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Paris, France
Ça plane pour moi
After a wonderfully comfortable flight followed by a painfully long slog through customs at Charles de Gaulle Terminal 3, this was my first view in Paris and one of the first pictures that I took this trip. The La Chapelle Metro Station is attached underground to Gare du Nord and the RER, but luckily it’s above ground and a great chance to get your head out of the mud. And like every other Metro line and station, it’s packed solid with people crowding every available foot as they jockey for the best position possible. So while you could easily see the glass, trees, sun, bridges, ironwork and distant chimneys almost anytime, the rare combination of empty tracks and platforms is something that you just don’t see every day.
I have been to Paris almost too many times to remember (apparently I have trouble remembering the number six), but even after all those times and all those visits, it’s still easy to find places that I have not seen and surprises that make me rethink or re-imagine the city around me. This is inside the main building at Galeries Lafayette, a department store which is more than just a place for a tasty baguette or a free rooftop view. This is inside the building’s central space, looking up a dome that is colorful and deep and rich as anything you could ever possibly imagine (or re imagine I guess).
If you drew a line from the Louvre to the Arc de Triomphe, you would be following the Axe Historique and my very favorite walk in Paris. If you kept drawing that line past the Arc de Triomphe a few more miles, you would end up at La Defense and another arch. La Grande Arche de la Defense is a great big boxy arch designed by Johan Otto von Spreckelsen, a competition winning Danish architect who ended up resigning during construction and not even living to see it completed.
The reason that I took this trip when I did and the reason that I started in Paris had everything to do with the Delta flight reward calendar. While I am normally all about United or JetBlue, my main credit card intentionally accrues Delta miles and every so often it affords me a free first class round trip to Europe. The free flight is fantastic but comes with all sorts of calendar restrictions and layovers in weird places like Detroit or Atlanta. In order to get this trip to work, there was only one day that I could leave and one city that I could fly into, which luckily was Paris. So while the timing couldn’t be better in just about every aspect, I was in Paris just a few weeks before this building opened.
This is the Fondation Louis Vuitton designed by Frank Gehry, trapped behind the (construction) barricades deep inside the Jardin d’Acclimation, near-ish the Les Sablons Metro Station, about halfway between the Arc de Triomphe and La Defense. The building, with its billowing curved glass and its sparkly Louis Vuitton tacked on logo, is a vanity museum that seems pretty nice, at least from the outside. And while I briefly thought of storming the (construction) barricades, there was little to see at the unfinished building that you couldn’t already see from the street. It’s hard to hide all that curved, billowing glass, no matter how hard they may have tried.
As Americans killed each other in the Civil War, the French were building their brand new opera house atop a phantom infested underground lake deep in the heart of Paris. Designed by Charles Garnier, the building is iconic and loved but no longer home to the Paris Opera, they moved out 25 years ago to a far less loved building out by where the Bastille Prison once stood. What they left behind was renamed after its architect and still hosts performances but (luckily) also remains open for tours. A quick 10 Euro allows anyone to loiter on the grand staircase, wander the salons, visit the balcony and peek inside the auditorium, where a Marc Chagall painted ceiling hovers over all of the gold and red that anyone could ever handle.
While everyone loves Charles Garnier’s Opera House, Villa Savoye by Le Corbusier is more of an acquired taste. Hidden in a suburb that is a 40 minute RER train ride followed by a 20 minute walk away from Paris, the house floats on pilotis in a very small field and separated by only a few trees from perhaps the noisiest schoolyard in all of Europe. Despite the not so distant screaming, the house is wonderful for all the right reasons, and it remains one of those places that you need to see and walk through and touch to actually understand.
