We realize that it has been a very long time since our last post. Part of this is due to a busy winter, where Katherine traveled for six weeks for research in Brussels and Weimar and her parents visited for a month to help out, which was much appreciated. Now life has returned to "normal," and so we can finally share our wonderful New Year's visit to Paris.
Looking at these pictures makes us happy, and they pretty much say it all, but we'll try to fill in some of the details. We had the wonderful offer to stay in an apartment owned by parents of a friend, which meant that we had a real home away from home and could take advantage of all the great food shopping in the neighborhood. Although Mike and I know the city quite well, we wanted to introduce it to Oliver and Nora and show them the greatest hits. As we came up out of the metro at the stop "Pont Neuf" and looked out over the Seine to the Ile de la Cité, Oliver's first word was "wow." I hoped that he would be impressed by the city, and indeed he was. He was up for anything during the trip, and even asked to be taken to more art museums (which warmed the cockles of his mother's heart). Nora was a real trooper, but perhaps a little less ready to absorb all the history. After three days of serious sight-seeing, she declared that today would be a day with "no museums and no towers." This is hard to avoid in Paris.
We started our exploration of the city at Notre Dame.
From there we went to the Pompidou. Although the square in front has become rather subdued, the building never ceases to delight, and Oliver and Nora loved running up and down the escalators. We later returned for a look in the permanent collection-- Nora spent quite a while in front of three paintings by Matisse of windows painted in various levels of abstraction. Oliver enjoyed a show of Mondrian and De Stijl and the works of Kandinsky. It was enormously fun to see them engaging with the works.
Although Christmas-New Year's is a busy tourist season in Paris with long lines at the major attractions, we could not avoid the Eiffel Tower, which Oliver desperately wanted to ascend. En route there we visited the Arc de Triumphe.
From there we headed to the Eiffel Tower. Don't get me wrong-- the Eiffel Tower is a fine monuemnt, but in my view it is better viewed from a distance. The line to go up is interminable. We happened to pick a rainy, foggy day, and the views from the top were not very auspicious, but up we went anyway. We spent a total of about three hours in line, half of that to go up, the other half to get down. We had a good ten minutes at the top before the rain got to be too much, and we decided that we didn't want to wait in yet another line to use the bathroom. It was an exercise in endurance, but we very much enjoyed the view later that evening of the Tower from the new footbridge built across the Seine. We recovered from our tower experience by going to the Musée du Quai Branly, the new museum for African and Oceanic Art located nearby-- it is an innovative building with displays of objects that foreground aesthetics rather than historical information.
Day 3 consisted of a trip to the Louvre, which involved a line about a quarter of a mile long to get in.
In the "good old days" Mike and I used to be able to enter via side entrance for free by showing a letter that we were full-time researchers. However times have changed, and we now have to wait in the regular line along with the rest of the world. This being said, the Louvre courtyard offers certain pleasures while you wait-- it isn't the worst place to stand around for an hour, and we actually enjoyed the experience. Inside we saw some of the highlights-- Greek and Roman statues, Michelangelo's slaves, and of course the gallery of nineteenth-century French painting, where I am afraid that I talked Oliver and Nora's ears off. Oliver insisted on getting a look at the Mona Lisa, which basically consisted of us cramming into a crowded room and lifting him up above our shoulders so that he could see a small painting encased in bullet-proof casing-- he was content with this, although I doubt that he managed to see much.
From there we crossed the Seine to have lunch in the area around St. Germain des Près. The kids were tired, but managed to revive a bit after some steak-frites.
By now you might understand why after three days Nora proclaimed that she would visit no towers or museums. This was ok, and we took the opportunity to visit friends in the city. We ended up seeing a lot of friends, in fact. Our clock kept getting pushed back, and we returned home late (around 11pm) most nights, except for New Year's when we left the party "early" at 3am.
After rallying for the incredibly nice and fun New Year's celebration, Nora was pretty much out of commission, so Mike and Oliver embarked on their own tour of military Paris, which took them to the Invalides and Bastille.
They both truly enjoyed this, and Mike fed Oliver's enthusiasm for the history of the Revolution and World War I.
Mike also got in touch with his masculinity at the École Militaire.
Nora and I met the boys at the end of the day at Sacré Coeur before meeting a friend for dinner.
By this point our trip was almost over, and we cheated by celebrating epiphany a few days early so as to sample a "galette du roi," a nice flaky pastry with a little plastic king hidden in it-- whoever finds it gets to be king/queen for the day.
We were quite sad to leave, but some of Katherine's nostalgia wore off when she experienced a nightmare scenario trying to change their reservation on the TGV. Weather had been an issue all along, and we wanted to leave on an earlier train so as to make our connection in Mannheim. The problem was that we had made our reservations in Germany, and the French attendants couldn't read our tickets, let alone figure out how to locate our reservation within their system (so much for Franco-German partnership). After traveling to three train stations, speaking to five attendants as well as three policemen who forcefully evacuated the ticketing area due to a "suspect package," she managed to find someone who knew what he was doing, who changed the reservation in about 2 minutes. From there she raced across the city to meet Mike and the kids at the train with not a minute to spare!
It was nice to get back to Göttingen, and fortunately, our friend Sylvie had prepared us by playing us a recording of the song,
"Göttingen" (1968) by the Parisian chanteuse Barbara--it is worth looking up if you don't already know it.
