Three museums, two breakfasts and a home cooked dinner

Thursday, 25 October, 2018

Luxembourg Gardens

After my long journey, arriving middle of Wednesday and spending a few hours at Luxembourg Gardens, I check into my Parisian hotel room. I slept and slept and slept. When I wasn't sleeping, I chatted with Emma who popped by with food. Her university is nearby.

The next morning I had a caffeine withdrawal headache and I popped some Panadol and then went back to sleep some more. Emma had left me a chocolate croissant which I scoffed as I dressed, having had a minimal appetite the night before.

Emma soon arrived and we boarded the first of eight train trips for the day to Blackburn Coffee, a cafe with a reputation for good flat whites. But alas, the water was out so they were not operating their coffee machine (or toilets). We accepted black filtered coffee made with bottled water bought from the local supermarket. The coffee served its purpose. This cafe also had a reputation for its French toast. Amazing! Second breakfast complete. Lunch no longer necessary. We were thus appropriately fuelled for our museum-a-thon. Walking to our next train station, Emma accidentally enriched my Parisian experience by taking me down back alleys lined with prostitutes. We continued our cultural day at Jeu de Paume which hosts photography exhibitions. We soaked in Dorothea Lange’s pictures of Americans suffering from the impact of the Great Depression and WWII, including Japanese Americans who were interned after the bombing of Pearl Harbour. My mum would have liked this exhibition. The other exhibition we viewed was of Ana Mendieta videos from the 1970s which had less of an impact on me. The messages were interesting but the aesthetics not so much. 

Emma reluctantly posing outside Rue de Paume

Another two trains and we were at Palais de Tokyo. We spent hours at the one exhibition of Tomas Saraceno on display here. His website lists numerous collaborators which makes sense because we could not fathom how one person could generate the whole display in just three years or so. The exhibition started with amazingly intricate and beautiful handmade spiderwebs lit up in a dark room and ended with a how-to of thermal air balloons including an example of one made out of recycled plastic bags. This is an exhibition my dad would spend days at. We merely spent hours.

Two more trains and we were at Mundolingua, a museum of linguistics. Really, it was a place you would take a bunch of school kids to hop around from computer terminal to computer terminal to discover basic information related to words and language. We were there for less than an hour. I only knew it existed from a close look on Google Maps as to what was near my hotel. A short walk back to the hotel and we freshened up for dinner.

Before we caught a suburban train to Antony, we stopped to buy some flowers for our hosts and had a cheeky glass of champagne at a Brasserie.  Dinner was at the house where Emma boards with a delightful couple, Solange and Arnaud, whose adult children have moved out. They have a son who is a fashion designer in the heart of Paris, a daughter studying in London and an architect daughter who has lived in Shanghai for the last fourteen years. She and her husband have two children, bilingual in Chinese and French. Solange and Arnaud are looking forward to them returning to France next year because visits just twice a year are insufficient for grandchildren contact. They cooked for me superb pumpkin soup and buttery lemon fish with buttery courgette and potatoes. Emma had made caramel slice for dessert and of course we also had cheese. I rolled into an Uber that brought me back to my hotel just before midnight.