from decadent elite to underground egalite

Note: if you look at the blog entry before this one, I edited it to add links of all the pics I was missing. :)

Tue I went to the Palace of Versailles with Irina. The town it's in is about 30 mins south-west from downtown Paris. A regular train gets there. You get to a regular train station, in a regular town, no cool signs or pictures or anything really... Outside the station, a girl handing out flyers and saying in English: "To the right to go to Versailles!"

So we walked about 15 mins through a town, complete with a Mac Donalds and other shopping stores. The first glance of the Palace is simply of a large building with a parking lot in front. I expected something more majestic... Huge line of tourists up front, of course. We arrived at 11am, and finally got in by noon (that's what the time stamps on my pics say. :) ) Inside it was mobbed. But i got pics of all the rooms, and since Irina went out of her way to get an audio tour, we learned a bunch. Overall it was cool, but I still like the Louvre best.

The main palace isn't all there is to Versailles. Huge gardens at back are set up in the symmetrical fashion of the times. Symmetry is key for most of Versaiiles. Even in the palace, all the rooms of one wing originally mirrored their counterpart on the other wing in theme for the decor and function of the room. Subsequent kings and queens completely remodeled the place is what I'm told.

Back to the gardens: all I thought of it was big dirt roads with gravel and fenced-in green part. The dust is a sore spot, I've noticed that every day i walk in Paris my shoes get dirty. It didn't happen in madrid... here they have a lot more dirt!

Walking to the back-right of the property, we reached another two buildings, used for less formal occasions. Le Grand Trianon and Le Petit Trianon. More cool rooms. The smaller building was used by some queen as her private apartments. Much cozier than the palace.

The part I liked best was the "queen's village". All the way in the back of the property, it's an area where they reproduced a small country town. Cute houses, lotsa green, little hills, a pond... even farm animals of all kind. Although to walk back from there to the front took 45 mins!!

By the time we made it back, we were both exhausted. But she had to work, and I had to meet Ana for dinner at her friend Kim's house. Which turned out to be really cool. Her apt was near the Moulin Rouge area. She's a professional juggler! She studied international business with Ana, but found a full-time gig with a company that tours France. For dinner she made us a yummy zucchini pie with cheese. Mad easy but was real good!

Getting home, I ended up staying hooked to the computer 'til way too late. So my plans for the next day turned to a day of rest, mostly :) We did have plans to meet Clemence (the girl we went to Chinatown with) in Paris, so I went out just for that. Ah, and I stopped by one of the main train stations to purchase my train ticket to Germany. Confirmed for next Friday afternoon! :)

We went to a bar near La Bastille. That section of Paris is pretty cool. Rows of restaurants and bars in the back streets. An art exhibit along the boulevard. I had my first crêpe in france. Didn't like it. Clem ended up eating more than half of it... it was ham and egg and cheese. An overdose of emmental cheese. Which the French seem to put in everything!

Cool thing: on our way to the bar we saw the filming for a local show. Inspector Mon...something. It was going on right in front of the place we went into, so we observed some of the rehearsing. We spent a couple of hours doing girlie talk, remembering old friends, and discussing life...

We got home at a decent time, so the next day (we're up to Thu now) I went to visit the not-so-famous catacombs of Paris. *Very* cool! It was 3 km of stairs and underground tunnels, leading to an ossuary half-way through. Piles of bones, arranged decoratively... quite amazing. And not so many tourists here. You can read the history in the wiki article, but basically they ran out of space in the cemeteries, they had plague problems, and they had these huge tunnels excavated from when they were digging up stones to make their buildings above ground... they had to stop digging or part of Paris would have caved in. So they started dismantling cemeteries and putting the bones here, nicely stacked. There are markers at every section saying which cemetery bones came from. The first guy in charge of this told his workers to go nuts and make it pretty. So they used femurs and skulls to create patterns and pretty walls to cover the mess of other bones piled behind them. The chambers are pretty wide, but the passageways you walk through aren't. The bones are piled up to 30 feet deep from the walls!

The only bad part is that i was alone, and a girl, and out of the 3 guys that keep an eye on things down there, I managed to graciously evade the first, ignore the second, but the third ended up following me for the second half of the tour, kept trying to be "friendly" and put his hands on me... I had to turn down a really cool opportunity to get in behind a closed section 'cause i was afraid he'd try something.
He opened one of the gates for me and let me take pics of a closed section. It was really cool, dammit. Stupid guys alway being stupid and ruining the good things in life...

I really need to go back with a tripod. And a companion. That place is so worth it. But it's so dark, it requires long exposures, and my hand isn't steady enough to be completely still for 1-2 seconds. Ideally, a halogen lamp, too :) The smarter people had lamps to look into the dark nooks and crannies. I had my little pocket flashlight which helped. Here are some of the pics I took of the catacombs.

Getting out of the catacombs I had no clue where I was. I randomly went down towards where some people were walking (there were few people down there. So no big crowd to follow!) and luckily ended up reaching the same train station I arrived at. I did some more walking around, then took the train to go to the movies. I had looked up cool movie theaters to visit. I wanted to see the animated Asterix movie, and it was showing at the REX, a supposedly famous art-noveau style building with the biggest screen in town. Of course that was only for big movies. Asterix was playing downstairs, in one of the smallest screens I've seen :P Still, I had a chuckle or two with the few things I understood in French, got to experience the voices in original French, and was happy with myself :)

Since when I got out it was only 4:30pm, and I had learned my lesson about peak-hour metro, I looked up some other place to visit. The target: Parc Monceau, a couple of kilometers away. I had read online that it was really nice. On the way there, I happened to see the Passages of Montmartre. Which are basically alleyways, covered with glass ceiling, and lined with quaint stores and restaurants. Very pretty experience. The park was also pretty nice. A designer park.Pics of the passages and the park.

At 6pm, I deemed it safe to try the metro. It was still mobbed, so I sat and waited. Then got lucky and two came one after the other. So the first gathered all the ppl, the second remained empty. All the way home!

I tried to used Thu night to catch up on pics and everything. No way. So I took today Fri completely off, didn't step foot out of the house, and did virtual and real clean up. Tomorrow Ana's in-laws are coming to stay for 2 days. So it'll be a bit hectic. I'm going to try to stay out of the way. But Hopefully I'll do the St Denis cathedral (yeah, been saying that for a while...) and on Sun the Batoun-mouche, the fly-boat!. More on those after they happen. For now, I call it an update. And I am gonna have to start to take less pics. :P I'm also filling up my hard drive!