inspiring and peaceful experience.

After Notre Dame, we returned to the hotel to get ready for dinner. Anna had talked Jamie into joining her and some others for dinner at one of those tacky Medieval restaurants (I think they were expecting it to be like Medieval Times, but it definitely was not). Anyway, it was the all you can drink wine that inspired Jamie to go, and I sort of tagged along in hopes that it would at least be fun if nothing else. When we got to the restaurant, we found that the price was 41 Euros a head, which was about 10 Euros more than I was expecting, and I was ready to bail at that point, but everyone else decided to suck it up and do it, and I didn’t particularly want to walk back by myself or eat with the other two students who were leaving since I barely new them. And that’s how I paid 41 Euros for mediocre food and bad wine. The servers weren’t even in costume, but there was an amusing ‘minstrel’ who was actually just a fat British guy with a guitar. But, and this alone may have been worth the price, he played Take Me Home, Country Roads. The French people seemed pretty confused, but I was loving it. He played a lot of songs I knew, and quite a few I liked too. Anyway, in spite of the rather disappointing meal, the company was good so it wasn’t a total bust. By the time we left the restaurant, some of us (myself not included) were pretty drunk, so after trying to decide what to do, we finally ended up at a bar near the hotel. Claire bought me a gin and tonic, which was a nice change from all the damn wine. I tried to pay her back for it, but she wouldn’t accept. Anyway, after about half of the drink, I had to leave for reasons I won’t list here and went back to the hotel, where I was only able to get about 4 hours of sleep before the next morning’s wake-up call.