Paris, Île-de-France, France
I got an early start from Waregem, actually Heestert where I
was staying with Amelie and Kevin, for the drive back to Brussels. We had a bit
of an issue in that that Sixt’s system was saying I needed to be charged 49
Euros for an extra day because I didn’t return it in time. The fact is I got
the car back before 9:00 A.M. as in the contract, but that might technically
have been a few minutes over 17 days from when I showed up at the office to get
the car. I’ll fight them on it!
I figured I might have to wait a while for a train to Paris.
I showed up at 9:03 at the Thalys office in Gare du Midi, and the agent
insisted he could get me on the 9:13 train to Paris. He said I wouldn’t even
have to walk fast to the track. Such clockwork! Gare du Midi, the Brussels
South train station is where my mom’s friend Josette and her son-in-law picked
us up after or train ride from Paris to Brussels in 1985. But 33 years ago we
had to deal with passport control, and it was before the era of very fast
trains between Paris and Brussels.
What took us over three hours then now takes
about an hour and twenty minutes.
I love going so fast at ground level on TGV and other
high-speed trains! They even have WiFi on the train! I passed through Gare du Nord a couple of
times on my 2003 trip to Europe which included Paris. It physically looks the
same, but things are different. It’s now far more, ummmm how shall we say it?
Much more “multicultural”. Is this still Europe or have I been transported
rapidly to North or West Africa? There’s definitely a lot more Africans and
Hijabis in Paris than there was my last time here in 2003.
When you get into the city of Paris, though, it’s still
monumental and beautiful. I arrived in Paris a day and a half before my brother
and sister-in-law and had great plans for before they got in. Hey, the Louvre
is open late tonight! After two late
nights without a lot of sleep in Waregem, I was mostly ready to crash on my
arrival in Paris.
And my hostel here is kind of weird. I booked it through the
normal website I use but somehow missed that it’s run by a conservative
Catholic organization.
My five nights stay involves a membership fee in the org,
and not only do they not have a bar with alcohol, the vending machines don’t
have soft drinks with artificial sweeteners. Is aspartame against Catholic
theology? There’s a chapel downstairs, but they’re not making me go, and
overall it’s a very nice place. But if I didn’t find God walking the Camino de
Santiago, I probably won’t find him at Adveniat Hostel in Paris.
But by morning I was ready to go. With a mostly cloudy and
showery day forecast, I decided it was a good one for museums. Of the major
ones, I felt most eager to see the Musee D’Orsay again, the former train
station that since 1986 houses France’s primary collection of 19th
century art. In popular imagination, that means the impressionists like Monet,
Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, Cezanne, Manet through Van Gogh and Gauguin, but in
reality it’s a lot more, many great artists from pre-impressionism and
alternative schools of painting and sculpture from the era whose styles haven’t
been as popular in the latter half of the 20th and into the 21st
centuries.
Of course, Van Gogh and Gauguin and all those associated
with Impressionism are everyone’s faves. SO I strategically got to the museum
at opening time and went to those parts first before they got too too crowded,
even though I spent most of the day in the museum. Ah, and that also meant I
had lunch there. The portions were on the chincey side, which is typical for
France, but the atmosphere in the restaurant at the museum was stunning, like
something directly out of the Belle Epoque.
This may have been one of my biggest picture-taking days
ever. Why do I take pictures of paintings in museums? I don’t know. I see
something I like, and with digital photography the cost of taking an extra
picture or twenty or two thousand is essentially zero. So why not?
2025-05-22