Christmas rambles

Ian and Zanne brought with them a box of cards called "Paris Walks," a collection guaranteed to introduce you to new parts of Paris (or deepen acquaintance with places you thought you knew.)

On Christmas Day we used the cards (smaller than a postcard, they are a wonderful accessory for travel snobs!) to do two radically different walks.

The first was in the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, an urban but wilder-looking park than our neighboring well-tamed Parc de Monceau. Buttes Chaumont features a panoramic view of Paris, and paths leading up and down hills and through a gorge with a genuine waterfall. (How genuine the gorge is a matter for discussion, as Haussman dynamited the hillside to make the cliffs more dramatic.)

On Christmas Day (mild and sometimes sunny, by the way) the park welcomed runners, strollers, photographers, a few picnickers and children trying out brand new wheeled objects. We climbed to the highest point, a pillared folly with a great view. (Over Ian's right shoulder is Sacre Coeur, for example.)



Thanks again to the card, we found the neighborhood bakery of note -- and it was open! Treats all round, which we took back to a park bench to savor.

From there (after a walk through a definitely untouristed neighborhood) we made our way to the École Militaire metro, staging area for a walk up the Champ de Mars to the Eiffel Tower and the Trocadero.

At least half of Paris evidently had the same plan for the afternoon. And half of those were carrying maps - there is no such thing as low season for Paris tourism. We blinked at the long lines waiting to ascend the tower, and pushed on to the Trocadero, for that wonderful view back from where we had come.



In the foreground you can see the skating rink, and the tented pavilions of the Christmas market. Everything was in full swing.

It was wonderful to get back to the 17th, where almost everything was closed, and traffic almost non-existent. Ian cooked us a splendid Christmas dinner to finish off the day.

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Christmas Eve in Paris

And the sun was shining! We walked the Rue Montorgeuil street market with crowds of people doing last minute holiday shopping. Santa outfits were popular.












In contrast to the usual Friday-night bustle, the neighborhood was quiet last night. We went out to dinner, and were the only guests for quite some time. On the street, buses and taxis were empty.

That continued today, where only the usually heavy tourist areas were crowded. Notre Dame was full of people, but St. Eustache, near Les Halles, was almost empty, except for people preparing for tonight's services.

This is a side chapel, dedicated to the farmers who brought produce to the market that once spread out in front of the church.








At the apartment, we have a small, reusable Christmas tree (I can pack it flat and bring it home in the suitcase!)




And we have candles and Christmas ornaments. French yogurt glasses make excellent candle-holders.




Joyeux Noël to all!


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Company!

Staying in an apartment here makes it easy to invite friends to visit. Since the invitation is to Paris, most accept. Immediately.

Last week two friends from Seattle arrived for a week's visit. They stayed here 4 nights, then moved to a hotel for the remainder of their stay.

When I saw the 2-room suite at their hotel, I had trouble believing that they had actually enjoyed sharing the tiny bathroom here and pulling down the Murphy bed every night. But they assured me the experience was memorable.

Because they moved to an entirely different area, we were able to explore and enjoy two neighborhoods in the course of errand-running and Christmas shopping.

One Christmas window near their hotel featured penguins. When the window was illuminated, the birds moved up and down.



Here's a side street near their hotel (located near the Luxembourg Gardens.)





The Luxembourg Museum was directly across the street from the hotel, making it wonderfully easy to visit the current exhibit, a Cézanne retrospective, featuring his time in Paris.







The visitors from Seattle departed on Monday. Today Ian and Zanne arrive.

Now it really IS Christmas!

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All kinds of windows

It's possible to walk for miles in Paris, simply to see what is in the next window.

In this neighborhood, there is the cordonnier (shoe repair) with the window full of a mix of full-size and miniature shoes.




Nearby an optical shop has a slightly different approach.




Lanvin has highly unusual Christmas windows this year, featuring life-size mannequins that look eerily real.








And then there is the high-end shoe store on the Rue de Castiglione (the street leading into the Place Vendôme.) I am not sure who would buy or wear some of these shoes, but they attract plenty of attention.








More in keeping with the season are the windows you can see all year round, for example this one, in St. Pierre de Montmartre.




St. Pierre is the small church on the Place du Tertre, at the top of Montmartre. Today it was nearly empty, and the Place itself far less crowded than in spring or summer. When the weather is as mild as it has been for the past few days, December is a fine month to visit Paris.

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Evening in Paris

OK, this dates me. When I was growing up, "Evening in Paris" was a perfume that came in dark blue curvy bottles. You could buy it in the dime store, and no one you knew wore it (or admitted they did!)

There IS something blue about evening in Paris - the real thing. Tonight I walked a long way - from the Rue de Grenelle, in the 7th (where I attended the monthly service of the UUFP - the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Paris) to the Opera, where I took the Metro back to the 17th.

And it was blue - the "blue hour" of song and story. (There used to be a perfume for that, too - l'Heure Bleu, a heavy, heady 20s scent. No one I ever knew wore it, either.)

Here's what I mean:





Picture is from the Pont des Arts. In the Tuileries, I had to take at least one more picture of that Ferris wheel, and a carousel.






Later, my way led through the Place Vendôme, with its elaborate Christmas lights.


In the days when "Evening in Paris" seemed glamorous and faintly wicked to me, I never imagined that I would see the real thing.



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Saturday on Quai Branly

Quay Branly runs along the left bank of the Seine, from the Pont de l'Alma to the Pont Bir Hakiem. It is a lovely but incredibly crowded walk at all times, because as well as the Musée de Quai Branly (fascinating anthropology, ethnology and ecology museum) the street borders the top of the Champ de Mars and leads to the Tour Eiffel. Since I wasn't going to the tower, I swam upstream against crowds who were!

(But of course I took a picture or two.)




Where I went was a new place to me - the Japanese cultural institute (Maison de la culture du Japon.) It is worth walking by just for the architecture (the building dates from 1966, and is a striking addition to the area.)

I was lucky enough to catch the last few days of an outstanding exhibit of Japanese woodblock prints, from the Manos Collection, whose home is a museum on the island of Corfu. Much more information here.
I know - it's all in French, but even the tiny pictures give some idea of the richness of the collection.

(M. Manos collected his prints in early 20th-century Paris, at the height of "Japonisme," the fascination with all things Japanese. The Utamaro prints in the show were worth a visit all on their own.)




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Lights everywhere!

Paris knows how to celebrate. Tonight I took a leisurely (read 'slowed to a crawl by heavy traffic!') bus ride to the Place de la Concorde, to see the Grande Roue (ferris wheel) and other illuminated objects.

I was just in time for the hourly light show from the Tour Eiffel (no pictures here, because my little camera wouldn't do it justice - see "Midnight in Paris" for a sense of the display.)

Tonight it was mild, clear and dry, and a full moon floated over the merrymaking. The Champs Élysées is lined with lights that suggest UFOs. They start blue then morph to pink and white, often as you are trying to line up a picture.








A Christmas market adds to the gaiety. Tonight most people seemed to be interested in drinks and snacks, or just out to enjoy the evening.




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Paris au temps de grisaille...

Just another way to say "cloudy with a chance of rain." But the weather is still mild, for December.

On the Pont des Arts, a hardy artist displayed his work. Sales were slow.



Spontaneous art on the bridge includes locks -- hundreds of locks, fastened to the chain link fencing.







It gets dark here soon after 4:30 pm, but schools aren't out until after 5, even for young children. In spite of the dark, the Parc de Monceau is the place to be, for small children, their mothers or nannies.




I think the carousel runs all year.




Window decorations are not just for holidays. This is a shoe repair shop near the apartment.







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More about Paris

Late leaves & flowers, Parc de Monceau

Except for the lights, and the early sunsets, it could be late October rather than December. Thanks to the handy weather app, I know this mild weather will continue for a while.

The apartment is near the Parc de Monceau, also the Musee Cernuschi, where I went today. Current show is of Chinese artists who came to Paris beginning in the early 1920s, eager to learn more about western painting styles, but also interested in incorporating their own traditions.

The artists banded together, and were first recognized with an exhibition at the Jeu de Pomme in 1933. Many paintings in the current exhibition were acquired by French museums at that time.




This picture is of Shana, a daughter of one of the artists. She is, quite literally, the poster child for the exhibition, her face appearing all over Paris.

Aside from the current exposition, the Cernuschi has an extensive collection of objects from Asia, much of it acquired in the 19th century by M. Cernuschi. His widow acquired the elegant townhouse that is now the museum, and installed the collection.

Here are a few more objects:














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Pictures!

Turns out it is more of a hassle to post pictures while blogging from the iPad. However, now that I have bought an app that works, I expect Blogger will soon issue its own. Probably free.

Here's a kitchen closeup at VM, result of today's shopping.


And here is Rue de Courcelles, illuminated.





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Paris pour Noel

"Did you stop blogging because you weren't traveling?"

It's a fair question. In the winter I wrote about books and knitting, not always in that order. And I didn't travel.

Now I'm back in Paris, at Villa Monceau. Since my allotted month this year is December, why NOT be here for "les fetes." Luckily for me, various friends and family have accepted invitations to join me from time to time.

Paris is dark early in the morning, and goes from light to dark very quickly late in the afternoon. Then the lights come on. Rue de Courcelles, the main street of the immediate neighborhood, is hung with decorations that remind me of the lights strung across Main St. in Moscow, Idaho, circa 1956. Nice then, nice now.

I'm learning to blog from an iPad - how does one upload a picture? No blog post until I figure it out!


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Location:Villa Monceau,Paris,France

Winter

A good time for knitting and reading. The scarf required concentration that got in the way of other things.

After finishing many long lines of garter stitch, I went back to reading - more of Ismail Kadare, this time Chronicle in Stone, a novel based on his memories of a wartime childhood. Kadare grew up in Gjirokaster, an Albanian city that was invaded and occupied during WWII first by Italians, then Greeks, the Italians again, then Germans, and finally Albanian Partisans, who ushered in Enver Hoxha's long dictatorship. (Kadare also invokes previous invaders - the Slavs, the Ottomans and the Romans, among others.)

I enjoy memoirs and history, but often a novel can tell the truth far better than non-fiction. Kadare was only 4 or 5 when the war began, but the novel's main character is older. An introduction to the book says Kadare has revised and edited the work several times since its initial appearance in 1971.

Nevertheless, when reading Chronicle in Stone, you feel this is what it was really like to be a child in a war-wracked city, nowhere near the main battlefields of that war, but constantly affected by far-away incomprehensible events.

Recently the UU Partner Church Council Chatline had a lively discussion of books to read before going to Transylvania. Along with recommendations for histories of all descriptions came a few suggestions for novels. (I recommended Miklos Banffy's 3-volume Transylvania Trilogy, which I don't really expect people to read, although I've been raving about it for 10 years to anyone who would listen.)

Then, last fall, after a 5th trip to Romania, I finally read the classic we all avoid mentioning: Dracula.

"Dracula," the name, not the novel, is the first thing most people talk about if you tell them you're going to Transylvania. Bram Stoker, the author, had only a cursory acquaintance with Transylvania, and yet his descriptions, over-wrought and intentionally foreboding as they are, can be startlingly accurate. The train journey from Cluj to Bucharest goes through jagged mountains that seem to rise straight up from roads and rails, through dense dark green forests. It's easy to let the imagination run.

What's interesting about Dracula the book, is the insistence, throughout, on its modernity. It is written as a series of letters among a number of characters who often contrast their contemporary, progressive world (of the late 19th century) with the primitive superstition represented by the idea of the undead. When they must deal with ancient horrors, they communicate by the ever-present telegraph, and rush back and forth by train.

It's a good read, but I'm glad I waited! Here's a picture of the real Transylvania, far from dense forests and forbidding mountains...(but that IS a graveyard in the foregound.)

Full moon

The moon is huge, full, completely in the clear, and it's making a shining path across the lake and directly into the window east of my desk.

In the middle of the path is a sailboat, completely dark against the lighted water. If anyone tried to paint this scene, it could end up as a cheesy silhouette on a background of shiny paper, and would give viewers no idea at all of its true beauty. I just feel lucky to have seen it at all, because the sailboat has now moved out of the shining path, and I can't even see its green running light.

Winter moons are the best, because we so often don't see them as anything other than light behind a cloud layer.

No pictures. I've tried that before, and it only leads to frustration!

Albania

I've never been to Albania, and in spite of a continuing fascination with Eastern and Southeastern Europe, I'm not even sure I'd want to go.

More than any former Communist country, Albania has been "the other" - the strange, the unknown, the unknowable. In junior high school, I read a young adult book about brave partisans in what must have been 30's or 40's Albania. Even then I knew that things had changed, and that it probably wasn't a good idea to recommend the book. (In WWII, Albania was invaded by Axis countries, and Communist partisans were armed by the U.S. and Britain to resist both Italian and later German forces. After the war, things changed rapidly!)

After 1991 things changed again, and in 1992, a family friend went to Albania for a two-year stint in the Peace Corps. He wrote about the desolate state of Tirana, the capital city - decayed buildings, broken windows never repaired, wind-blown dust so all-pervasive that everyone had skin ailments of one kind or another.

What interests me about Eastern Europe is learning a little about how people survived under dictatorship. As a visitor, you learn only what residents choose to share. In Transylvania, the one part of Eastern Europe where I've spent significant time, the people I know best are ethnic Hungarians who are citizens of Romania because of 20th-century boundary upheavals. As such, they generally keep their own counsel, and, as another friend says, you learn about them gradually, like peeling away the layers of an onion.

Fortunately for the curious, there are writers. At the moment, I'm learning a little about Albania by reading novels long and short by Ismail Kadare, whose point of view is that "Dictatorship and authentic literature a incompatible. The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship." Kadare, born in 1936, now divides his time between France and Albania, and managed to survive Enver Hoxha's regime relatively unscathed, although much of his work was banned. His books first became known in Europe through the work of Jusuf Vrioni, who began translating Kadare into French while a political prisoner in Albania.

Kadare's novels range across the whole history of Albania. I've read only three so far, but there are many more. The Concert deals in part with life among the privileged in 1970's Tirana - Party members in good standing, who work in the bureaucracy or are recognized artists. But Kadare's imagination ranges far and wide - into the mind of a dying Mao Tse Tung, or a monitor listening to transmissions from the east at a post somewhere in the Arctic, or a confirmed European leftist, trying to decide whether to back the Soviets or the Chinese.

Last fall I got close to Albania - as near as Kotor, on the coast of Montenegro. Further south are the ruins of Butrint, a UNESCO World Heritage site, and I suspect the Albanian coast is as dramatic and beautiful as the rest of the Balkan peninsula.