The Inaccurate Tourist

3. My Flat

I've added a new feature for this week called the Louvre-a-rama^TM, brought to you in SkrabaVision^TM. Click here to start the Louvre-a-rama^TM, and click the Louvre-a-rama^TM to turn it off. The Louvre-a-rama^TM is brought to you at great personal effort. Some of the edits are obviously quite rough, but I'm willing to bet there's at least one you can't spot.

My flat is in the fourteenth arrondissement, or neighbourhood of Paris. Paris is divided into a clockwise spiral of twenty such neighbourhoods, and the fourteenth ends up being in the south. My area is also called Montparnasse. Montparnasse is where the artists all lived in the early 20th century -- Picasso, Chagall, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein. Now, the region lends its name to:

• the Tour Montparnasse - a 60 story office building that was built in the 70s to bring Paris into the skyscraper era, but still pretty much stands alone.
• the Gare Montparnasse - a high speed train station that can take you pretty much anywhere southeast of Paris.
• the Cimitière du Montparnasse - the second largest cemetary in Paris. I'd like to say that I stumbled across the grave of Emmanuel Chabrier, a composer that I've always liked and whose CD I happened to borrow earlier that week. In fact, I had to search carefully for it, amongst the very large and closely packed tombs, crypts and sculptures -- if you want to rest peacefully under flowing green meadows, die in Canada. I also "stumbled" in the same way across Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir's shared grave. Perhaps the next time I visit, I could happen across Samuel Beckett, or Saint-Saëns. Jim Morrison, of course, is in that other Paris cemetery. If you're a fan, you know the name, and if you're not, you won't care.

I'm right by the métro station Pernety, but I still often make the ten minute walk to Alésia to simplify the connections. There are many shops close to my flat, including the best poissonnerie in Paris (I am assured), several patisseries and boulangeries, flower shops, tobacco shops (tabacs), book shops, mystic items (?), electronics, a post office, there's one of everything.

I really had some good luck in finding this particular flat. It's spacious, partially furnished, south-facing and on the sixth floor. The floors in France are numbered differently than in Canada -- the street level (or RDC) is the zeroth floor, the next level is the first floor, etc. The landlords have left me some antique furniture, including a grandfather clock, a beautiful armoire, some desks and dressers.

The landlords are a lively, older couple who have shown an overwhelming concern for my comfort in the flat they have rented me, to the point where they bought additional towels to ensure I had some until my things arrived. I am extremely grateful to have met them.

When I arrived to look at the place, the walls were covered in paintings left by their son, who is a painter in Florence, Italy. They graciously left two of these paintings for my stay here.

Rental flats in France generally don't include any kitchen appliances, which means that I was planning on having to buy a bar fridge, a toaster oven and a hot plate. Fortunately, my flat has an equipped kitchen with a full size fridge and freezer, the hot plate, a dishwasher (!) and a washing machine (!!). The typical Parisian apartment has the washing machine in the kitchen, but they typically don't use a dryer. I suppose that accounts for all of the presseries (stores with the sole purpose of doing your ironing).

In addition to the rooms shown, I have two bedrooms (and will have two beds when my things arrive), a room for the sink and tub, and a room for the toilet. Apparently, putting the toilet in the same room as the sink and tub is a filthy habit adopted only in the colonies. I have no comment on the issue.

Well, enough about me (at least until I my things arrive, and I take more pictures of my newly decorated apartment). You're probably wondering where my walking tour took me this weekend. If you've guessed "Palais du Louvre", arguably the best collection of art in the world, then you would be completely WRONG... I mean right.

The quick history goes something like this: Construction of the Louvre was started in the late 12th century as a fortress. The monarchy started living in the palace in the 14th century, and generally adding wings here and there. After commissioning his wing, Louis XIV took the court to Versailles in the mid-17th century. Napoleon, of course, added his reno's. The French government doubled the floor space and added the famous glass pyramid in during the 1980s.

My general policy has been to find and gawk at the exterior of these monuments, but to wait until I have guests before going inside (or up). The Louvre, however, is incredibly huge, and I would like to see more of it than could possibly be covered in a single day. So, I think I'm going to enter it while the crowds are still pretty thin.

That day, however, I stayed outside, and walked along the Seine. The row of stone faces is a collage from one of the bridges along the way. There are plenty of bridges across the Seine, and I'd like to cross every one. In the meantime, I took pictures of this one.

While I was walking down the Seine, I noticed that there was one métro station that opened into the direction of the river. But it had thick, metal doors with steering wheels on the outside. If you imagine what they must have looked like, you can probably figure out why -- they were submarine locks. It took me a minute, because the doors were well above the water lever. As you walk along the Seine, however, you will occasionally notice an engraved line almost at the street level, marked with the year 1910 -- a year where the waters rose to incredibly high levels. So always remember, the Seine is a romantic and scenic river, but it is also a ruthless killer with a knife at the throat of all of Paris.

Eventually, I got to the oldest monument in Paris. I am going to spend a whole other day on the Cathedral of Notre Dame, but I couldn't resist taking a close-up picture of an authentic gargoyle.

Since my first experience with the movies had failed, I tried again on Sunday. I thought I would go see Zoolander, because it was a movie I recognized, it was dubbed (for good practice), and because I figured it would be largely visual humour. Unfortunately, a clock-related mishap caused me to miss the first half hour of the movie, but I saw most of it. They did a pretty good job of dubbing the characters' voices, and the French audience certainly laughed.

I also naively went to the métro station Bastille, to see the remains of the famous prison. Of course, there's absolutely nothing left of it, except a small bit of the foundation (in the métro station). But the trip turned out to be a very interesting one, because I found my first open air Paris market. I plan on going back this weekend to purchase some of the fresh foods, and hopefully I'll get some good pictures to share.

Posted by The Inaccurate Tourist at January 25, 2002 12:00 PM