Tuesday, May 7, 2019

BHV, Panthéon, and some music

Yesterday, I went down to BHV (Bazaar Hotel de Ville), which is an enormous department store. (I also stopped by Merci to visit my future towels.) They had everything from plumbing supplies to clothes to sewing stuff to linens.  I debated getting a special, Parisian number plate for my door -- they have stacks of the numbers in the basement, going much higher than I've seen in the US.

Then I wandered over to a fresh juice bar, where I got La Vie en Rose (rose essence, almond, beets, coconut, chia seed, maple syrup).  


After that, poked around some cutesy stores :

I was planning to go to a concert at 8 PM, but decided I had time to go to the Panthéon first.  So I walked over to the Left Bank (eventually.  Of course a bunch of roads are blocked because of the Notre Dame fire).  It's immense, and covered in lovely paintings showing the history of France (and also of Ste Genevieve, who was integral in keeping the city going).  

 It was a church, and then it wasn't, and then it was, so there is a mixture of secular and spiritual design.

And it has Foucault's pendulum!  It's attached to a bar at the very top of the dome:

I walked back towards my concert, stopping at Shakespeare & Company's cafe.

Then I went to Cité internationale des arts for the aforementioned performance: crystal sound project.  It was so, so good. They used instruments made out of porcelain, mostly (including a stringed instrument using a bowl).  There was also a Persian singer, a flutist, piano, backing tracks, and a video installation. Some of the singing was into a bowl, which had a very interesting effect, sort of like a mute. Incredible. 

3 comments:

Lurker said...

And the performers appear to be as light as air.

Lurker said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Scrubber said...

Well, I'm not going to take photos when the performance is happening! (Luckily, since they turned the lights way down...)