Paris with Chris: Days One and Two

Our two-story hotel room.

Our main objective in Paris was to meet up with Chris, a friend of ours whom Lisa met in college at UNC. He came to France to visit us for about ten days and since he was flying into Paris and since we we would have to go through Paris to get home to Rennes, we decided to spend a few days there before coming home. Chris' flight got into Paris early that Wednesday morning and our train from Cologne arrived a bit before noon so we met him in the courtyard of the hotel, in the 16eme arrondisement.

Chris and Lisa at the Eiffel Tower.

After dropping off our bags, we bought some take-out sandwiches for lunch and ate in Trocadero Park, down the street from the hotel and overlooking the Eiffel Tower across the Seine. When we finished, we walked down to and around the tower so Chris could see it. There were many more people there than when Lisa and I went in December. It really brought home the difference between the low season and the high season in Paris - and we're not even very far into the high season yet!

Underneath the Arc de Triomphe.

We then walked back up past the hotel to the Arc de Triomphe, the triumphal arch originally built by Napoleon to commemorate his various victories. It's in the center of a huge traffic circle - twelve streets feed into it! - meaning that you have to take an underground passageway to get to the arch itself. In addition to having massive sculptures on the sides and lists of Napoleon's victories and generals, it also holds the French tomb of the unknown soldier and plaques in honor of the war dead of France's post-Napoleonic wars. It's a very impressive monument.

Eiffel tower at night from the 16eme.

Arc de Triomphe at night.

It was now mid-afternoon and we encouraged Chris to go back to the hotel to nap (he had just flown across the Atlantic on little sleep less than twelve hours before, so he needed it!) so Lisa and I went to a museum in the neighborhood, the Maritime Museum (interacting with a very friendly and helpful security guard on the way in!), to buy the Paris Museum Pass. It gets you in "free" (really prepaid at a discount) at a number of the major museums and it often means you get to skip the ticket line. It's definitely worth the investment, although the ones we bought were only good for two days, meaning we really had to pack in the museums to make it worth the money! We then found a cafe to sit and have a glass of wine (me) and tea (Lisa) before heading back to the hotel around 7 to meet up with Chris and go out to dinner at a Franco-Portuguese bistro Lisa and I had found not far from the hotel, which was pretty good. After dinner, Chris wanted to see the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe lit up at night. Obviously, Lisa and I had seen the Eiffel Tower at night back in December (when we spent about six hours in Paris the night before flying home for Christmas), but seeing it from the Trocadero Park was a different and perhaps more dramatic angle.

Ceiling frescoes at Versailles.

Day Two in Paris started with pastries to-go at a bakery near the hotel and buying sandwiches for a picnic lunch then taking the Metro and a regional train to Versailles, home to Louis XIV's opulent 17th-century palace. It wasn't a far walk from the train station to the palace itself and while the Museum Pass meant we could skip the ticket line, we couldn't skip the security line, which took about 45 minutes to get through. Fortunately, it was a sunny day so we didn't get rained on while waiting in the courtyard! We spent about two-and-a-half hours in the palace, seeing every room we possibly could, including a special exhibit on Napoleonic battle paintings (not that interesting, at least to me). It was also the most crowded place we've yet been and it didn't help that there tons of tour groups who would just stop and camp out in the small rooms while their guides talked to them. The palace itself was opulent and grandiose, with fancy furniture and lots of ceiling frescoes. It reminded me a lot of the Vatican Palace; the Hall of Mirrors especially reminded me the Map Room in the Vatican (although I'm not entirely sure why).

Marie Antoinette's bedroom.

Hall of mirrors.

French school children.

While we were at Versailles, we saw a group of French school children with an official tour guide from the museum. Lisa (who is writing this paragraph) was very impressed by how well the teacher communicated with and engaged the youngsters. They were very respectful throughout their visit, and despite the fact that they took up large quantities of floor space in every room we visited, were not obtrusive or rude. We wish all museum tour guides could be so dynamic!

Gardens and water at Versailles.

Once we finished inside, we walked into the gardens out back to eat our picnic lunch. We didn't go very far into the gardens because we were on such a tight time schedule, but they looked very pretty and quite expansive. I'm sure they'd be even prettier later in the spring when more things are in bloom.

Crypt of Notre Dame.

Following lunch, we took the train back into Paris and went to Notre-Dame. We started in the archaeological crypt (covered by the Museum Pass!) below the cathedral, which I found immensely interesting. It has remains of the fourth-century AD Gallo-Roman walls around the island in the Seine that the cathedral (and much of the ancient city) was built on. They also had an exhibit on the transformation of Paris from a Roman city to a medieval city over the course of the fourth to sixth centuries AD. As someone whose fascinated by that period, I loved it! We then went up to the church itself to walk around, although I found it a bit less interesting since I'd seen most of it in December. Still, after all the Gothic cathedrals we've seen since that first visit, I was better able to appreciate the differences between Notre-Dame and the others, like the fact that their are rose windows at the ends of the transepts and there's a double aisle (which no other cathedral we've been to has).

Notre Dame with many
tourists!

Rose window from the inside.

Some photographable flowers for you to view while
you read about the water lilies.

After that, we took the Metro to the L'Orangerie Museum, arriving at 5:15, just a half hour before closing time. It's an amazing place, designed to hold Monet's massive water lily paintings. They were done at the end of his life in the 1920s and in his will, he donated them to the citizens of Paris in a specially designed museum to be a place of calm and healing in post-World War I Paris. There are two rooms, each with four huge canvases of water lily ponds at different times of day. Unfortunately, no pictures are allowed inside, but here's a picture on Wikipedia of one of the paintings. I thought they were amazing paintings, with a great interplay of color and light. It was very moving and calming. We then went down to the basement to breeze through the rest of the (rather small) collection of Impressionist paintings before being kicked out at closing time.

Full rainbow in Paris!

Outside, a brief squall that had blown up had just stopped, allowing us to see a full rainbow over Paris! We walked across the river to show Chris the Musée d'Orsay, passing the French National Assembly building (which Chris was very interested in) and stopping to get a quick quiche dinner at a little snack bar kind of place. The Musée d'Orsay is the main 19th-century and Impressionist museum in Paris and it's built into an old train station. Much like the medieval museum in Cologne (and the Montemartini Museum in Rome, for that matter, built into an old power plant), it's a very creative re-use of space.

Another picture from Versailles. You
can see us since we couldn't show you
anything at the museum!

Again, no pictures are allowed inside, so here's a Wikipedia picture of the interior. The museum is open to 9:45 pm on Thursdays, so we had quite a bit of time there. The Museum Pass allowed us to skip the security line at the general entrance and go through a much shorter security line at the priority entrance. We learned at the Orangerie that the three of us all have different museum paces, so Chris explored the museum on his own and saw just about everything in it before getting dessert while Lisa and I saw pretty much everything we wanted to see: the main Impressionist rooms (with their fantastic collections of Monets, Caillebottes, and Renoirs), the Van Gogh and Seurat rooms, and some of the pre-Impressionist rooms on the first floor. We also saw a special exhibit of Degas's nudes, which was very crowded and hard to see. On the fifth floor, we got a great view through the old station clock north across the river towards Montmartre as the moon was rising. It's really a fantastic museum. Once the museum closed, we met up with Chris outside and took the Metro back to the hotel for bed.

Cologne, or, Like the Romans, We Didn't Cross the Rhine

OK, first, to be fair, the Romans did cross the Rhine. They just tended not to stay across for very long and they treated the Rhine as the border between the empire and the barbarians of the German forests.

Breakfast on the train!

Anyway, the day after our day-trip to Bruges, Lisa and I bade farewell to Nathaniel and Maria and took a morning train from Brussels to Cologne, Germany. We had first-class seats on this one because when I bought the tickets, the first-class seats were cheaper than second-class. Perhaps it's because this was an international train (running from Paris to Brussels to Cologne), but our first-class service was significantly better on this train than on French trains (although we have very limited experience with first-class trains in France). We were served complimentary breakfast in our seats, just like a plane! Also, there was free WiFi, but since we didn't bring a computer, it wasn't much use to us.

Train station with cathedral in the background.

The train to Cologne took about two hours. The station is very conveniently located right next to the cathedral; as soon as you walk out, you see it. We didn't spend a lot of time admiring it from the outside because we wanted to get our city map from the tourist office across the street. Unfortunately, unlike in France, we had to buy the map, just as we did in Brussels and Bruges and many places in the UK. I guess these northern European countries are always trying to make a buck off you!

The cathedral was so large from the side that even Lisa's
wide-angle lens couldn't capture it all.

We then walked around the outside of the cathedral. The cathedral was begun in 1248 and left unfinished in 1473, but work started again under the German Empire in the 19th-century and the whole thing was finished in 1880. Although it sustained over seventy bomb hits from Allied planes in World War II, it didn't collapse. There's a theory that one reason it wasn't destroyed by the Allies is because the two huge towers (515 feet tall!) served as a useful navigational landmark for bombers flying deep into Germany near the end of the war. It's the largest Gothic church in northern Europe and has the largest facade of any church in the world. There's not much external sculpture, unlike French Gothic cathedrals, but the size is what makes it so impressive. The towers are stepped and recessed, constantly pulling your eye upwards and emphasizing their height. The mass of stone is truly overwhelming.

Dionysus mosaic in the Roman-Germanic Museum.

Next to the cathedral is the Römisch-Germanisches (Roman-Germanic) Museum. Cologne was originally founded as a Roman veterans' colony (hence the modern name of the city) on the west bank of the Rhine River so there's a lot of Roman remains from the area, most housed in this museum. It, too, is overwhelming, but in a different way from the cathedral - there's just so much stuff in the museum and it's not well-signed in English nor is there any kind of comprehensive organization of the material. So it was just lots of pottery and jewelry and funeral monuments to look at. The highlights for me were a couple of floor mosaics found in the course of archaeological work in Cologne and a special exhibit of Greek statues and vases from the classical museum in Berlin. I'm disappointed we won't make it to Berlin to see the museum, so I was very happy to see part of the collection elsewhere!

You can see why it took three hours!

We spent almost three hours in the museum then headed to our hotel (just on the other side of the train station from the cathedral) to drop off our bags, stopping off for a pretzel (in lieu of lunch) inside the train station. After resting in the hotel for a bit, we decided to check out the Schnütgen Museum, Cologne's medieval art museum. To get there, we walked though some of the pedestrian-only areas of the "old city," although since most of the city was leveled in World War II, there very little of the town that pre-dates the 1950s, but we did pass some old buildings surrounded the old market places, like the medieval city-council building.

Medieval city-council building.

St. Cecilia's Church.

The medieval museum itself was good, with lots of medieval stained glass, vestments, serving pieces, ivory and wood carvings, and illuminated manuscripts. The central part of it was located in the deconsecrated 11th-century St. Cecilia's church. It was a very creative use of space because the artifacts followed the lines of the church and, in some cases, the original uses of the space. For example, the gold and silver was located in the old sacristy, a large Bible was placed where the altar would have been, and carvings dealing with the theme of death were placed in the crypt. (Unfortunately, pictures weren't allowed inside, so we can't show you what it looks like.) It was an interesting place and the signage was much better than the Roman-Germanic Museum!

Aaron, not crossing the river.

After the museum, we walked towards the Rhine and went out onto the Deutzer Brücke bridge over the Rhine (but again, we didn't cross the river!) and then back up to the cathedral to go inside. The square around the cathedral was unbelievably windy. Lisa speculated that the temperature difference between the cathedral (a huge mass of stone that doesn't warm up very easily) and the external air might cause the wind since it wasn't really windy anywhere else in Cologne. I think the large open area around the cathedral has something to do with it, too. The inside is almost as overwhelming as the outside, largely because of the height: 142.2 feet, three feet taller than the cathedral in Amiens. The aisles and nave also felt narrower than the cathedrals we've seen in France. I don't know if they actually are, but it would make sense. To build a cathedral that tall, you would need to keep the inside narrow to support the height. We couldn't walk around the ambulatory so we ended up not spending a whole lot of time in there. Plus, it was getting dark, so it was hard to see much inside.

Cathedral interior with people in motion.

Dinner!

We left the cathedral and walked back into the old town for dinner. We went to a beer hall / brewery that seemed like a pretty local kind of place. I tried the local Cologne beer, kölsch, and we had our fill of good German food - sauerkraut, mashed potatoes, spaetzle, and blutwurst (for me, not Lisa!). The spaetzle Lisa had was more like the richest, cheesiest, homemade mac 'n' cheese she's ever had. There were a couple of large groups of German men in there, too, who ordered several of the big 5-liter columns of beer. They were having a good, raucous time until their food came. Then they were silent as they chowed down!

We're not really sure why Lisa took
such crooked pictures this week.

On the way back to the hotel, we stopped to get some pictures of the cathedral at night before turning in. The next morning, we had a fantastic German-style breakfast in the hotel: cold cuts, cheese, yogurt, cereal, bread, jam, cucumbers, tomatoes, coffee, and juice. And all for five euros a piece - easily the largest and cheapest hotel breakfast we've yet had in Europe! After that, we went back to the cathedral to see the inside in the daylight. We got there right as the sun was coming through the windows behind the altar and it was very pretty. Unfortunately, we could only spend about 30 minutes inside before we had to walk across the square to the train station to catch our 8:44 train to Paris, the last stop on our week-long tour. It was rather disappointing to spend less than 24 hours in Germany and Cologne, but I'd say we packed quite a bit in during our time there!

Cathedral interior in the morning.

Bonus picture for Aaron's dad: Cologne train station.

Bonus picture for Patrick: yum!

In Bruges (but not like the movie, which we've never seen)

Daffodils at the convent, very Eastery (and slanted).

Belfry in the Grande Place.

On Easter Monday, Nathaniel, Lisa and I took a day trip to Bruges, about an hour train ride from Nathaniel and Maria's house in Brussels. Bruges is in the northwest part of Belgium, the Dutch part. In fact, about half-way through the train ride there, announcements stopped being made in both French and Dutch and started being made in only Dutch. Starting the 12th century, Bruges was major textile producer and a trade center, largely because a huge storm created a new channel for the river Zwin which allowed direct access to the ocean. Around 1500, this channel began silting up and Bruges began to lose its commercial importance. While it's still a fairly large city today (a couple hundred thousand people), much of its historic medieval buildings and canals have been preserved.

Canal where you could take a boat tour.

Convent church.

Unfortunately for us, though, it was a cold, windy, rainy day when we visited, making it more difficult to appreciate the city's charm. We started in a still-functioning convent on the street from the train station to the city center. It was a very simple and quiet place. The walls were painted a bright white, and the arches were Roman, giving the space a simpler and brighter feel.  The nuns were preparing for a service, so we only stayed a few moments.  It looked like they were going to have a bit of a crowd for such a small space - very different from most of the holy places we visit in France.

We also visited several small churches plus the cathedral where the organist was practicing throughout our entire visit. The cathedral was certainly different from the medieval churches we've seen in France - this one was brighter with white walls but also had many more paintings hanging on the walls. They also had a little museum in the old treasury, containing old grave markers, some illuminated manuscripts, lots of gold chalices and plates, and some clerical garments. We saw the central square, the town hall and the huge belfry, too.

Cathedral interior.

Depiction of Jesus skipping.

Belgian fries.

We ate a picnic lunch outside in the cold and rain (fortunately we found a bench in a parking lot that was under an overhang so we didn't get too wet!) and afterwards we tried fries at a restaurant next to the cathedral. Despite their name, French fries actually originated in Belgium so we thought what better place to try them? Sadly, they weren't very good. They were very fatty and not very salty or crisp. It was a bit of a disappointing experience. In the afternoon, while Nathaniel went to an art museum, Lisa and I did some shopping and tried more local specialties.

We had another Belgian waffle (this one was sort of cinnamon-y and not as caramelized as the one we had in Brussels) and some Belgian chocolates, too. Lisa had a cognac-cream-filled one which she said was the best chocolate she's every had. We also tried cuberdons, a Belgian candy specialty that's not really exported. It's a kind of waxy sugar cone containing raspberry syrup on the inside. We tried both raspberry (we didn't really like them) and licorice flavor (the licorice was better). Finally, in an attempt to warm up, we bought some hot chocolate, which consisted of heated milk and a piece of chocolate on a stick that you stir into the milk as it melts. It was pretty tasty (although in my haste to drink it while it was still warm, I managed to spill a decent amount down my coat!).

The porcupine was filled with cognac cream and was one of the best
chocolates Lisa has ever had.

A scenic shot.

Finally, when we had enough of the wind and rain (especially because our poor cheap umbrella was no match for the weather), we met up with Nathaniel and took the train back to Brussels. In the end, we found Bruges to be an odd place. It was very touristy and we heard lots of English (from both Americans and others), more than almost anywhere we've been outside of the UK, Paris, and Mont-Saint-Michel. But we couldn't really figure out why it was so touristy. It's a perfectly nice city and all, but we didn't really see anything we felt was terribly distinctive (although it's obviously different from what we see in France). It's just how I imagine Dutch cities to be - lots of brick buildings and canals. Then again, perhaps the bad weather didn't let the city show off its full glory!

An idea of the architecture.

Bonus picture 2: Their getaway car.

Bonus picture: Aaron
and Humphrey.

Brussels

Nathaniel, his girlfriend Maria, and Aaron.

After spending the morning in Amiens, the afternoon and early evening in Lille, our ultimate destination for Easter Saturday was Brussels, the capital of Belgium ("the Canada of France"). Lisa has a friend from OSU, Nathaniel, who lives there and with whom we could stay for a couple of nights, which was very nice of him. The high-speed train ride from Lille lasted about a half-hour and I think it was one of the more international trains we've been on - I heard English, Dutch, French, and what I think was Portuguese.

Braderie in Brussels.

Shortly before our arrival, Nathaniel informed us via text message that there was an impromptu transit strike in Brussels. Apparently, there had been a minor accident with a bus and a car, the bus driver called his route supervisor, the car's driver (who may have been intoxicated) called a couple of his friends (who were intoxicated), and one of the friends beat the route supervisor to death. Nathaniel said there's a whole host of issues with public transit in Brussels and the workers aren't very well respected, but regardless, the death caused all transit workers in the city to almost immediately go on strike for at least four days; they were still on strike when we left Brussels on Tuesday. That meant that for our entire time there, there were no buses and no trams in service. Fortunately, Nathaniel and his girlfriend, Maria, live relatively near a commuter rail station (commuter rail was unaffected by the strike) so we were able to get a local train from Brussels' central train station to his neighborhood train station where he met us and walked us back to his apartment. The apartment was very lovely - one floor of an old three-story row house with high ceilings, hardwood floors, and French doors between rooms. Unfortunately, we forgot to take any pictures of it to share with you!

Grande Place.

On Easter Sunday, we got a tour of central Brussels from Nathaniel and Maria. Because we had tour guides who knew where we were going and because we didn't really have a determined itinerary, it's hard to keep track of what we saw and in what order (in contrast to most of our previous blog entries!). But I remember we started in Brussels' Grande Place, which is similar to Lille's, but even more over-the-top with a mix of late Gothic architecture and 17th-century brick guild halls.

Mannikin Pis and Lisa.

We walked to see the Mannikin Pis, a famous fountain in the shape of a little boy peeing (it was surrounded by tourists, which I suppose should be no surprise). We also tried to get into the church of Notre-Dame de la Chapelle, but it was closed (surprising on Easter!) and then walked through an antique-dealer area to a Sunday flea market, which was cool but we're not really able to buy much more stuff to bring home! We had lunch there at a little greasy-spoon kind of place. I tried stoemp, a good Belgian/Dutch dish consisting of mashed potatoes and carrots served with a sausage on the side.

Sablon interior.

Belgian Waffle and Lisa.

After lunch, we walked through more of the central city and tried Belgian waffles from a little mobile food van. They were good and different from American Belgian waffles; these were almost caramelized on the outside but were still soft on the inside. We then went into the church of Sablon. It was a late Gothic church with no ambulatory, choir, or side chapels off the aisles, which meant that all the stained glass was much closer to us than any French church we've seen. There was also a cool aristocratic funerary chapel on one side, too.

Cathedral.

Cathedral interior.

We then walked past the national art museum, the royal palace, and a big park to get to the cathedral. The cathedral was full of tourists but was pretty nice. The stained glass was fairly new (mostly 19th-century) and so it used very vivid colors. We also went down to the crypt below the cathedral where we could see part of the excavations showing the original Romanesque cathedral from the 11th century. It was all very nice but I didn't think it was that fantastic of a church. Perhaps I was just spoiled by seeing the Amiens Cathedral the day before!

Cathedral crypt.

Stained glass from the cathedral.

It was now about six o'clock and Nathaniel wanted to introduce us to a couple of his French friends. We took a commuter train to the Brussels South station and walked from there into the Saint-Giles neighborhood (which was a bit grittier than central Brussels). We met them at a bar and they were very nice people - one had family from near Rennes. Meeting them at a bar also gave me an opportunity to try Belgian beer. It was lighter and wheaty but quite tasty. We stayed about an hour or so then went back to Nathaniel and Maria's house for a delicious meal of fajitas before bed.

Brussels reminded Lisa and me a lot of Chicago, with a very clean, touristy central area then dirtier, more immigrant neighborhoods with a large mix of architectural styles. All of this is in contrast to the next city we visited, Bruges.

Bonus picture: Detail, Sablon interior.

Lille

Lille's Grande Place.

Lille is a very different place than anywhere else we've been in France. It's the capital of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region ("the eastern Pennsylvania of France" - Aaron: 8/21 regions, Lisa: 12/21 regions) and it's practically on the Belgian border. Thus, throughout its history, it was constantly fought over between the French and whomever ruled Belgium and the Netherlands (usually the Austrians and Spanish) and it wasn't permanently incorporated into France until 1713. Because of its history, it has a lot of 17th-century Dutch-style buildings with lots of brick and ornamentation in a kind of flamboyant Spanish  Baroque style. It's also a very large city, surprisingly so for a city I had never really heard of before I came to France - its metropolitan area is the fourth-most populous in the country. In fact, as we walked from the train station to the tourist office for our free map, the streets were packed with people, out enjoying a Saturday afternoon stroll through the shopping district. I'm not sure we've seen a city that crowded since our Saturday in Nantes last fall!

Brueghel!

The main reason we wanted to stop off in Lille (other than to be able to say that we've visited the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region) was to see the art museum, which is supposed to be one of the best in France outside of Paris. Plus, we correctly guessed they'd have free baggage storage where we could get some weight of our backs for a few hours. Anyway, the museum lived up to the hype. It's in a huge 19th-century building and it's got a great collection of 15th- and 16th-century Flemish painting (which I suppose one should expect, with it being so close to Belgium). We spent about two hours there, enjoying the free audio guide (it was an iPod!), although I mainly used it to read about the art rather than listen. We didn't have time to see everything, but we did see some of the more distinctive parts of the collection, such as a bunch of 19th-century wax seals. They also have several massive wooden scale models of "the citadels of France," Lille among them It was a series of several hundred models that was first produced under King Louis XIV starting in 1688 and added to up until 1870. It was supposed to be a way to visualize military campaigns around these fortresses as well as plan additions or new fortifications. It was certainly a different kind of art than we'd seen at other museums!

Local décor.

Old Bourse.

After we got kicked out at closing time, 6 pm, we walked back to the central city and saw the Grand Place, the main square of the town surrounded by 16th and 17th century guild halls and the Old Bourse, a stock exchange built in 1652 that has a used book fair in the courtyard every day. We poked through the books then, on the way back to the train station, went into the church of St. Maurice.

St. Maurice Church.

This, too, was unlike anything else we'd seen in France. It was a 15th/16th century Flemish-style "hall church" - one big room without a choir, nave, aisles, etc. like in all the Gothic churches we've seen. Lisa also noted that it seemed to be one of the most "occupied" churches we've seen, with lots of banners and decorations up and a play area for children during services. Afterwards, we got take-out Chinese food from a place right across the street (we don't get much Chinese food in Rennes!) and walked to the TGV train station, which is different from the regional train station we came in at. We ate there and waited for our train. (It was 20 minutes late, but then again, its origin was Perpignan, in the far southwest of France. So 20 minutes late out of a six and a half hour trip is pretty good!)  Our next destination: Brussels.

PS.  This was actually written by Aaron.