ZUT ALORS!!... last "night" I slept in (and in; and in...) longer and longer until it was past 3pm. I must have needed the sleep... and my dreams! I was dreaming galore! My heart tells me to up and flee to Berlin or Paris. I am in a quandry as to which, but as I know Paris a little, I dreamed about there... Illustrations: top: metro map and RER map below that ... (click twice to see in vast detail); left: Paris nightscape; right: Galleries Lafayette, view up from the perfume hall...)
Galleries Lafayette (Parisian Harrods).. Shakespeare & Co. (English language bookstore providing free accommodation to anyone willing to muck in int shop that day...) the pursuing aroma of doggies' diarrhoea from Parisian pavements (all those pampered pooing pooches...) and the most luxurious of luxury goods I have ever seen (on the Champs Elysees)... only place in my life I've ever glimpsed a genuine crocodile-skin bag! And I'll never forget the amazing Egyptian room in the Louvre. Or the assistant who directed me there, stopping my dead half way through my "excusez-moi madame; où se trouve le département des antiquités égyptiens et orientales?" with a halting hand and a businesslike: "what language?"!
... and later following signposts to La Joconde... eventually to file amonst a transcontinental crowd into a chamber where from about 4m or 12 ft away and through the bulletproof sheen of several smoked glass coffee-table-tops I was at long last able to glimpse the tiniest and most famous painting on earth: Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa!
The best art in Paris is to be found in the Orsay museum. A bright, light and airy former railway terminus, this features a room packed with about 20 Van Goughs. All I could think as I craned to within inches of the legendary brush-strokes ~ and how they stick out! ~ and through no glass, no barriers bar an ankle-height metal string... This was the late 80s/very early 90s when Sunflowers and Irises had sold for upwards of £50m each or $100m a piece (in today's money) ~ I was in the presence of over a billion dollars' worth of modern art!
The Mona Lisa, incidentally, was vlued by would-be insurers at $100 million at the turn of the 20th Century. So costly in fact was the premium that the Louvre baulked at sending it on an American voyage and, one adventurous theft aside, it has remained at home in Paris ever since... Where its value has surely surpassed the one billion dollar mark...
My Mum, who spends some months a year in a 2nd home in the French countryside (where I've never been invited) described an hilarity moment back here in Angleterre when, caught up amongst a roomful of babbling fellow-humans, she quite unexpectedly realized: wow! I can understand every word they're saying! She's definitely a chip off the same block as me: my lifelone obsession with acquiring exotic languages stems from a sheer repulsion of not being able to understand similar crowds of foreigners from my own childhood as they blibble-blebble-blobbled in "foreign" ~ a tongue I had decided I should master so that nobody would speak over my head ever again!
Photo-blog of the Day:
Misty's Musings www.mistysmusings.com
... fantastic wildlife shots...
19 comments:
For some reason Paris has a bad reputation when it comes to dog shit and cleanliness in general. Now, it probably deserved it at some point and reputations are hard to get rid of but I would like to point out that when Nicole and I were there about 1.5 years ago we did not see ANY dog shit and hardly any rubbish. It is a thousand times cleaner than Amsterdam and London.
No pooing pooches diarrhoea mate, sorry :-)
Dog poo can be found almost everywhere haha. I'd vote for Paris.
As to different languages..it's always funny when I'm abroad..I understand Dutch (native..duh), English, German and French if spoken slow enough. Always cool to listen in on people ;)
So.... are you going to Paris or not?! I'd love to go!
VINCENT: to be honest I don't remember ANY dog pooze on the parisien streets but EVERYONE goes on and on and on about it so it MUST be there somewhere...
ARJAN: one BIG disadvantage of being English mother tongue and of course having mostly monoglot friends it is well nigh IMPOSSIBLE to have a private babblesome conversation in international company, which I used to find really annoying as a child (that foreigners could ALWAYS understand us, yet we couldn't understand foreigners...)
MONOGRAM: definitely wanna go but it's difficult on a methadone script...
Sounds to me like your heart is in Paris Gleds.
I haven't been to Paris but I have been to Nice and have to say there was dog poo all over the place!
Paris a place i would love to visit :-)
How lucky to be able to visit Paris - even in a dream! It is someplace I would like to see but will never likely get the opportunity! You are sounding as though you are in better spirits!! 8-)
Have you had a chance to visit my new photoblog Views From My Camera yet?
Paris is my dream too . . I don't know why because I'm not keen on the French but to spend days in the Louvre and the Pompadeu Centre, drink coffee on a sidewalk and get thrown out of Chanel because they don't 'do' my size plus a night or two in the George Saint with a pink tea rose and a bottle of Billecart Salmon . . ooh la la! Although that Crocodile bag is probably made out of an Aussie croc!
Paris is nice, I went there when I was younger so I don't have such a clear memory of it. But what I do remember is beautiful. = )
I've always wanted to learn other languages, but for some reason I decided that Latin was the way to go. I think I'm going to learn how to speak French and German in college. A bit more useful than Latin, but I can't imagine that they are as much fun.
Well, we're currently trying to decide where to go for our 25th anniversary. For many reasons, I think Florida has a slight advantage. We don't have passports right now anyway, so if we go out of the country we need to hurry that along.
Never been to Paris but I have a cousin who LOVES it there. Been a few times.
Your Mother has a home in France that you aren't allow to visit??? Do explain that sometime.
I wanna go to Madrid!!!!!!!!!! :)
Keshi.
I'm going to have to return to read this post properly ... just wanted to let you know I've added a link at the bottom of my latest post so you can hear what a Noisy Miner sounds like ... and it's not got a Yorkshire or Welsh accent either ;)
South America....go to South America.
AKELAMALU~ some of my heart is definitley in Paris, for sure
SALLY~ well worth going. specially on Eurostar... it wasn't even open yet when I went (which makes me feel very old just to mention the fact...)
KAHSHE~ one reason I feel blest being in London is that you can catch a simple TRAIN to Paris: how glamorous!
BAINO~ hey probably it was... do you think Steve Irwin had a hand in the supply of those bags..?? Paris is not France, just as New York is not America so don't worry about that... Folks from other parts of the country look down and laugh at Parisians on their weekend country excursions.>!!!
LUCINDA~ German is supposed to be a bit like Latin. You have to put the word "the" in a great table according to its gramatical function in the sentence... French is like a degraded and massively funked up Latin, as is Portuguese. But that's about all I know about Latin. If you can say it's "fun" you should find those 2 languages dead easy!
CRYSTAL~ passports are a right pain if you need one in a hurry... but hey can't you get one quickly in person in NYC? Just a thought... Paris is, after all, City of Luurve...
KESHI~ I've been to Madrid for half an hour! You look out over a vast spread out town from "Chmartin" station (well that's what it said on the ticket...)
BIMBIMBIE~ eh oop I shall have to pop right by
EILEEN~ how did you guess? I have a Brazilian Portuguese thing going on right now... all set off and fuelled by that Lambada song as well...
I don't care how dirty Paris or any of these other main European cities are, I would love to just have the privilege of going/visiting!
I would hate living in Paris but it is a fun place to visit for foreigners!
I also learned languages so that I would understand people talking behind my back. I love to surprise people in China this way ;)
Wat: yeah come to Paris... by morning and evening the sandstone buildings are the colour of the rising/setting sun... all glowing-buttery. Amazing!
Zhu: I bet you do!!!
Wat: yeah come to Paris... by morning and evening the sandstone buildings are the colour of the rising/setting sun... all glowing-buttery. Amazing!
Zhu: I bet you do!!!
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