Paris! City of OH MY GOD I DON'T CARE.

[ayun]

The " #confessyourunpopularopinion" Twitter fad is well-timed for me, because I'm in the research-heavy phase of planning a trip to London and Paris later this year for me and Andy, and my unpopular opinion is that I've never given much of a shit about Paris as a place to visit. I kind of hated Amelie, I don't really care for cathedrals, palaces,

Comments

[aliceinfinland]

London: East End / Brick Lane / Spitalfields / Shoreditch is the most interesting part, I think. Like East Berlin vs. West Berlin. City money is gradually slicking things up from Liverpool Street outward.

Edgware Road, Middle Eastern restaurant and shop neighborhood at the base of corporate high rises. Look for Fatoush Express, it's my favorite London restaurant. You will also like the earthy-crunchy neighborhood of Camden.

Sir John Soane's Museum. This is how to be a hoarder, people.

National Portrait Gallery. Like meeting people without having to talk to them.

Paris: Going to Paris is like time travel. It is a city that, owing to not being a global banking center and having a truly huge stock of solid but not modernized city center housing to start with, hasn't totally squeezed out its middle and working class and still has little-shop-around-the-corner village communities all over the place. Enjoy the massive outdoor fleas.

The best touristy thing I did last time I was there was to walk their equivalent of the High Line, which was lovely in high summer, maybe not so much in November. A highlight of my first trip, there, around 1990, was going to midnight Rocky Horror Picture Show in French, where of course I ran into two people I knew from Cambridge.

The Eiffel Tower is better up close than you'd think, and so are the Monet Water Lilies. I deeply regret never having gone to the Musée de L'Homme, now under massive renovation, in the same way I regret not having gone to the Commonwealth Museum in London to see how all those painful 20th-century colonialist notions were presented to the public in exhibit form.

[ayun]

The Parisian High Line is the Promenade Plantee, right? I've got that on the maybe list (because, yeah, weather) and the Eiffel Tower is a definite yes. I...don't care for Monet. Really for Impressionism in general, and it doesn't seem as if there's much other reason to visit the Orangerie. But your suggestion does remind me that I should try to find out if any Paris museums have Yves Tanguy works.

On the colonial-WTF tip, I cut and pasted this recommendation into the doc I'm steadily assembling:
"My favourite building in Paris is the immigration museum, which used to be the Museum of African and Oceanic arts, and was originally built for the the 1931 Colonial Expo. Its facade is covered with intricate concrete carvings of people in "the colonies" and all the exotic products they produced for France. It was both beautiful, and grotesque in the assumptions it was making about African and other colonial peoples."

Thank you for the suggestions!