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| La Tour Eiffel from the Pantheon |
We covered quite a bit of ground during the recent visit and I saw some things I had never seen before - including the inside of the Pantheon and also the Musée national du Moyen Âge.
I am of course not the world’s most patient visitor to things like this - but I did my best.
It is hard not to notice that inside the Pantheon – which houses hordes of famous French dead people – that there are almost no dead women.
In fact the only one we could find was Madame Curie. Now I am no expert on French history but I am betting that there are a lot of women who should be there in place of some of the arch plonkers who have been entombed as Citizens of the Republic of days gone by. I mean most of them wrote a book or won a battle or became a senator. I am sure they all drank too much and caroused until dawn and fornicated abominably.
I mean Nicolas will probably end up there. Spare me!
Anyways – I did finally see and at last understand – Foucault’s Pendulum. But I am still not ready for the book.
Cate noticed – as I did last time – that there are more homeless people and beggars in Paris than in any other city we have visited in Europe. It must also – as I have mentioned previously – be the grubbiest city in Europe and have the most Graffiti artists per square metro. They should spend some tourist dollars on cleaners.
There is barely a millimeter of Montmartre which is not covered with graffiti and the whole place is a shambles. There is not much you can do about this – Vienna is not much better. It is not as though much of it is artistic. Most of it is just vandalism.
But we were glad to escape from our hotel and I have promised to do better in future. It is not really that difficult and I have promised Cate that next time I will stop taking my stupid pills at least two days before making the booking.
On reflection I think the feathery effect on the wall in the stairwells was supposed to be snow. I still have no explanation for the crazy blood splatters in the elevator.
We had some rival gangs doing graffitti on the back of our commercial building and the police caught one of them. As part of his punishment he was forced to paint (white) the back of our store while the police watched. But when I saw the final paint job, it was about as "bad" as having graffitti, only in an abstract art manner.
ReplyDeleteTwenty years since I saw Paris and I love your photo. Despite your exposure of her 'not so nice' aspects, I'd go back tomorrow if I could afford it. Just to check out the graffiti. But I wouldn't return to Venice which I thought smelled like a sewer back then and perhaps it did.
ReplyDeleteesb: Sounds like my lounge room
ReplyDeleteSandy: I still love it. And yes Venice still smells - and will get worse.