Aux Champs-Élysées

I'm a little behind in posting pictures since it was a very busy last few weeks finishing up papers and presentations for school.  Now, back to the trip to Paris with my sister, Rachel ...  We took an unexpectedly long train ride from Amsterdam to Paris.  That morning we had gone to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and then someone had tried to steal Rachel's money on the city tram, but Rachel saw the culprit in time!  We ran to the train station, thinking we could catch an earlier train, but we just missed it.  So we waited for the next one.  It never came.  Eventually we received the somber news that the international trains had been cancelled that day and that we would be taken to the edge of Holland, bussed over the border into Belgium, and there we could take a train to Brussels for our connection to Paris.  While we waited around in the southern Netherlands, the trains suddenly started working again, and we were spared the Belgian bus ride.  We didn't get to walk around Brussels and eat some French Fries with Belgian mayonnaise, as we'd hoped, but at least we made it to Paris!  Finding our hotel was another adventure.  Let's just say that the hotel gets a failing grade on the directions it provided on its website and a "D+" for the directions they gave me over the phone when we called in desperation from what turned out to be the wrong subway station.  Both of us took turns lugging around Rachel's enormous purple suitcase, and that was enough to put anyone in a bad mood!  We felt completely better, though, after dropping off the luggage at the hotel and eating a dinner of galettes with cheese, egg, crème fraîche, and herbs and a chocolate-filled crêpe with almonds for dessert!

 The next morning we took the metro to the Arc de Triomphe, the "Arch of Triumph," which crowns one end of the famous, tree-lined Champs-Élysées shopping street.  Multiple roads converge at the Arc de Triomphe
with no stoplights, and it is a horrific traffic-control nightmare.  But it is a beautiful arch, carved with Neo-Classical allegories of victory and virtue from the Napoleonic era, and also housing the tomb of France's unknown soldier from the World Wars.

Then we started walking down the Champs-Élysées, singing a song I learned in my high school French class called, "O Champs-Élysées" (don't worry--we didn't sing loud enough to draw attention to ourselves!).  It felt so characteristically French with the shade trees, the glass street lamps, and the ivory-colored stone of the elegant apartment buildings above the shops, each with a tiny wrought iron balcony where you could eat a croissant for breakfast!  We also had to sing snatches from Edith Piaf's La Vie en Rose to complete the mood!

The Champs-Élysées is home to some of the most unbelievably expensive shops in the world.  Rachel and I walked into one store where there were purses being sold for tens of thousands of Euros.  A little out of your price range?  You can buy a coin purse that's about 2"X2" in size for 250 Euros instead!

We decided to save our Euros for treats.  This is a famous pastry shop on the Champs-Élysées called Ladurée.

 They had a spectacular spread of pastries inside, and each one was a work of art--as if it had been sculpted and painted!  You couldn't take pictures inside, but this is what the windows of Ladurée shops look like, with these pyramids of macaroons.

 We got a croissant, a brioche, and two pastries, and that's all our bank accounts could take!  They didn't cost tens of thousands of Euros, but they weren't cheap either!  It was the best croissant we'd ever eaten.

And here is our violet-flavored réligieuse pastry.  It was two puff pastry shells filled with violet cream with a violet glaze, and a crystallized violet on top.  While we were eating a man walking by on the sidewalk stopped and picked up a golden ring from the sidewalk near our bench.  He tried to give me the ring, saying that someone had lost it.  I took the ring and was about to turn it in at Ladurée, thinking it was someone's wedding ring, when a woman suddenly told me not to take the ring, that the man was a problem, and to let him just take it to the police.  He took the ring back, shrugged, and walked on.  We were thoroughly confused, and Rachel--who had just had someone try to steal her wallet in Amsterdam--was wondering what on earth was going on.

We walked on, saving our last pastry for later.  We went past more beautiful, nineteenth-century apartments with wrought iron and gilded gates.

There was more gold and wrought iron on the grand bridge spanning the Seine River towards Les Invalides, where Napoleon is buried.  Four gilded figures with winged horses caught the bright afternoon sun, and there were ornate Art Nouveau lamps.

From one side of the bridge you could see the square towers of Notre-Dame, and from the other side the Eiffel Tower!

We ate our last pastry on a bench near the Grand Palais.

It has a a beautiful brass door, also in Art Nouveau style, with the metal shaped like vines.

This was one of the most delicious pastries I've ever eaten.  It was a rose-flavored Saint-Honoré--flower flavorings are apparently pretty popular right now.  The puff pastry shells were filled with a raspberry kind of jelly, then  rose-flavored custard, a rose-flavored paste, and then the top was covered with a rose-glaze, almond whipped cream, fresh raspberries, and a rose petal on the top.  And, unbelievably, while we were eating the pastry, guess what happened?  Another person walked by our bench, pretended to find a golden ring on the ground--this time I saw him drop it himself--and then tried to offer it to us!  Rachel and I both yelled "no" so forcefully that it probably really startled him.  What kind of a scam is this?!

We kept walking towards the Place de la Concorde, directly opposite the Arc de Triomphe at the end of the Champs-Élysées.  During the French Revolution, the guillotine was set up here, and it is creepy to think that the cobblestones once ran with blood.

An Egyptian obelisk stands in the center of the Place de la Concorde.  It's a little strange to see hieroglyphs, gods, and pharaohs trans-located to Paris.

We headed up towards the great Neoclassical church of La Madeleine.  Mary Magdalene is a special patron of France, and medieval Christians believed that she sailed to the southern city of Marseilles where there is a shrine to her. 

The Mary Magdalene's sanctuary in Paris looks like a Roman temple, with a porch of Corinthian columns and flowers covering the entryway stairs.

Mass for the Feast of the Ascension had just concluded when Rachel and I arrived, and the church was still lit.  Normally it is very dark inside, so we were lucky.  Rachel once did a paper on the elegant sculpture you can see behind the altar depicting Mary Magdalene lifted to heaven by angels.

The organist was still playing an impressive postlude as we walked around looking at the statues of the saints, looking down from the severely classical architecture of their niches in the nave.

 The Vatican publicly authorized the cult of Pope John Paul II with his beatification in early May, and already there were little shrines to him.  Here he is with Mother Teresa.

Continuing on, we made our way to the famous Opéra, a Neo-Baroque landmark of Paris.  It was carefully positioned during the mid-nineteenth-century renovation of the city to create a dramatic vista as you look down the long boulevards.  It is a center for performing arts.

But with all its gilding, marble, columns, tapestries, crystal chandeliers, and monumental staircases, the building is a "performing art" in and of itself!

Here is part of the staircase going up to the concert halls.

And here is where you would recline against a marble banister and eat caviar on toast during the intermission.

Here are your seats.  Somehow I don't think the student rush tickets would get you one of these red velvet chairs with a gold balcony.

The dome of the ceiling is decorated with a mural by Chagall.  It creates a dramatic contrast with the rest of the building, but it is quite spectacular.  A large Art Nouveau chandelier illuminates the concert hall.

I'm pretty sure this room was modeled on Louis XIV's Hall of Mirrors in the royal palace at Versailles.  It was spectacular.  Along the sides of the room were mirrors alternating with windows looking out onto the grand staircase.  After a while there was so much gold and crystal and brocaded curtains everywhere that your eyes started playing tricks on you.  I started getting confused with what was a reflection and what was a real window into the other room!

On warm summer days, perhaps you could eat your toast with caviar out here on the balcony.  Rachel and I didn't have any caviar on toast, but it was still a beautiful view.

We kept walking past a replica of Emperor Marcus Aurelius's column from Rome, which chronicles the history of his military campaigns in a scroll-like narrative spiraling upward.

We spent the rest of the day in the Musée d'Orsay, one of the greatest collection of French nineteenth-century art in the world.  After waiting outside in the sun in a fairly long line, we got into the museum.  Rachel and I kept running into paintings that we had studied in class.  It is extraordinary the number of landmark, canonical works they have!  For example, I really enjoyed getting to see four of Monet's Rouen Cathedral paintings next to each other on the wall

That evening, we met a wonderful professor who Rachel and I both had taken classes from for dinner.  There was another student and another professor there, and we ate at a fabulous little bistro right by Notre-Dame Cathedral.  I had cold lamb in a cream sauce with fresh herbs, which was amazingly good, followed by delicious duck and fried potatoes.  For dessert I ordered a chocolate sablé cookie with pineapple ice cream.  It was very good, but it paled in comparison to the apple tart Rachel got, which was unbelievable.