Paris... and stuff
So I'm bad at the regular updates. My girlfriend was here last week, and that was great. We went to Paris over the weekend; my first time there. It is a pretty amazing place. We visited a friend who lives in Paris, and she gave us the grand tour. We ended up walking a 30k loop around the main part of the city, starting at the Arc de Triumph, and walking from the Louvre, to Notre Dame, to the Eiffel tower and then back.
We also went to the Musee D'Orsay, my girlfriend's favorite, which has an amazing collection of impressionist works, and some Van Gogh, including some of his self portraits. It's funny how art calls up certain things from your memory very powerfully. For instance, I kept humming Jonathan Richman's song "Vincent Van Gogh" at the museum, long after we left the rooms with his work. And their was a large section of Renoir paintings, including some of a girl in a red bonnet, and these all made me think of my mom, since she has a Renoir coffee table book with the girl in the red bonnet on the cover, on the coffee table I cracked my head on when I was small.
The trip from Lausanne to Paris took less than 4 hrs on the TGV (high speed train, i.e. Gran Vitesse), and the hardest part was figuring out how to buy the tickets. Let's just say that the french SNCF ticket office hasn't really entered the new millenium. I feel the new millenium is overated as a whole, but printing your tickets at home is a plus Feh, I wish I had something interesting to say; the Atlantic feels a lot larger than it did just a few days ago. Well, its Tom Waits and the last metro home for me. Its a long walk otherwise, and the weather is getting colder here.
We also went to the Musee D'Orsay, my girlfriend's favorite, which has an amazing collection of impressionist works, and some Van Gogh, including some of his self portraits. It's funny how art calls up certain things from your memory very powerfully. For instance, I kept humming Jonathan Richman's song "Vincent Van Gogh" at the museum, long after we left the rooms with his work. And their was a large section of Renoir paintings, including some of a girl in a red bonnet, and these all made me think of my mom, since she has a Renoir coffee table book with the girl in the red bonnet on the cover, on the coffee table I cracked my head on when I was small.
The trip from Lausanne to Paris took less than 4 hrs on the TGV (high speed train, i.e. Gran Vitesse), and the hardest part was figuring out how to buy the tickets. Let's just say that the french SNCF ticket office hasn't really entered the new millenium. I feel the new millenium is overated as a whole, but printing your tickets at home is a plus Feh, I wish I had something interesting to say; the Atlantic feels a lot larger than it did just a few days ago. Well, its Tom Waits and the last metro home for me. Its a long walk otherwise, and the weather is getting colder here.