Our love for Paris is eclipsed only by our love for the Louvre.
To be more specific, it's not so much the art within the museum (though it's a treasure trove of history and beauty), it's the structure itself. We are huge I.M Pei fans, having once trekked to Kyoto, Japan specifically to visit the Miho Museum.
It was a stroke of genius, the design. How could you expand upon the core structures of the building, the former palace of Louis the XIV (not known for his understatement when it came to construction, check out Versailles), without aping a 17th Century style?
By using simple geometric forms, that's how. Some people find it jarring, but Bob and I just love its openness and simplicity.
And the subterranean lobby is bright, expansive and quite timeless in its design, allowing easy access to all the wings of the older building.
This was the fourth time I had been to the Louvre, for Bob, his fifth. We avoided the Mona Lisa because it's usually a madhouse and once you've seen her enigmatic smile and bought the mug/t-shirt/college dorm poster, you've kind of figured out the whole thing.
Winged Victory, or the Nike of Samothrace, is one of the highlights which we usually enjoy when we visit, but sadly this time around she was not on display as the lady at the ticket counter joked, "she is getting her make-up done."
Still, we hightailed it to my favorite part, Near Eastern Antiquities. Ever since I read The Epic of Gilgamesh in college, I've found the ancient world of the Levant, Mesopotamia and Persia fascinating. Mostly because the complexity of the cultures, many which pre-date the Judeo-Christian era, but whose myths and stories inform what we now call the Old Testament.
Also, it was a ruthlessly violent world, and not just in terms of the geopolitical nature of the emerging empires of the time.
The structures, the mythological, magical beings, to me at least, are a testament to ancient man's attempts to put order into their world, with so many of these ideas – Gryphons, sphinxes, the original writings in clay tablets, the tale of Gilgamesh, the baby found in the reeds – just still informing Western society today.
It's also the scope of one man's vision which I find intriguing. Darius 1 or Darius the Great, commissioned two giant halls, called Apadana, in both the Persepolis, the capitol of the Achaemenid Empire, and Susa, a kind of second, administrative center sometime around 510 B.C. Check out the size of the capitals that supported the building's ceiling:
The columns were 62-feet high! And there were 72 of them at the palace in Persepolis supporting ceiling beams, built from cedar trees from Lebanon. Not bad for 2600 years ago, I would say. Amazing.
Above all else, I see the Louvre as this weird shrine to Empire, ancient and modern. When Louis the XIV moved to Versailles, this, his former palace, became home to the art and plunder of his empire. When Mitterrand commissioned the Louvre, detractors said the pyramids were an attempt to enshrine his image like the pharaohs of old.
Bob and I decided to walk through the Tuileries Garden towards the Champs-Élysées, but not before getting a quick photo of the rollerblading gendarmes.
We also stopped to get a photo taken because, as we keep on being reminded, there are few photos of Bob and I together:
We stopped at the Musée de l'Orangerie, a museum on the Tuileries, just off the Place de la Concorde, that is home to Impressionist and post-Impressionist works by Cezanne, Matisse and Renoir. But the highlight are the two elliptical rooms where eight of Monet's Water Lilies paintings grace the walls. Calming and beautiful, it's definitely worth the visit.
We made it back to our neighborhood and had wine and charcuterie. Bob took a nap, I wrote a blog and did some reading. Then, at the hotel manager's recommendation, we headed for dinner to Chez Janou Bistrot in the Marais.
Now this was a packed, local restaurant where people were crammed into tables and the wait staff were run off their feet. A "restaurant Provençal" with a reputation for both great and mediocre meals, a large assortment of Pastis cocktails (81 according to the menu!) and an allegedly rude wait staff, Bob and I appeared to have split the difference meal-wise.
We both had the fish soup, which was a hearty bisque served with croutons, remoulade and parmesan cheese. Tasty.
Bob ordered what turned out to be a very fatty veal chop with dauphinois potatoes (unintentionally cold), in a mushroom sauce (also cold).
I decided to throw caution to the wind and ordered the tagliatelle avec escargots. Now this was awesome, the pasta was cooked perfectly and it was folded, along with the escargot, into a rich butter and cream sauce with toasted pine nuts, chopped fresh basil and star anise.
Pastis is an anise flavored liqueur that's about 45% alcohol by volume, and you drink it with added flavors like orange or melon, diluted with still water. It is, by and large, potent and nasty.
I'm glad I tried it, so now I never have to do it again.
Commissioned by President François Mitterrand in 1984, and completed in 1989, the Louvre Pyramid (technically a large pyramid with three smaller ones, an inverted pyramid and mirror pools) was built in the center of the museums main courtyard, the Cour Napoléon, as the main entrance into the museum's giant underground lobby.
It was a stroke of genius, the design. How could you expand upon the core structures of the building, the former palace of Louis the XIV (not known for his understatement when it came to construction, check out Versailles), without aping a 17th Century style?
By using simple geometric forms, that's how. Some people find it jarring, but Bob and I just love its openness and simplicity.
And the subterranean lobby is bright, expansive and quite timeless in its design, allowing easy access to all the wings of the older building.
Winged Victory, or the Nike of Samothrace, is one of the highlights which we usually enjoy when we visit, but sadly this time around she was not on display as the lady at the ticket counter joked, "she is getting her make-up done."
Still, we hightailed it to my favorite part, Near Eastern Antiquities. Ever since I read The Epic of Gilgamesh in college, I've found the ancient world of the Levant, Mesopotamia and Persia fascinating. Mostly because the complexity of the cultures, many which pre-date the Judeo-Christian era, but whose myths and stories inform what we now call the Old Testament.
Also, it was a ruthlessly violent world, and not just in terms of the geopolitical nature of the emerging empires of the time.
The structures, the mythological, magical beings, to me at least, are a testament to ancient man's attempts to put order into their world, with so many of these ideas – Gryphons, sphinxes, the original writings in clay tablets, the tale of Gilgamesh, the baby found in the reeds – just still informing Western society today.
It's also the scope of one man's vision which I find intriguing. Darius 1 or Darius the Great, commissioned two giant halls, called Apadana, in both the Persepolis, the capitol of the Achaemenid Empire, and Susa, a kind of second, administrative center sometime around 510 B.C. Check out the size of the capitals that supported the building's ceiling:
The columns were 62-feet high! And there were 72 of them at the palace in Persepolis supporting ceiling beams, built from cedar trees from Lebanon. Not bad for 2600 years ago, I would say. Amazing.
Above all else, I see the Louvre as this weird shrine to Empire, ancient and modern. When Louis the XIV moved to Versailles, this, his former palace, became home to the art and plunder of his empire. When Mitterrand commissioned the Louvre, detractors said the pyramids were an attempt to enshrine his image like the pharaohs of old.
Bob and I decided to walk through the Tuileries Garden towards the Champs-Élysées, but not before getting a quick photo of the rollerblading gendarmes.
We also stopped to get a photo taken because, as we keep on being reminded, there are few photos of Bob and I together:
We stopped at the Musée de l'Orangerie, a museum on the Tuileries, just off the Place de la Concorde, that is home to Impressionist and post-Impressionist works by Cezanne, Matisse and Renoir. But the highlight are the two elliptical rooms where eight of Monet's Water Lilies paintings grace the walls. Calming and beautiful, it's definitely worth the visit.
We made it back to our neighborhood and had wine and charcuterie. Bob took a nap, I wrote a blog and did some reading. Then, at the hotel manager's recommendation, we headed for dinner to Chez Janou Bistrot in the Marais.
Now this was a packed, local restaurant where people were crammed into tables and the wait staff were run off their feet. A "restaurant Provençal" with a reputation for both great and mediocre meals, a large assortment of Pastis cocktails (81 according to the menu!) and an allegedly rude wait staff, Bob and I appeared to have split the difference meal-wise.
We both had the fish soup, which was a hearty bisque served with croutons, remoulade and parmesan cheese. Tasty.
Bob ordered what turned out to be a very fatty veal chop with dauphinois potatoes (unintentionally cold), in a mushroom sauce (also cold).
I decided to throw caution to the wind and ordered the tagliatelle avec escargots. Now this was awesome, the pasta was cooked perfectly and it was folded, along with the escargot, into a rich butter and cream sauce with toasted pine nuts, chopped fresh basil and star anise.
Pastis is an anise flavored liqueur that's about 45% alcohol by volume, and you drink it with added flavors like orange or melon, diluted with still water. It is, by and large, potent and nasty.
I'm glad I tried it, so now I never have to do it again.
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