Another Day in Paris
It is late afternoon on the fourth of our five days in Paris. As always, the time has flown by in this beautiful, enervating city. It’s been 22 years since I was here, but my memories of that trip have stayed so vivid that it seems to be much more recent.
We have been frequenting the usual tourist haunts: Tour Eiffel, Montmartre, Montparnasse, the towers of Notre Dame, and the Latin Quarter among others. I had the opportunity to dust off my high school French when my 5 day Metro pass stopped working after the second use. The ticket agent spoke no English so I was forced to describe my problem en Francais! It worked. I got a new ticket and didn’t fracture the grammar too much in the process.
Some of the highlights of the trip have been a couple of strolls through the Latin Quarter, at one time the intellectual center of Paris. The Sorbonne is located nearby and the area is filled with bookstores and cafes. The cobbled streets are narrow and reserved for pedestrians only. At night, they are jam packed as hoards of tourists (and I suppose some locals too) frequent the inexpensive Greek and Middle Eastern restaurants that line the streets. It’s the best spot for people watching I have ever encountered. The photo below gives you some idea of the street scene, although it gets decidedly more lively when the sun goes down.
The Montparnasse Cemetery also made it on to the itinerary yesterday. It is filled with massive concrete monuments to some of those who have passed on. We walked around for a while and came across the graves of Charles Baudelaire, Camille Saint-Saens, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartres. Sartre was a hero of mine in adolescence as his philosophy of existentialism resonated with me in those days and, to be honest, still does.
Tomorrow we are off to Monet’s country home at Giverny even though it means catching an 8:15 am train. You may not be aware that Monet was not only a brilliant painter, but a master gardener as well. It was at Giverny that he took inspiration for much of his work and the pond where he painted his water lilies is there. The home fell into disrepair after Monet’s death, but has since been restored to it’s former bucolic state.