Paris in the Fall

In September, girlfriend Katie and I took a romantic trip to Paris and London. We were gone for ten days: four in Paris, three in London, and three more in Paris. We saw lots of museums and ate lots of food.

We took an overnight flight to arrive in the morning in Paris. After quickly checking into our hotel room (which was amazingly small) we went to lunch at a cafe very nearby that overlooked a little square with an amusing fountain:

Then we went to see the Eiffel Tower, which was in easy walking distance. This is Katie under the Eiffel Tower and doing her best imitation thereof:

Here's a picture of me a little further away (on a bridge crossing the Seine):

Here's the view of Paris from above:

Paris is very white. All of the buildings are supposed to be white, I guess. It's like that in Kendall Square in Cambridge (where I worked for a lot of years), only with red brick. The similarity is a nice effect, but a bit shocking to see a rule applied to so many buildings in a city so old.

I took a video as we rode from the second level to the very top:

The weird thing about that video is that it turned out to be very popular on YouTube. Well, perhaps "relatively" is more appropriate than "very." I posted the videos a month or so ago and about 14 people watch it every day, based presumably just on the tags. The internet is a strange place. I'm fond of the video, but I can't think it's so compelling that a hundred people would be interested in seeing it.

Katie turned imitating the art and architecture into a theme. This is in front of a government building we walked by:

While walking around, Katie would sometimes excitedly point out some architectural detail on one of the buildings we passed by. Architecture and decorating are hobbies of hers. I took pictures of things she pointed at so she could remember them fondly:

I think her hobby is not so exciting. But, then, I'm the one who flies to big cities in North America just to sit in hotel ballrooms and play cards for 8-12 hours a day.

Eventually we reached our goal, the Arc d'Triomphe, a massive tribute built by Napoelon to commemorate his military conquests:

It includes lots of bas relief sculputre along with engraved names of French military heroes:

The outside of the arc had larger statues:

We had drinks one night in a small cafe near our hotel. I took this video because I thought it was funny that they were playing a tune by American jazz great Miles Davis:


The next day we went to what turned out to be my favorite part of the trip, the Orsay Museum. They display the largest collection of my favorite impressionist and post-impressionist masters. Also, they allow non-flash photography, so we took a few. Here we are posturing in front of a couple of Monets:

Feel free to vote in the comments on who you think has the more winning smile.

Here I'm standing in front of a van Gogh. My college friends Ekrem and Leanne have a print of this painting hanging in their living room in Arlington, MA:

This shows the sumptuous cafe inside of the Orsay Museum:

Here's the view from the boat we took down the Seine. Notice in particular the lines of tents along the side. Katie thought it was neat for the city to give out camping permits for the spaces. I thought the tents more likely belonged to people who were otherwise homeless.

The bridges (like everything else) were ornately decorated. This one was my favorite, featuring lots of faces ranging from funny to eerie:

Here we are coming upon Notre Dame cathedral from the same boat:

Another door that Katie found interesting:

Katie imitating a statue outside of the Paris Museum of Modern Art:

Here's my favorite piece of art at the Modern Art Museum:

Yes, it's several planks of plywood covered with two shades of brown paint. We concluded that modern art is pretty much the same wherever you go.

At one cute traffic circle we decided to prop up the camera and take a shot with both of us. Again, vote for best smile in the comments section:

Two more architectural details that fascinated Katie and that I dutifully photographed. You'll have to ask her what she found so interesting. I've somehow forgotten:

Here's the Petit Palais Museum: Inside (to Katie's delight), they had lots of decorative arts, including this wood-paneled room with a bust of an early American diplomat (Benjamin Franklin):

This is the garden in the Petit Palais. You see Katie sitting down with her shoes off at the end. She sat a lot because she bought new shoes for the trip and didn't wear them enough to determine whether they fit or not. They gave her blisters and caused her pain the first day she wore them. She was determined to beat them into submission. This is the second (and last) day she wore them:

Here Katie tricked me into playing her game of imitating art. She told me to go stand by the statue of Winston Churchill, but then she didn't take the picture until I was walking back:

Here's the reflecting pool in the garden at the Rodin museum:

And here we are imitating the pose (much to the amusement of those around us):

Then we went to London for a few days. We saw three theater productions: a production of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, and Tony-award-winning musical Avenue Q. We saw the first two because they seemed very British. We saw the last somewhat by accident. The production of Canterbury Tales was actually performed in two (independantly viewable) parts on two evenings. We were told that the two consecutive nights that we bought tickets would stage parts 1 and 2. Sadly, in reality both were part 1. We waited through the introduction, thinking it a little tacky that it was identical. When the main body was identical as well, we knew what had happened. The people in the theater were wonderful, though. They got our money refunded and got us great tickets (at the student rush price) to Avenue Q (which started 30 minutes after Canterbury Tales). We booked it on over and had a wonderful time, even though the musical is set in Brooklyn and therefore not very British.

The part of the London trip I was most looking forward to was to return to the National Gallery. I went to London when I was 16 and fell in love with the large collection of impressionism. Much to my great disappointment, this wing of the museum was being renovated for one week - the week we were there. Very sad. We still had a great time there, but we will have to go back. Next time we'll call ahead to be sure we can see my favorite art.

No photos inside, so here's the outside (including a statue of George Washington in the foreground):

This was in the square in front of the museum:

I decided I wanted to partake in the huge bas relief sculpture. Katie (who still hadn't figured out how to take video) took a sequence of stills:

I was trying to help the pour shirtless soul in the lower left appeal to the important guy in the middle. Sadly, he turned a deaf ear.

Here we are in the London train station, about to return to Paris. We planned our currency exchange pretty well. Here's a video of us having a drink at the station, counting our money and planning on buying lunch.

The next morning (back in Paris) Katie chose a restaurant for breakfast where the menu and table matched her shirt:

Katie took a picture of me as we walked to the Picasso museum:
Katie is doing her best impression of the Picasso painting in the background:
Here I am doing my best impression of the Picasso portrait on the right. (Or is it a still life?) Here we are descending into the Louvre entrance, starting at the famous glass pyramid designed by fellow MIT alumnus I.M. Pei. The pyramid is on street level and houses an escalator that brings visitors down one level to the museum entrance.

Here's a shot from inside the Louvre. I was impressed here with the absolutely ridiculous number of ancient Greek urns on display and also with the ornate ceilings, which were more ornate than the pottery in the rooms.


Some of the art in the Louvre was quite impressively massive. Here's Katie standing next to what I thought was the biggest framed painting in the world:
I thought that until we got into the next room, where the paintings were even more massive. I tried to coax Katie to stand beside this one, too (for perspective), but her feet were hurting again (still due to the new walking shoes), so she decided to lie down:
Since Katie wouldn't oblige me, I conned some old guy (without him even realizing it) into doing an impression of this famous portrait of Louis XIV:

Eventually I got Katie up and walking again. Here she does her armless impression of the Venus de Milo:
As a special treat, here is an image of the rarely photographed back of the Venus de Milo. (Who knew that Venus worked as a plumber?)
I thought I'd take a nice calm video of the fountain and pool outside the Louvre entrance. A gust of wind near the end almost plunged my camera into the water. Luckily, I was able to catch it in time!


That evening, we went to Harry's New York Bar, a frequent hangout of Ernest Hemingway and other expatriates:

It's decorated with dozens of disintigrating half-century-old banners from American colleges and Universities. We found Katie's undergraduate alma mater (Carleton College) and my undergraduate and graduate universities (MIT and UC Berkeley):



Katie had a Sidecar (a drink supposedly invented at this establishment). I drank scotch and ordered a Cuban cigar. Katie was quite amused to see me smoke it. Here I am about to light the cigar. Also pictured is the massive drink the bartender poured. I eventually had another as well:Katie says she's never seen me happier than when I started smoking that cigar:

We came across this odd street gate across from the Paris cafe where we had breakfast the next morning (the last full day we were in Paris).

Katie wanted me to pose for a picture as we were walking around that day. I followed her instructions even though I was seriously hung over from the two massive glasses of scotch the night before. I was in a bad mood. Although she said she was taking a picture, she took video instead. I was not very pleased.

That video was the favorite of my family when we gave a slide show of our photos. And oddly, this has been twice as popular to random strangers on YouTube as my Eiffel Tower video.

We spent a lot of this day at the Louvre, too, but I was so hung over and miserable I went into the park across the street to lie down in the sun and take a nap.

I felt better after dinner. We went strolling around afterward, too. Here's a picture of some Notre Dame gargoyles. I think they look better in the dark:
Sitting on a park bench in front of the cathedral, a snail came up to say hello. Katie, who had eaten and enjoyed escargot twice on the trip, was horrified to see how slimy and freaky the actual animal is. She was particularly horrified the way its eyes moved about at the end of its tentacles. She vowed never to eat escargot ever again:
One last photo of us from our final hotel room after we've packed and are about to go downstairs to get a taxi back to the airport.

All told, we had a great time!