23 Days of Travel: 1 week in Paris, France

Instead of starting with day 1 of the traveling workshop with my professor and the 10 other students on the trip I will start with the day before. The day before the workshop started Ryan left to go back to America, and I went to find my airbnb in France. I no longer had an data on my phone, so if I could not find the place I knew that this would be a problem. The place was only a 20 minute walk from the hotel we stayed at the night before, and I downloaded a map of Paris on my phone while I still had WiFi.

As a started walking from my hotel to the airbnb located near the Gare du Nord Train station around 11 in the morning the streets were empty besides for the armored police vans on ever side streets of the main street that I was walking on. I did not really think much of the police vans and solders with machine riffles because this is honestly something I see in Europe all the time. If you walk down Las Rambles, the main street in Barcelona, the soldiers are a normal site to see. The thing that I was not used to seeing that through me off guard as I continued walking was a bunch of people with purple flags walking in the same direction I was walking.

Eventually I got to a point where I could see a mass of people with flags congregating, and could no longer see the street in front of me. Luckily the door for the airbnb was in front of these people. The problem was when I got to the door the door code I was given did not work, so I waited a couple minutes till a old man opened the door with his code and let me into the courtyard. In the courtyard I was advised to go through a second door to get to the apartment, but of course my code didn’t work again. Since I did not have data and my phone stopped working in London I had no way to contact the airbnb host to find out what the problem was so I waited to see if maybe the airbnb host would come to the courtyard. After a while of waiting I decided it might be a good idea for me to try and leave and find a McDonalds where I could connect to WIFI. (advice if you go to Europe: McDonalds always has free WIFI and there is one around every tourist destination) As I was about to exit the building to go to the McDonalds and call the airbnb host I started to hear footsteps and yelling in French. Whoever the people with the purple flags were, they were walking right across the doorway I was inside. Afraid of going outside and having someone steel my luggage or wallet in the mass of people I stayed inside a little longer. Eventually a elderly French women came into the courtyard to take out her trash. She noticed I seemed upset and invited me up to her room for tea and said she could call the host for me. Seeing that she seemed like a nice woman and I was desperate I took her up on the offer and she called the airbnb host for me. It turns out I was in the wrong building the entire time, because the airbnb website put the address of the building next door to the building I was supposed to be in. Getting to my airbnb the host then again made me tea and made me feel at home.

Now the reason I told this story was to just show how we cannot believe every stereo type we hear. Many people call the French rude, but honestly, I met the nicest people when I was having some troubles in France. The old women at the same time asked if I was British and not American because I also did not seem rude.

At the airbnb, I was able to connect to the WIFI and help my 5 other classmates staying at the place find it with the correct address.

The next morning started the class traveling workshop with our professor Alejandro Lapunzina. Since Alex had lived in Paris for many years and the UIUC study abroad program used to be in Versailles he was able to organize this time very well.

Day 1 started at Notre-Dame. We did not go inside the cathedral this day but instead looked around at the urban space built around the chapel that has dramatically changed over the years.

We then viewed some other public spaces in France and got a good idea of the city organization. We even crossed over the bridge that everyone puts a lock on. Turns out this never used to be a thing, but is more of a side-effect of mass Tourism, and if you put a lock on the bridge the city will cut it off soon enough to make more room. Paris actually had to ban putting locks on some bridges because the structure of the bridges started to fail from all of the extra weight.

And of course, we ended the day at the Eiffel Tower, because you cannot go to Paris without seeing the Eiffel Tower lit up at night. The Eiffel Tower was much more beautiful than I had originally imaged. I always here people telling me it is a lot smaller than you think, but I thought it was huge compared to the rest of the city!

On Day 2 we met in front of the Sainte-Chapelle. The Sainte-Chapelle is a small, but beautiful Gothic church in Paris. After the small church, we headed over to the massive Cathedral of Note-Dame in Pairs. We luckily on this day had a little bit of sunlight when we climbed the towers of Notre-Dame and had a great view of the tops of the city of Paris. Paris is overall a very short city, but that is partially so no building trumps the Eiffel Tower. Going into both churches on this day I did an interior comparison that you can see in my drawings of a couple bays from each church.

Views from the top of Notre-Dame.

After the morning of churches, we headed to lunch and then to see the Centre Pompidou. The Pompidou is not a building you typically thing of when you think of Paris. It is a building that has no exterior skin and is like a raw skeleton. Designed by Renzo Piano this art museum deliberately shows all the functions of the building from the outside and is a great building to learn from. It also does a great job at creating a new public space with the plaza on the side of the building with the entrance and exit. Below are a couple images of the exterior.

Other than being a great building the museum had a great contemporary art collection inside that included work from artist like Picasso, Allan Kaprow, and Claus Oldenburg. I always enjoy seeing work by Oldenburg considering I did a work inspired by his last year and made a giant Starbucks cup. Claus also made many large plus size objects of popular culture in American society as well and used to sell them in the studio that he had set up like a grocery market. Doing this he comically critiqued the consumer culture that we live in. Below you see a watch by Claus Oldenburg.

Another interesting things about this museum is that had many rooms specifically for certain feeling. As you can see below one room wanted to only have a focus on sound, another site, another smell, and another I am not really sure about. Overall, I find it an interesting concept that each of these rooms were designed specifically for one feeling.

Room of leaves above focuses on smell.

Room of colors above focuses on seeing.

Room with the wool and piano focuses on sounds.

Not sure what this above room focuses on, but it makes me feel like I was in a cartoon cave.

On day three we met at the Bibliotheque St Genevieve. A beautiful library right next to the Pantheon of Paris. We entered the library at 9 am before it officially opened at 10. There was no one in the Library before us, but when we exited there was a line of at least 300 students wrapped around the building to get in.

After the library, we went into the Pantheon. The Pantheon of Paris was probably double the size of the Pantheon of Rome, and the Dome reminded of the Cathedral in Florence. I drew a section of the Dome below.

The Pantheon in Paris was originally a Catholic Basilica that was later turned into a government building where they covered up all the side windows and changed some of the interior paintings from

religious-themed to governmental themed.

My favorite part of this Pantheon had to be the enormous crypts that were underneath the entire basilica. The crypts in the Pantheon are kind of like the French dead people hall of fame. The crypts housed anyone who had made an impact in French society. Many times, the people buried inside were already dead for over a 100 years when the French government decided to move them. Among the deceased included Victor Hugo and author of the Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas. Images from the crypt below.

That night we had some time for independent visits, so I few of us went over to see the Eiffel Tower during the day. Sadly, the city of Paris almost always has a dense fog, smog, or both over it so the Eiffel towers top most point was difficult to see, and it was even more difficult to see anything from the top once inside.

Out next stop was the Paris Catacombs! We bought tickets online the night before because otherwise, the line was hours long to wait in. Overall, I did not think the Catacombs were that creepy, but it was a cool and much different type of museum then the ones I usually go to. Like many museums, it had a lot of dead people, but this one just had a lot more.

The next morning, we met more on the outskirts of Paris at the Louis Vuitton Foundation, or otherwise known as the MoMA of Paris. Considering this is the first building designed by Frank Gehry that I have seen I was really looking forward to seeing the museum. Our visit started with an architecture tour by one of the museum employees who explained to us that during the design process they kept having to tell Frank Gehry to make his design more and more simple so it would be easy to hang the artwork. They did not want another Guggenheim because hanging the work in that museum is quite challenging with all of the curved walls.

Another reason Gehry had to keep the work simpler than his usual work was because the city of Paris would have objected to something crazy that would break up its uniform image. Overall, I thought the museum is one of the most beautiful buildings, with a glass exterior that reflects all of the natural landscape around it. Gehry’s idea was to have all the museum walls on the interior and then create sails on the outside of the exterior to make the building have movement.

Now to switch my focus from the building to the work inside of the building. Inside the foundation was a collection of work on loan from the MoMA in New York! They had work from Andy Warhol, Picasso, Duchamp, Rene Magritte, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Salvador Dali, and many more. The work I was probably most excited to have seen would be The Persistence of Memory, by Salvador Dali. This painting contains the well-known melting clocks. I was shocked at how small the work was. It was only on a canvas the size of an A4 (typical letter size) piece of paper, but it was still beautiful.

Warhol

Magritte

Dali

Our next stop on the list was the Villa la Roche, a house designed by famous architect Le Corbusier. The house was made for a very rich man to have very fancy parties and talk with his friends about the newest artwork and gossip. The house was perfectly made for this task, and I could not imagine anyone else doing anything but hosting fancy parties here. The living room had a permanent cocktail table for the help to serve you, and a ramp that took you up to the highest point in the home. Image of the entertainment space below.

After the Villa, we headed over to La Villette, the third largest park in Paris. My favorite thing about this park would be the large red sculptures designed by Bernard Tschumi (same architect as the Acropolis museum). These red sculptures were almost like pieces of an adult playground scattered around the park and were extremely fun to walk along to look at the views.

After playing in the park we headed back to our place to change and get ready for a night at the theatre. We saw the orchestra at the Philharmonie de Paris. The building was very strange and the seating was all around the orchestra and not the front. We had seats in the back because they were cheaper, but the sound was a little different according to some of my friends who play classical music. Overall, I thought the building was a little strange, maybe even a little over done in parts, but it did have an interesting ceiling in the entrance area and the concert music was still very beautiful even from the back side.

The next day we headed to Versailles to see the Chateau and the gardens. The entire reason that this palace exists is to revolve around the Sun King. Here the Sun King, King Louis XIV, ruled over France with the royal court that he moved from Paris. Everyone’s daily routine revolved around the king. When he woke up in the morning, if you were royal enough, you too would wake up in the morning and watch as he got dressed and then watched again as he ate, went along with his daily activities, and fell back to sleep at night. (Pictures from the gate, in front, and inside the chateau below)

The hall of mirrors is probably the most elaborate room in the Chateau and would be the room you would enter if you wanted to talk to the king on his throne. The mirrors made the hall look giant, as they all faced the windows out to the Gardens of Versailles. (Hall of Mirrors below)

The gardens were immense and beautiful. You easily could have spent multiple days in the gardens along walking around, but it was cold so I didn’t stay more than a few hours walking around. A place I would like to go back to in the Spring one day.

The next day in Paris we went to the famous Villa Savoye, probably the most well-known work of architecture by Le Corbusier. This is the work he defined the 5-points of Architecture with that can be best explained by the recipe I wrote below.

A RECIPE FOR ARCHITECTURE:

Prep-time: Decades of practicing architecture.

Ingredients:

· 1/2 cup pilotis

· 1 cup roof garden

· 3 tablespoons free façade

· 1 teaspoon free plan

· 3/4 cup horizontal windows

Baking instructions

1. In a large bowl combine all ingredients and set aside.

2. Consider presentation of plating with client’s needs and desires.

3. Add sugar and carefully place ingredients onto construction documents.

(Images of Villa Below)

After the Villa Savoy, we had some free time, so a few of us headed to the Louvre. At the Louvre, I, of course, saw the Mona Lisa. I was shocked at how big it was. Everyone tells me the work is so small, but to me, it seemed like the normal size for a portrait painting. Of course, it was not as big as the wall size paintings surrounded it, but it was not as small as The Persistence of Time on a letter size canvas like I thought it would be.

After the Louvre, we walked down the Champs Elysees until we got to the Arc de Triomphe. The arch was huge. We could see the arch from the Louvre and thought that the walk would maybe be a mile top, but it ended up being about 2.5 miles and an hour walk. Though the Champs Elysees was a wonderful shopping street with lots of macron and coffee shops, so I cannot complain.

The next day I took a 6-hour train back from Paris to Barcelona. The train ride felt very fast because of the beautiful mountain landscape we passed over. Back in Barcelona, I was just happy to see some sun, because although Paris was great, all in all, it was a very cloudy city. That was the end of my winter break.