Day 4 April 8th

Tuesday, April 08, 2008, 1940

Today we woke up when we wanted to. 0800. Luke and I ate a quick breakfast with out even sitting. We ate standing at the kitchen counter. Luke made me one of our favorite Rochester breakfasts- Egg sandwiches! This sandwich was modified though because the mustard was very spicy! Horseradish-y. Oh, and we didn’t have any mayonnaise. It was tasty. Dad was still sleeping too.

We showered and got out the door in 1.5 hours after waking. Dad wondered “Where is breakfast?” and “Are we eating breakfast?” Mom had made them both scrambled eggs.
Our first destination was going to be the Marais walk; this included the modern art museum the Pompidou Center. Well we checked to see what time it opened. Thank goodness we did. It was closed today. So….we rearranged our itinerary. We did Thursday’s activity today; Napoleon’s tomb and Army Museum, then the Rodin Museum followed by the Musee’ d’Orsay. It was the first time we haven’t had to take a metro to our day’s activities. We walked for like 10 min to get there.

Napoleon’s tomb is in a church. I don’t think it is an actually functioning church as there were no pews or hymnals or furniture for that matter. After Napoleon was buried for 19 years he was moved from his grave in St. Helena (where he was exiled) and moved to this gigantic porphyry marble coffin/tomb. His casket was placed in additional caskets and in another casket- like 4 or 5 (a la babushka style) and then finally in this RARE red marble tomb. It is the biggest single piece of this marble that exists. Anyway, his son and brothers are buried/entombed here also. His brothers were awarded to be king of Spain, and Rome (Napoleon II, son of Napoleon), Westphalia (Germany). You know Napoleon named himself to be emperor so he could delegate royalty to his conquered states. It must have been rough. Rick made some joke about the Napoleon ‘complex’- the group of buildings that we toured.

We then continued on to the rest of the museum. We saw a big section on WWI which was all kind of a blur to me. But mostly I remember the trench warfare and the bent guns. To allow the soldiers to better defend themselves with out being a target themselves- they built bent guns. They bent them like periscopes to have the barrel be aimed at the enemy and have the trigger and the shooter safely below ground level in a trench. I hadn’t heard of that before. Now Luke writing: What Lisa doesn’t realize is that you can’t bend a gun and fire it. It really doesn’t work that way. Basically they built a new stock, dropped it a foot and half, connected the triggers and rigged a mirror/periscope system so they could be at trench level with the stock and the physical gun on ground level. We also saw some scary rudimentary type gas masks.

Then we came to the meat and potatoes of the exhibit; the WWII section. This was pretty interesting. The only 1 I can remember is regarding the A bombs dropped on Japan. They were dropped 4 years after the attack on Pearl Harbor! We thought it was an immediate retaliation. It makes the US look a bit crueler. I think. Of course it was focused on the French role, because we are in France. They played up big roles of Charles De Gaulle and the home country played during the whole time. It was kind of neat to see all the guns of the era, and what was being used to fight and defend from the enemy. We saw a remote controlled tank (that was about the size of a VW Beetle, only shorter) and some motorcycles that the allies dropped into France that were the size of the little motorcycles that you see grown adults drive around their driveways.
One thing I didn’t get too excited about was all the period uniforms. There must have been a group of students that were going to school for fashion, because they would walk around and then park themselves in front of a uniform and pull out their sketch book. They were all using black permanent marker that just about made the whole place reek.

When we were done, we came downstairs to go to the bathroom, and one of the employees asked to see our tickets. We weren’t expecting that, especially since we had been through the entire museum. That would be like asking to see a ticket in the Metrodome for going to the bathroom. Whatever. I can’t think of much more to add to the WWII site. It was probably a 3 out of 5. Next on the list is the Rodin Museum.

Lisa and I walked about a block and a half to the Rodin museum and saw a small, but manageable line. We got in with our museum pass. Rodin was a 19th Century sculptor that also did bronze work and some paintings. We saw the majority of his life’s work; the museum is in the mansion that he lived in. That housed most of his smaller works, and on the grounds were about 5 of his better known large garden size bronze works. Rick’s tour started you out in the mansion to look at all the small stuff. I don’t know if I enjoyed this museum very much, because it was kind of hodge podge of stuff. Rodin sculpted a lot of varying nude females. It is said that at one point, he would just have naked ladies walking around moving, dancing doing various things to “inspire” him. If something caught his eye, he would sculpt that particular angle/pose. What a life. He did a few male and female sculptures together, one Lisa liked was called The Kiss, she tells me. He also specialized in hand sculpture, one called The Secret and The Cathedral. The secret was two right hands supposedly holding their secret.
The mansion was two floors and housed about 200 hundred sculptures and 50 about paintings (per Rick). The Rodin museum also featured his favorite contemporary artists. On the grounds were most of his well known Bronze sculptures. The first that I think everyone knows is

The Thinker. You know, the guy that is sitting on something, leaning forward, with his hand tucked up under his chin (I think of Napoleon Dynamite when Deb tells Uncle Rico to slowly put his fist underneath his chin). The sculpture is in a deep though (not of taking a dump either). It is probably his best known work. He also had a bronze sculpture of this author of the time called Balzac. I don’t know what he wrote, or why Rodin liked him, but Rodin did a bronze sculpture of him.

On the other side of the mansion he had probably the second best known work called the Burghers of Calais. It is said that back in 1347 that the six city “fathers” of Calais had to give the King of England the keys to the city and their own lives. So they put on some nooses and had some keys in their hands and off to the gallows. Rodin did a bronze of these six men going to their deaths. Each showed his different emotional expression and posture. They all reacted differently as they were preparing for their own death for the city’s benefit; from humble and honored to hysterics and denial. This was probably my favorite because of twisted emotion and empathy. You could see on their faces and look at their posture to see that these were actually people that were going to die. They actually didn’t die in real life. The King of England pardoned them, at the behest of his wife, and they lived.

After the Burghers of Calais, we saw a bronze door (never was supposed to open) of the gates of hell. This huge cast of doors was a menagerie of twisted figures and iconography of hell. I couldn’t even fathom how they figured out how to do something so big. I guess it took a lot of time and a lot of bronze. It was interesting to look at, and there is some history to it. It was based on Dante’s Inferno and Rodin’s vision. There were more sculptors in the gardens, but most were reproductions of most of the stuff we already saw, or saw mixed into other works. So Lisa and I decided to leave the Rodin museum, but not before we checked out the gift shop were Lisa bought some pictures/postcards. After this flight of fancy, we decided to get one more museum out of the way and go to the Orsay museum. A few metro stops in, and we were there.
The Orsay Museum is based on the years from 1850-1925ish. They feature some realism and impressionism in their halls. Paris was going to demolish a train station, but it was saved because they thought it could be renovated to turn it into a museum specifically for all this turn of the century art that was in many small museums. So they took the tracks out and refurbished it and hung some stuff on the walls and put up some sculptures. When you walk in it is a very airy and open place, and they have small rooms built around the airy expanse. We got to see a lot of Monet, Manet, Van Gogh, Renoir, Degas, Cezanne and others. It is probably the biggest one collection of Impressionism. One of my favorites was Manet; most of his stuff was good. He was a real rebel in the day, and he did what he wanted to, even though Paris, and French people didn’t like it. I don’t know why they didn’t like it, because art is art. Like it or love it.
Lisa and I got pretty bored by the end as we were BURNT out. The place was super busy, and there were a lot of groups that would “hog” the special pieces so you couldn’t get up there to get a good look. They allowed photos with no flash, it was hard to get a good picture cause either you were in the way or “they” were.

After we got past Monet and Van Gogh, I kind of just stopped reading Rick and told Lisa it was time to just wade through the crowds, see what looked interesting and move along…quickly. So we speedily saw a few more things, took the escalators down and got out of there. Oh but wait, Lisa did have a stop at the gift shop for post cards. . After we left there it was time to get going home.

As we were leaving the metro to our stop to get home, we walked past the Rue Cler, and I asked Lisa if she wanted to go and check it out with out the ‘rents. We saw a grocery store, so we decided to go in get some Parisian delights. Boy did we hit pay dirt! We found some chocolate coated little crispy crepes. Those were especially good, and they were cheap like €0.85. We also got some small chocolate tarts for less than a Euro. They were more like flat tarts that had chocolate in the middle, like I small pie, about a half dollar in size. Those weren’t as spectacular. They were okay though.

I finally got some Roquefort Cheese, a yellow cheese and then a packaged cheese that I took a gamble on. We also got some green salad and then we came to the wine department. We had decided when in Paris, get some Champagne. We figured that there would be only French wines, etc in this dinky grocery store, so we didn’t think anything different about it. Well, when we got home it turns out the Asti “champagne” was from Italy, and it was sparkling wine. Champagne can’t be called Champagne unless it is from the Champagne region in France. So we made a mistake with that. Not the first and definitely not the last. We enjoyed the Asti and even made Mimosas with the OJ we bought.

So the cheeses were spectacular. I really enjoyed the Roquefort, but oh boy, could you really see the mold. The blue cheese that you get in the states has some “veins” of blue which everyone assumes is just kind of coloring, and the people in the know can figure out that it is mold. Well, this cheese doesn’t have veins of blue, but caverns of real furry dark green dusty mold. I was astonished. I think for the first few bites, I actually didn’t look at the cheese as I ate it. But boy, once past the lips, it was sure delicious. I would say if I had take a Pepsi challenge with Roquefort and Maytag blue or something, I would definitely pick Roquefort. What a delicious cheese.

The yellow cheese was good, and it was definitely satisfying. Kind of like a foreign cheddar cheese. The prepackaged cheese that I took a gamble on turned out to be good. It was the kind of cheese like camembert and brie with the outer “tough” mold. But once you got past that, it was yummy and tasted like butter. It wasn’t super flavorful, but boy did you get a butter flavor from it. It was tasty, and Beth even got it to spread on her crispy toasts. Lisa made a cheese plate with the cheese menagerie that we had laying around the fridge. It was not as good as the one that we had in Italy that I made, because we didn’t have tons of other goodies to go with it, like Tralli Crackers and olives. But it was tasty none the same.

After the cheese plate, I figured I had to start making supper. We had packed some Arborio rice for risotto and Lisa wanted me to make that. I purchased some grana padano grated cheese for it, and when I was adding it at the end, I only put in half, but I decided, what the heck am I going to do with it. So I dumped the rest of it in there. It was about 2-3 oz in weight that I dumped in there. Hmm, it was nice and cheesy. By the time it cooled off in the fridge from the leftovers, it was a solid hunk of just rice. So that was good.

Rodger and Beth came home then and had some rice and other snackies and then we all decided to get to bed. First Beth loaded the dishwasher, which was nice, because for some reason we had a lot of dishes.

So as we were reviewing the travel plans for the next day, I spilled it to Lisa that I wasn’t particularly interested in going to Versailles. It is supposed to be the palace of all palaces and ritzy and everything. But I was not particularly looking forward to going cause I’ve been to palaces before. The palaces I have been to before didn’t really stoke my fire, nor light any embers, or give me any spark whatsoever. So as Lisa and I went to bed, we talked about it and decided that we could skip it. I am sure Lisa did want to go see it, but I really didn’t, so she took one for the team, and we decided not to. So then off to bed.

One thing I noticed was all the young children in strollers or arms that are in museums. Why do parents take the children along with them to museums that could not possibly hold the attention of small minds? I am not talking about teenagers, I am talking about younger than five. I can’t imagine taking children on a vacation like this. Who says, I think when Tommy turns 5 we’ll take him to Paris to see the Impressionists. Dur.