Paris Failures

Among other things I:

Failed to visit the David Lynch designed bar ‘Club Silencio’
Failed in any attempt at library geekery: no Bibliothèque nationale de France, and no Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève
Failed to eat frogs’ legs, despite several attempts – when they were on the menu, they turned out to be out of stock when I asked
Failed to see the catacombs. I did plan this, and got there in the last week I was in Paris, only to find out that the air conditioning was out and would take 2 weeks to fix. On the plus side it did mean that I got to see this protest:

The protest seemed just as much a moving party – it had flares, music, and food carts. Very civilised! It was that and things like the “RIP Chris Marker” graffiti, and the cultured comic stores that made me feel like Paris was a centre for intellectual life (on that note it turns out that Jean Giraud aka Moebius also died in 2012).

All You Can Eat Art

I’m a bit of an art geek, so I bought a 6 Day Musee Pass for €69 and then embarked on an extended gallery crawl. I saw:

Musée national des Arts asiatiques – Guimet
Musée Rodin
Musée de l’Institut du Monde Arab
Centre Pompidou – Musée national d’art moderne
Musée du quai Branly
Musée du Louvre
Musée d’Orsay
Musée national de l’Orangerie
(I made multiple visits to the last three)

The Musée national Picasso was closed for renovations, and there were a couple of others that I wanted to visit but just didn’t get to.

I don’t know how to convey the sense of visiting them – there were a slew of them, with so many works inside them, and it was concentrated within a short span of time, so I won’t attempt any kind of accurate representation. Instead I’ll just post a few images and reflections. One side effect of gallery crawling was spending most of the day without natural light at all– the metro lines I were on were largely underground, and many of the galleries had few windows and preservation focused light levels.