City of Lights
Almost there!
I am obsessed with mass transit, because I have never owned a car. Well, maybe not "obsessed", but I am more interested in it than most Americans would be, I think. At any rate, here's your picture of the Paris Metro. Unlike Ezra Pound, I was not moved to poetry, but I will quote his:
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in a crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
The Cathedral of Notre Dame. I did not like it nearly so well as Westminster; it was too big vertically, not big enough horizontally, and too dark.
This is horribly dismissive of what is rightfully considered a beautiful building, but, uh, them's the breaks?
'
This is probably my favorite picture of the whole trip. Because....RHINOCEROS!
A view of the Musee d'Orsay. We saw pretty much the whole thing, including some very striking van Goghs which were, apart from the rhinoceros, the high point of this one.
The Louvre. This places is huge. I mean, really, really huge. I walked at a decent clip for three hours and saw maybe a third of it. It's the only museum I've ever seen that could rightly be called a multi-day affair. Of course, we did not have multiple days, but we did what we could. Including a visit to this woman
whom you will have seen before, and the Mona Lisa, which looks startlingly like the Mona Lisa, except smaller and with lots of people around it. Gene Wolfe advances an interesting theory that the Venus de Milo is a 19th century forgery, but regardless of when it was made it's a knockout.
This is a fountain depicting Michael the Archangel defeating "that old dragon" (Rev. 12:7-8) near where we ate lunch/dinner, which was very good and at which we spurned a complimentary glass of wine apiece, to the probable bemusement of our waiter.
Overall, I did not like Paris as well as London, but that is at least partly because it was quite hot while we were there and I was overdressed. We also didn't get to relax much there (not that we did much relaxing in London either, as the HLP was running the show and that is not his style.)
I am obsessed with mass transit, because I have never owned a car. Well, maybe not "obsessed", but I am more interested in it than most Americans would be, I think. At any rate, here's your picture of the Paris Metro. Unlike Ezra Pound, I was not moved to poetry, but I will quote his:
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in a crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
The Cathedral of Notre Dame. I did not like it nearly so well as Westminster; it was too big vertically, not big enough horizontally, and too dark.
This is horribly dismissive of what is rightfully considered a beautiful building, but, uh, them's the breaks?
'This is probably my favorite picture of the whole trip. Because....RHINOCEROS!
A view of the Musee d'Orsay. We saw pretty much the whole thing, including some very striking van Goghs which were, apart from the rhinoceros, the high point of this one.
The Louvre. This places is huge. I mean, really, really huge. I walked at a decent clip for three hours and saw maybe a third of it. It's the only museum I've ever seen that could rightly be called a multi-day affair. Of course, we did not have multiple days, but we did what we could. Including a visit to this woman
whom you will have seen before, and the Mona Lisa, which looks startlingly like the Mona Lisa, except smaller and with lots of people around it. Gene Wolfe advances an interesting theory that the Venus de Milo is a 19th century forgery, but regardless of when it was made it's a knockout.
This is a fountain depicting Michael the Archangel defeating "that old dragon" (Rev. 12:7-8) near where we ate lunch/dinner, which was very good and at which we spurned a complimentary glass of wine apiece, to the probable bemusement of our waiter.
Overall, I did not like Paris as well as London, but that is at least partly because it was quite hot while we were there and I was overdressed. We also didn't get to relax much there (not that we did much relaxing in London either, as the HLP was running the show and that is not his style.)
Posted by sealionii on
Sunday December 14, 2008 at 11:39pm