In which my photos are disappointingly blurred

Sorry this has been so long in coming; I just got swamped with picking classes/looking for an apartment/everyday stuff. (I finally found an apartment! Right next to the Centre Pompidou (the modern art museum – more on that later), with a French family who have two little kids, gorgeous spacious apartment. And free Internet! Whoo!)

But here goes.

First off: I went to look at an apartment last week right by the Arc de Triomphe. (This was actually the reason my housing was so screwed up: I thought I had this one, but it fell through, so I was left with nothing.) While we were over there, we decided why not actually go see it? We didn’t have time to go up, but here are some pictures from the ground:

The bottom…


…and the top.


There was some kind of memorial service going on at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, I think. At least, it was gated off, full of dressed-up people, and lined with soldiers.


One of the carvings on the Arc.


And another. I like how even the carvings of Athena on a war memorial include a child reading at her foot: war, wisdom, and weaving. She’s my favorite goddess.

And that’s the Arc de Triomphe. I do want to go back another time and see the top, and I’ll definitely visit the Champs Elysees, because how could I not?

But here’s the Musee d’Orsay, where we were taken on an orientation field trip by Brown-in-Paris, known for having all the Impressionist artists. The museum is in a former railroad station, and you can still see the basic structure of that. But because it’s built in that tunnel sort of shape, they’ve been able to organize the art in a very cool layout: all the traditionalists are on one side, and the rule-breakers (like the Impressionists) are on the other.


Here’s one of the massive animal statues on the terrace. It’s a rhino (clearly), standing over what I can only say must be a cactus. I don’t know why. It must have some sort of symbolism. (And over to the left, that’s Megan, who always has a plan for sightseeing. She’s on the phone, confirming her apartment, after having been here for two days. Lucky.)


You can kind of get some sense of the railroad-station construction here. In front of the camera are a couple of girls in the program; they’re all wearing headsets because that’s how tours work at this museum. The tour guide has a microphone, and everyone in the tour has headsets to hear better. It was very helpful sometimes, especially since the tour was in French.


I told you my photos were blurred. There’s no flash photography allowed, so the pictures all came out blurred and washed out, which I found disappointing. But this clock is massive, a former railway clock.


Our guide, who was clearly enamored of rule-breakers, kept talking about how the old-style artists were so careful in their painting and only painted idealized subjects, not including the flaws in the real thing. She was going on about how no one has skin this color (“like marzipan”) in real life. Ok, granted, my skin will never be this perfect (I’ve got the lines and spots you’ll see on everyone, plus the faded freckles permanently burned into my shoulders, and more), but I do think it’s pretty much this color. It’s really awkward and reflective in real life, though, not so soft and elegant.


Apparently, they had frat parties in ancient Greece, too.


I snapped this picture running behind my tour, because I was caught by it. We didn’t really talk about any of the sculpture, but I really like this one: the facial expressions, the graceful movement of the figures. The man in the center (Bacchus, perhaps?) reminds me extraordinarily of Tilda Swinton.


I loved that this woman had set up an easel and was copying a Monet, and no one cared. I just thought that was really cool.


Ahh, this painting. My favorite Monet, partly because it reminds me of this bridge in Somesville, Maine, right down the street from my cousins’ house. But I also love the colors and the tranquility of it.

But then there’s Van Gogh, who is my favorite painter. I love the vibrant colors he uses and the fact that he exaggerates paint strokes and the way he never paints straight lines. Here are a few of my favorites. (I am extraordinarily disappointed, though, that Starry Night was probably in transit from New Haven, so I didn’t get to see it here and didn’t get to see it there because the tickets sold out. That’s my favorite painting ever; I have a poster of it which gets hung up in my dorm every year. It’s simultaneously calming and unnerving, and I love that he could do that with blue and green and yellow. Painting is all about colors for me, and nothing else affects me.)

Not Van Gogh, but:

Impressionism is not kind to faces.


Toulouse-Lautrec! The famous painter of the Moulin Rouge! I got really excited when I recognized this. It’s weird to see these up close: they’re huge, and it looks like they’re painted on the back of something else, newspaper maybe, or that tea-staining you do to make paper look old in middle school history projects. It’s like something is bleeding through. But I liked it.


I like sculpture better than paintings, and this one is epic. You can get such movement and violence in things like this, such fear.


Accidental flash! Oops. But the colors and the detail come out so much better here, even if the bright spot is kind of frustrating, don’t they? I wish flash photography didn’t harm paintings. (At least, so I’ve been told.)


Speaking of epic: the gates of hell. There’s so much detail in this, all the little figures fighting and falling. And two strangers for scale! (Actually, they were just standing there a long time and I got impatient. I’m probably going to be in lots of tourist photos by the time I leave here, with all the places I’ve been going to see.)


I love this: the symmetry, the grace, the phony background of stars. I love it all.


Another accidental flash. But this woman really struck me: I love the expression on her face. She looks like she knows more about you than you will ever know about yourself, and like that knowledge amuses her. I’ve never seen that in the Mona Lisa, but I like this one.


Polar bear! This cracked me up when I saw it. I don’t know why they have it or why someone carved it, but I love it. I like how there are almost no lines in the statue, but he still has a distinct expression on his face.

Whoo, epic post! I can't figure out how to cut pictures behind a handy little link so the page isn't so big, so I'm sorry about that, and if anyone knows how to fix it, please tell me. Up next: Notre Dame!