Arc De Triomphe and Louis Vuitton Museum

October 25, 2018 Day 3 of Trip

I am having trouble adjusting to the time zone difference and got up too early after too few hours sleep. Age or jet lag? I spent early morning hours reading on the computer and working on the blog, but then really sag in the mid afternoon..

We had to leave by 8:00 to meet step daughter and grandchildren at the US Embassy. They were coming up from the Loire Valley to have a brief Paris vacation and to renew the youngster's US passport. It was about a 35 minute walk from our hotel to the embassy.

I enjoy walking around and within new or foreign cities. Paris is particularly pleasant with all the street level shops and food smells.  The vehicle traffic was not gridlocked. However it is sometimes hard for me to follow Google directions with the foreign pronunciations and the very precise directions that single out even the most minute changes in direction. However we made it with only one rerouting phase. (I never did find FDR Boulevard.)

After greetings we took the two older grandchildren off to breakfast at a non-decrepit cafe. Lots of croissants and drinks for 25 euro. Paris is not cheap. By then the passport work had been completed and we agreed to meet at our hotel.

After dropping off their luggage at our hotel we walked to the Arc de Trimphe. It took about 15 minutes. It is located at the end of the Champs Elysees (that is a nice stroll under trees amidst luxury shops and named after heaven in Greek mythology.) in the Charles de Gaulle Etoile roundabout. You take your life in your hand as a pedestrian if you try to cross the round about on foot. We took the underground passageway.

Contrary to mine and popular belief, neither Napoleon's armies, and except once, nor any armies,  have marched under the arch. The arch was conceived by Napoleon who declared to his troops after the 1805 Battle of Austerlitz where he defeated the combined armies of the Russian and Austrian empires, "I will bring you back to France and there you will be the object of my tenderest attentions...". When he returned to France after the battle he commissioned the construction of the arch in the style of a Roman triumphal arch. The Austerlitz victory was a watershed moment that seemed to forecast a lengthy period of French dominance. However a mere decade later Napoleon had fallen from power, the Empire was crushed, Russian troops occupied Paris (another instance in the Russian view that it alone has saved western/Christian civilization.) and the Arch had barely risen above its foundations. It was not finished until 1836 and at various times has been viewed as dedicated to the monarchy, the Revolution, the Empire and the various French republics.

It has been the site of major French national events such as the return of Napoleon's ashes, the funeral vigil for Victor Hugo and most recently, the final stage for the Tour de France. In 1919 the Allied armies marched under the Arch. That is the only time that such a military procession occurred. I was surprised that German troops did not march through the arch in 1940 after the fall of France. However the pictures showed that the German army march down the Champs Elysees and through the square, but around the arch. No explanation offered.

We paid 12 euro for the opportunity to enter the arch and climb to the top. 202 steps to the mezzanine floor.  That was an effort, but I did not have to stop to rest. There was a small museum on that floor. After touring that we climbed the remaining 82 steps  to the top. The terrace offered sublime panoramas of Paris, particularly the 12 avenues radiating out from the square.

In the attic room off the mezzanine there were exhibits of many of the uniforms worn by the various armies in WWI. Lots of colonials for the British and French.

There are lots of engravings, inscriptions and sculptures on the base and walls of the arch commemorating important events and people in French history.  At the base is the French Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. As in the US it was dedicated on November 11, 1921.
 We then walked to lunch at an American style burger joint. We ate outside. Very good milkshake.

After lunch we walked to the Fondation Louis Vuitton in western Paris. Opened in 2014, this Frank Gehry designed building is an eye catching architecture design. Like the Disney Hall in LA it features a curving stainless steel exterior topped by 12 glass "sails" overlooking a waterfall and basin that is reminiscent of a boat.  We spent several hours there exploring the many layer building and the exhibits of the works of Egon Schiele, an early 20th century German artist, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. The latter was an American painter of Haitian and Puerto Rician heritage who essentially started out as a graffiti artist in NYC and one of his Heads paintings sold for $110,5 million in 2017. He died young in 1988 from a drug overdose.

We then walked back to the hotel. e played some chess games and the kids picked up their luggage after which we ate dinner at a non-decrepit Chinese restaurant near our hotel.

The kids then took off to the house they were staying in and we returned to the hotel. 

 Arc de Triomphe

 View of Champs Elysees from the Arc

 Roof of Gehry's Louis Vuitton museum

Basquiat's Heads that sold for $110.5million

Paris, France October 2018 From the Walking Dead to the Actual Dead

October 23-24, 2018
 Back on the road at the beginning of a 6 week, three country, two continent trip.
 It was a long day of travel and the airline seats seem to be getting smaller, or maybe I have been expanding. Perhaps I may need to invest in business class for future such trips.
 We left for the airport in SLC over three hours before scheduled departure. That was a mistake. Not only is it a shorter trip to the airport than in LA, but it is much easier to get through the airport check-in and security processes in SLC than LA. When added to the flight departure delay, we found our selves with plenty of waiting time, and no airport lounge. However the airport had good Internet connections.
 It was a 2.5 hour flight to Chicago and then an 8 hour flight to Paris. On the former I experienced a rarity, the flight was only 2/3s full. On the latter, the flight was full and we were seated amongst a group of enthusiastic French teenagers returning from a trip to the US.
 I watched two movies, read a substantial portion of Angela's Ashes and slept a little on the latter flight. We arrived in Paris on time about 10:00 am. It took us almost one and a half hours to get to get out of the airport. Walk to immigration (first entry stamp in my new passport, aside from the Sudan visa entry stamp which had necessitated the new passport), wait for luggage pick-up, there was no customs and then negotiate the Uber ride. We took a group Uber which just squeezed in all the luggage and then took the 30 minute ride to the hotel.

 We are staying at the XO Hotel. Nice up scale hotel. Still small rooms like most Parisian hotels, but at least the elevator is large enough to carry both of us and our luggage. It is located just north of the Champs Elysees area in arrondissement 17. After we checked in (our room was available) and unpacked we had been traveling, and mostly awake, for 22 hours. However with a burst of adrenaline, and a desire to get on to Paris time we decided to forgo a nap and set out for the Cimetiere du Pere-Lachaise.

 A short walk took us to Marechal Juan plaza where we got on the #3 metro at the Pereire station. We purchased the 10 trip Metro package for 14.9 euro. The individual fare is 1.9 euro.

 It was about a 25 minute ride on the Metro. Outside of the US as I ride metros I always wonder why we cannot have metros that are as efficient, frequent and clean as those in the rest of the world.

 We exited at the Pere-Lachaise station from which it was a very short walk to the cemetery.

 Cimetiere du Pere-Lachaise is a 44 acre cemetery which houses over 70,000 tombs, over 800,000 bodies and scores of memorials. It claims to be the most visited cemetery in the world. It was established in 1804 in response to neighborhood graveyards becoming full, perhaps as the Revolution's guillotines or Napoleon's wars increased the death rate. At the time it was in the outskirts of Paris and conflicted with the Parisian tradition of being buried in the quarter in which one lived. That tradition was successfully overcome when the city fathers exhumed the bodies of some local celebrities and reburied them here.

 Walking through the cemetery's grounds was like a stroll through a verdant sculpture garden. The leaves were turning and the tombs were many and frequently ornate. Paris residency is the only requirement to be buried here, so it has a cosmopolitan and in some cases, an international flavor to its inhabitants. We stopped by, among others, the grave sites of Chopin, (we directed a group of Japanese tourists to his site) Moliere, Balzac, Edith Piaf, Bizet, Gertrude Stein, (who was accompanied in death as in life by  her partner, Alice Toklas) and Imre Nagy. The last was an elaborate memorial since he is no longer actually buried there. His body had been there for over thirty years after he had been murdered by the Russians for leading a 1956 liberation movement that was finally shutdown by a Russian led Warsaw Pact invasion and the resulting fleeing of 250,000 Hungarian refugees. (Ironic that 60 years later the Hungarian government is among the leaders in the anti immigrant efforts in Europe.)  His body was repatriated to Budapest in the early 90s after the fall of the communist government. We saw that grave site last year. There were many other grave sites containing the remains of other famous people which we did not have time to visit.

However the rock stars of the cemetery are clearly Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde. Both of their sites are now protected from the favors of their fans. At Morrison's site there were lots of flowers and visitors who were bone many years after his death. At Wilde's site there are many lip stick kisses on the Plexiglass which surrounds his tomb.

One grave site has a supine sculpture of a Victor Noir, a nineteenth century journalist who at age 22 was killed in a duel. During his short life he established a reputation as a ladies man and consequently in death he has become a sex star as woman rub his crotch area , which now is very shiny, in an effort to improve fertility.

Around the outskirts of the cemetery are about a score of memorials to man made disasters and tragedies, from memorials to sea and airplane crashes and the Holocaust. Two of the most moving were a sturdy granite arch commemorating the victims of Dachau and small wire replicas of the children killed.  There were many visitors in the cemetery.

By the late afternoon we were running out of energy and it was getting close to closing time. I thought that if we exited the cemetery closest to the Metro station it would be a more pleasant walk. Instead we found one exit after another closed and so we had to walk twice the length of the cemetery to exit. On the metro ride back to the hotel I was almost falling asleep so we decided to eat dinner close to the hotel. Unfortunately it was about 6:45 and most restaurants  seem not to open for dinner until 7:00 at the earliest, many later than that.

We waited outside Bacino, an Italian restaurant, until it opened at 7. We were the first, and for a while the only customers. We both ordered a plate of the day and got a fish dish and salmon lasagna, Good food and inexpensive wine. The flour less chocolate cake for dessert was just average.
By 9:00 we were exhausted and early to bed.

 Jim Morrison grave site

Children's Holocaust memorial

   Strolling in the cemetey