Paris

[Moros]

So I'll be visiting Paris the first week of February. I promised it to my girl and we'll be there for three days. Now the thing is I've been in Paris for like 4 or 5 times and I've seen all the usual things already. Of course I'll be doing some of those again as my girl hasn't been to Paris yet. But spending three days seeing things I've already seen is a bit much too. So does anyone know lesser known things to visit or do while in Paris that isn't too expensive (as we're both just students).

[Fragony]

Just enjoy the city itself, no Eifel tower beats listening to the traffic from your cheap hotel-room. Planning anything always sucks the life out of everything, it's fun enough to just be there

[Yoyoma1910]

I enjoyed the Cluny museum and the Parthenon.

[Louis VI the Fat]

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

http://spaceinvaders.blog4ever.com/b...ex-440718.html

[naut]

I was too young to remember anything from when I went, so I can't make a suggestion. Although I do agree with Frags, a place like Paris has enough going on for it to be nice to just go for a walk and discover something unexpected.

INVADER OWNS!

[Fragony]

Oh I forgot, do visit the Musee de Quai Branly, a few minutes from that ugly WAY too high Eifeltower. The building itself is worth it, but they also have a spectacular collection of primitive arts, you have to beat me out with a stick before closing time.

[Fisherking]

I was too young to remember anything from when I went, so I can't make a suggestion. Although I do agree with Frags, a place like Paris has enough going on for it to be nice to just go for a walk and discover something unexpected.

Just don’t get mugged!

[Strike For The South]

Overated

[Peasant Phill]

Just don’t get mugged!

I've walked around in Paris at night more than once and I certainly wouldn't call it unsafe.
The only time I've seen violence was when one tranny fought with another tranny but you could call that entertainment.

[Louis VI the Fat]

Much of the splendour of Paris is hidden.


The countless hôtels. Tucked away behind high walls, inconspicuous servants quarters facing the street, behind which a courtyard, then the mansion itself, and then a garden.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

All of them are right in the city, mostly invisble from the public street. Most are not publicly accessible. Hence it is a sport to try and get to see them all one way or another.


Some of the oldest and finest are located in the Marais. Once the most prestigious area. Then slowly turned into a slum by the 19th century, as wealthy Parisians moved to the newer western areas. When the Marais was gentrified in the 1960s, many hôtels were restored and turned into museums.

The other areas are the 7th, with some of the very largest hôtels, most serve to house institutes of the French state. Very difficult to get in, unless you have some connections and are good at bluffing.

The hôtels in the first and eight are mostly embassies. They are also some of the most prestigious hôtels, including the mothership of them all, the Élysée. Virtually impossible to visit, unless one gets invited to a party or event, which, fortunately, an embassy is supposed to have often because its very task is to 'network' in the host country.
The splendour of many of these embassies helps to explain why Paris is so sought after by people employed in the diplomatic corps, why Paris is still a hub of international diplomacy. They all want to live the dream, are susceptible to the glamour, the prestige. Cultural soft power at its finest.

[drone]

Don't forget to take in a riot while you are there.

[Louis VI the Fat]

Paris is bigger than Belgium. The tourists see the centre of the city itself, this is only a small part of the urban area. Not that most of it is altogether very interesting, but it is there:

[Moros]

I haven't been to le Musee de Quai Branly yet. I believe museums are free for students residing in the EU, so that might not be a bad idea.

For the rest sadly I've seen most of it already. Of course I didn't see everything in the Louvre or the likes, but I don't want to bore her to death with factoids like why those reliefs on the Egyptian tomb are raised and the others are sunken reliefs. Let alone when I bump into something Arabian. I think she's more than pleased by seeing three paintings by painters who's name she thinks she might have heard once or twice. And the Mona Lisa of course.

[Fragony]

Louvre area is boring, hop the metro to Saint Michelle. It's a maze of old small streets full of awesome, can easily spend a day there roaming around. There really is plenty to see everywhere you go, the only problem in Paris is a total lack of nightlife as we have in nl and be, nothing to do after 10 but returning to your hotel, but you should be too tired to do anything else anyway

[Louis VI the Fat]

Léo Ferré. The song makes me weep. Makes me nostalgic for an era in which I wasn't even born.

Ferré sings about a place, but the song is about a time. A time that has passed. A time that has never been. That always will be.


Paris is glitter and glamour. It is easy to be impressed. But this love is fleeting. superficial. Besides, Vegas and Dubai glitter even more.

There is also the other Paris, the profound Paris, the layers of history, its infinitely intricate social make up. Paris requires a lot of work. It takes effort to love the city, eyes that can see, that understand what they see. Attentive ears that can hear the whispers in the street, the voices in the backalleys, the very stones, for they speak.
You need to put the effort in to love Paris. But it is a love that is reciprocal. Love Paris, and Paris always loves you more in return. Paris is infinite. A lifetime doesn't suffice.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

All of which for various reasons makes me ponder 'longing'.

Two pictures of Parisian photographer Willy Ronis with that very same theme. Here combined into one to renew their meaning:

[Louis VI the Fat]

The Île Saint-Louis,looking towards the hill of sainte Geneviève, the patron saint of Paris. Yoyomas beloved Panthéon on the hilltop. The heart of the student district, of the song in the video above.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

The Panthéon is an uneasy compromise, build over one and a half centuries, the result of many conlficting demands. A church, devoted to the local saint. A mausoleum, devoted to the great men of France. A massive building - but without windows! All windows have been turned into walls, their inside painted by works commisioned by the Third Republic, depicted 'a' history of France. A macabre, introspective place? Or a glorious temple devoted to reason, to France, to her great thinkers and writers?
God has been reinstalled and removed again. Currenty, with a nod to the great centres of learning of which it stands in the centre, centre space is given to Foucault's pendulum.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Every change of the church / temple / scientific laboratory / mausoleum has been the result of fighting in the streets nearby. One of the most recent, in 1968. Locals harvestings cobblestones:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Cobblestones, to use as weapons. But also to dig away at the street, for their motto was 'beneath the cobblestones, the beach'.
To lie on the beach, to sit in the sun, to read the books of the great men interned in the mausoleum of the Panthéon, that is the dream.

And a dream that has come true in our age! Every summer, the right banks of the Seine get transformed into a beach. This picture taken close to where my first picture looking at the hillside was taken:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

[The Stranger]

how cute!! though if u want romance i recommend Speyksessies in Rotterdam. Much more better than Paris.

[Moros]

how cute!! though if u want romance i recommend Speyksessies in Rotterdam. Much more better than Paris.

I will come to that one day, TS, I will. But I'm still having exams to make the 29th.

Edit: Louis Feré is indeed a great artist. Avec les temps is one of my favourite french songs, together with Les Passantes by Brassens and of cours most songs by the real maestro (not unsurprisingly a Belgian) Brel.

[Fragony]

how cute!! though if u want romance i recommend Speyksessies in Rotterdam. Much more better than Paris.

Going to compare that soulless concrete-upward village with Paris, Rotterdam is meh, nothing of any interest ever ever happened there and that includes being bombed, bye Rotterdam. Old harbour, it isn't a total disaster, but it's still really boring.

[Louis VI the Fat]

The Hausmannian buildings look great from street level. Pretty, restrained façades. Elegant in a stern kind of way, classical.


They are a complete disaster to live in though. The floor plans are made for nineteenth century living, small rooms, awkward layouts. Just when most had been build, electricity and bathrooms became the norm, shortly before WWI. However two wars, each requiring lenghty reparations afterwards, meant that only by the 1960s/70s the project to build bathrooms in old houses was at last making substantial progress.

Building blocks are too large. This was fine for the medieval city, with its mazes of alleys and courtyards. But as these dissapeared, were no longer build in the new blocks, it gradually it meant that most houses simply lost acces to the street. Because of the need for long visual lines, building blocks remained large, too large. As a result, still what you see in Paris is only half the city, the other half remains hidden. In the welathiest areas, the ancient eastern Marais, the 7th and 8th, this allowed for enormous gardens. In most areas, courtyards are build up with houses, lacking street access.

This all conspired with the decision to build prettty diagonal street patterns. So much more elegant than a square grid:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

When the inner courtyards are removed, or when an unfinished street façade leaves a gap, it sometimes shows to what extent the pretty streets can be deceitful:

[Beirut]

Edit: Louis Feré is indeed a great artist. Avec les temps is one of my favourite french songs, together with Les Passantes by Brassens and of cours most songs by the real maestro (not unsurprisingly a Belgian) Brel.

We had a concert here in my small town a few months back by a Quebec artist who puts on a full Brel cover show. Sweat and all. Two nights in a local art gallery, about thirty or forty people each night. Plush seats with beers in hand. It was fantastic!

"Moules et frites et frites et moules."

[Moros]

We had a concert here in my small town a few months back by a Quebec artist who puts on a full Brel cover show. Sweat and all. Two nights in a local art gallery, about thirty or forty people each night. Plush seats with beers in hand. It was fantastic!

"Moules et frites et frites et moules."

If only a man could live multiple lives in multiple times and multiple places, so many great experiences we have missed, will miss and will not notice.