Eiffel Tower Take II (Tourist)

Paulis insisted on needing to do the most stereotypical tourist thing in Paris when he visited. We climbed the Eiffel Tower (just to level two, the elevator line was too long). The view was phenomenal, but what did we expect? 

I also got unexpected enjoyment from seeing all the structure in the tower... I guess super tourist things can be genuinely cool too.

Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation

One of many welcome Parisian surprises. This memorial by French architect Pingusson commemorates 200,000 people who were deported from France to concentration camps during WWII. It's fairly hidden underground, just behind Notre Dame at the tip of the island. A coworker told me about the memorial. I was expecting the usual statue with inscription, distinguished only by being underground. The memorial is a sort of sculpture, but one experienced by being walked through. Quite a powerful space, perfectly located. 

 Photo by Graeme Stewart

Photo by Paulis Austrins

Photo by Paulis Austrins

Museum Tour (Musee Orsay / Palais Tokyo)

After receiving my Carte de Sejour I am now a long-term resident of France. One of the privileges included is free access to a lot of museums and other cultural sites. With all the gray days these past weeks, museums have served as good things to do indoors. I even went a little overboard with the museum visiting: Musee Orsay, Orangerie, Louvre, Centre Pompidou, and Palais Tokyo. Most of them do not allow photos, so the photo selection is meager but the collections here are really fantastic.

I went to Orsay (above) and Palais Tokyo (below) both in the same day. Quite different places. Orsay keeps mainly french collections from 1848-1915, while Palais Tokyo displays contemporary art pieces of the sort that I think leaves most people confused. The buildings for both are reused structures which had past lives (Orsay, a train station... the other an international exhibition space which had been partly demolished and abandoned before being repurposed). I found the recreation of both spaces very successful for the types of work they held. Palais Tokyo gets mixed reviews from others (the dark, unfinished basement area feels like the leaky basement of an abandoned parking garage), but not all art belongs or even works in the "neutral" white box gallery environment. 

Francois Hollande / Bastille

I still get my groceries at Bastille, despite it being crowded and touisty. After last week, I will think about the space of that plaza very differently. We wandered into this crowd without quite knowing what was happening, but we found out real quick. We were just looking to get onto the metro (this was unsuccessful); there were people everywhere cheering and dancing, live music playing, food trucks everywhere, and eventually the new president taking the stage. Hollande (Socialist) had just beat Sarkozy (Conservative) by 52%. Was quite cool to see. 

Père Lachaise Cimetiere / Paris Catacombs

I went to see the Père Lachaise Cemetery one weekend before heading over to the apartment of some of the other interns for some wine, baguette, jambon, and good company. They lived nearby, but I totally underestimated the vastness of the cemetery and ended up arriving almost an hour after I had planned. 

Because of its scale and also the large house-like tomb structures, the place feels a bit like a little town for the dead. There's also an impressive list of 70 famous that are buried here. A few that I recognized included Balzac, Bellini, Bizet, Bugatti, Chopin, Delacroix, Haussman, La Fontaine, Moliere, Pissaro, Proust, Rossini, Seurat, Gertrude Stein, Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde. Associated with some of these are traditions upon visiting the graves. Flowers for Chopin, subway tickets, joints for Morrison... 

I've always had a strange love for cemeteries. Love walking through them, reading the epitaphs, looking at the dates. Many of them are also incredibly beautiful sites (like the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Boston), or just meditative and calm, places for memories. 

In contrast to this is the Parisian catacombs. To get there, one walks through a non-descript door off a street in southern Paris, descends down so many stairs I almost began to think the stairwell didn't have an end (19m), and walks through the tunnels of the old limestone quarry. Here the bones of thousands of Parisians are deposited from graveyards around the city that were becoming too crowded and also unsanitary for the city's well water. The bones are actually stacked in quite an aesthetic manner, and the 45 minute walk through tunnels of bones stacked shoulder high on both sides surprisingly negates any feelings of disgust, replacing them with spectacle. (Quite dehumanizing). 

A glimpse

In case you've been wondering what I've been working on:
http://www.dreamhub21.com/

The really tall one. 620 meters tall!

Except I'm not working on the tower. I'm working on the podium at the base of the tower that you can just barely see as you 360 around the site. The podium is enormous; it encompasses retail, a conference center, a large auditorium, and also a bridge which brings people from the Yongsan train station to the tower within a lifted landscape/roof. For all of that, it's still dwarfed by the massiveness of the tower.

I can't find any images I really like of the project online, so this will be my first image-less post in a while.
(In case someone from the office stumbles upon this blog while obsessively google-ing the project, hello!)

Parisian Scene: Move-In Day

If you've ever wondered how Parisians move all their things up their skinny spiral stairs, through their narrow corridors and into their apartments, the answer is, they don't. This is a scene I saw walking back to my apartment returning from my trip to Barcelona.