Dejeuner-ing all over l'herbe

Fondation Louis Vuitton

Saturday began with another trip up to my old neighborhood, because I was obviously going to take them to that awesome galette place.  We stopped by my old place, too.  Someone was obviously there, since there was coffee on the little balcony. 

After a lovely brunch, we headed over the west side of the city to the Fondation Louis Vuitton, which is mostly a contemporary museum, I believe.  They had a lot of work from the Courtauld Collection, too (which I had seen before, because it is normally right next to King's College London, where I studied for a year). 

It's a very cool building, designed by Frank Gehry.

I discovered that I really like Jesús Rafael Soto, because two of my favorite pieces were by him, including a piece with blue strands you could walk through.

 They also had one of Yayoi Kusama’s first infinity rooms, which was interesting (albeit not as amazing as some of the later ones I've seen).

The Courtauld Gallery works were great.  There are a lot of Monets, Seurats, etc.  I think this is the most famous (Manet): 

This, by Monet, is of the Gare St. Lazare, which was where we took the train the next day...

Bread is Pain.

Friday was mostly a bread class.  Spent 9:00-13:00 learning how to make baguettes, brioche, and fougasse/ciabatta.  And "French bread" aka pain perdu. It was interesting and the results were quite good.  Obviously there was a lot of weighing; the tips on shaping were interesting.  The dough came together so well -- sometimes requiring substantially more mixing than I would have expected.

Walked home through an old Roman arena turned into a park.  My mom needed to rest her feet. My sister and I headed out to do some shopping. Galeries Lafayette has a lovely interior dome.

Impressionism: d'Orsay & the Orangerie

The next day, we went to both the d'Orsay and the Orangerie. The d'Orsay was having a show on the Black Model in the late 1800s, which was quite interesting.  It made a nice pairing with the show on Orientalism that I'd seen previously.

The general collection and physical space is, of course, amazing.  

We then went across the river (locks on the bridge) and had drinks in the Tuileries.  

After that, we headed to the Orangerie, mainly for Monet's water lilies.  There are two huge rooms full of the paintings -- they were designed by Monet especially./

There was also a show on some German artists that I’d not heard of: August Macke & Franz Marc.  And, as you'd expect, more Impressionism. 

After that, we headed back to change and went to a soufflé-based restaurant.  Look how poufy!

-->

Family Here!

So, I am actually back home now, but I know you are all on tenterhooks wondering about the rest of my trip, so I will do some quick posts.  Turns out that having my mom and sister around, while delightful, did not leave me writing blog posts.  

After they came, I moved over to the left bank with them.  We were by the Jardin des Plantes.  

We spent the first day walking around, in an attempt to stave off jet lag.  Had famous hot chocolate at Angeline.   

The next day we wandered around the Marais -- I took them to my old favorite bakery and we did some shopping.  My pink towels came home with me... Then we went to the Picasso museum, which also had a show comparing Picasso & Calder.

Cluny

Today was my last day in Paris alone: my mom and sister come tomorrow.  I decided to go down to the Cluny Museum, which specializes in the middle ages.  As it happens, they are undergoing a lot of construction, but you can still see many of their pieces.

The museum is built sort of around an old Roman bath and you can go into the frigidarium. (A guard showed me where you can also see where the caldarium used to be.)

Upstairs they had some lovely ivory carvings, gold work, and tapestries.  

And this one, which I would call "undead Mary and child."  An important lesson to me on the necessity of pupils.  

I think the museum is best known for its "Lady and the Unicorn" series of tapestries -- there are six of them and they are enormous.  The room was dark and also extremely full of tour groups, but here is a not-great picture of one of them.

 I found the little animal details very charming.

Rouen, Étratat

On Sunday, I took a train to Rouen, where one of my former students, Audrey, lives (she was in my club; I never had her in a class). We went to their Beaux Artst museum, which is quite nice. Here are a few pieces from there that are of the city (their collection is much more varied).  

 Rouen has a famous cathedral and is also known as the city of a hundred bells. It is also where Joan of Arc was jailed and burned. And it has a famous clock (as attested to in one of the above paintings).

This picture is along one of the sides, rather than the center -- it's much bigger than this image might lead you to believe.  The statues have been taken down from the roof because they are working on it right now.

Rouen has a very distinctive style of building in the center of town. It kind of reminded me of Strasbourg. (Notice how the windows on that one building are non-rectangular parallelograms!)

I took a lot of pictures of other churches, but I am only including a few here. 

Here is a building that has kept the bullet holes from WWII.

We drive to a cliff above the town to see an overview and I imagine it would have been stunning on a sunnier day. Audrey then drove me around her town a bit (she lives just outside of Rouen), which was neat. It's nice to see a smaller town. We went to a McDonald's, which was way fancier and nicer than I remember US McDonald's being. All the ordering was done on fancy panels, they'd bring your food to your table, and they had knock-off (I assume) Eames chairs.

Then! we drove to the ocean, to see the Étratat cliffs, which were amazing. Here is the view of one side, from the beach.

Here is a view of the other side, from the top of that cliff.  It had been rainy all day, but the sun came out when we got there.


And here is the view from the top of the cliff, in the other direction.  (That photo is huge and I recommend viewing it in full.)

And Audrey insisted we needed to get some good pictures of cows. Normandy is a big dairy producer. These are not the classic Normandy cows, since they aren't black and white. We saw a lot of those from the highway, though.

I also got to briefly talk to Audrey's mom, who'd I'd met once before in Chicago. Then, pop, onto the train back to Paris.