Writing this has been on my agenda for a few days, but after arriving home in Paris, then seeing my room mate off to Berlin, I have had a rather unproductive batch of activity, colored by a mild cold (which seems to have been Greece's parting gift). At any rate, here come some tidbits about the trip, bullet-style.
I wanted to visit a Turkish bath while in Istanbul, but ultimately ran out of time and wasn't up for it after my migraine. After searching a little on the web I figured I could find something comparable in Paris, and sure enough -- the Mosque has a hammam open seven days a week. It's just a few stops away on the metro and a short walk. Léti, her sister, and I decided to give it a go, and I loved it. For all you men and ladies who are curious and don't know what to expect at a public bath, here are some facts and observations.
All in all, I enjoyed it and intend to go back. Perhaps next time I'll grab something to eat and take a few photos of the tea room. As for potential tourists, the hammam is a great relatively inexpensive way to relax after a long day of sight-seeing.
UPDATE: Looks like I won't have time to get back to the mosque before heading State-side for the holidays, but I found some photos of the mosque, the tea room, and the hammam here.
The past week or so has been a whirlwind of exams, goodbyes, au revoir dinners, studying, and generally trying to see as much of the city before I leave for a month. Today I finished my last exam, and began cleaning the apartment and assessing what needs to be packed and what can stay here. I fly back to the States this weekend for the holidays and won't return to Paris until mid-January. I can already anticipate how much I will miss it.
I've been collecting links for a little while now, some on Paris and some on language in general. Enjoy these while I get around to writing something more substantial.
Istanbul: vignettes from glynnis on Vimeo.
Paris has a plethora of museums. The Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay, the Rodin Museum, the Pompidou, the Picasso Museum, of course. But what others? I recently stumbled across Wikipedia's entry for all the museums in the city. I've visited some of the lesser-knowns, but have yet to see all the ones that interest me. Here are some that I've visited and some of the more unusual ones that I've yet to see.
Spent some time this weekend in the south of France picking olives and exploring castle ruins. More photos forthcoming on flickr.
In recent months, I've stumbled across a number of pieces like this one
that accuse Paris and other history-saturated European
destinations of stagnation--that they are more like urban, city-sized
museums that cater to consumers than beautiful hometowns that color the lives of residents. In her article, Field writes: Surely residents of other European cities take history in one hand and the everyday in the other, but I have come to admire the ease with which Parisians do so. To breach the border of the city-museum when you travel as a tourist is difficult. Venice, especially, stands out in my mind as a museum empty of residents--like a kind of historical theme park that caters to adults. Prague, too, felt a little like this. The historical parts of the city--called "Prague 1" and "Prague 2" (similar to the arrondissement system of Paris)--seemed lacking in local life. I should pause to say that by "local life" I mean something like local business--places to shop, eat, or spend time that can't be included in a portrait of consumerism. In Staré Město (also called "Old Town")--the ground zero of historical Prague--many streets are lined with souvenir shops. Just off Old Town Square is a Starbucks. At one end of Wenceslas Square sits a grand pedestrian boulevard lined with shops: H&M, Lacoste, Mango, Zara, Deisel. During my visit, I saw a handful of KFCs and even a TGI Friday's. I hardly expect historical cities--especially those like Prague, founded as early as the ninth century with buildings that survive from the 1200s--to cease modernization. Still, it is strange to stand before the theatre where Mozart debuted Don Giovanni, then wander a few blocks into a six-floor shopping mall that could just as easily be located in Atlanta, Georgia. Though the city's facades remain intact, the streets are saturated with souvenir shops and restaurants. Prague is relatively new to tourism. I would guess that a good five years passed following the Velvet Revolution (the fall of Communism in Prague, November 1989) before many people traveled to see the city, which means that Prague has seen about fifteen years of increasingly heavy tourism. In the case of the Municipal House, the birth of tourism in the city meant that restoration could be funded, after years of falling into disrepair behind the Iron Curtain. A part of me is alarmingly appreciative of the kind of kitsch this environment produces. Prague's popular souvenir "Czech me out" t-shirt rivals the singing Mao lighter I brought home from China last year. The delight a seasoned tourist takes in kitschy souvenirs can be compared to the internet's love of LOLcats. Still, sometimes when traveling I long for the authenticity that I feel tourism destroys, which which will forever remain the tourist's dilemma. The existence of souvenir shops in any given destination probably began with other conveniences like airport shuttles, English-speaking waiters, and centrally located hotels. Many of these things are the reasons people visit places like Prague as opposed to remote villages in Tibet. That said, tourism is something I enjoy but also have a hard time wrapping my head around. I have such a strong desire to visit the unvisited places--to see local life and street markets untouched by consumerism. When I think of travel in the early 1900s--the cost, the difficulty--I find something of the travel I long for. Surely it was difficult, uncomfortable. But surely also it was more immersive, more awe-inspiring. Imagine visiting ancient ruins you had only seen sketches of, or standing as one of the first foreigners in the center of Lhasa, a forbidden city. Though the world harbors many tiny villages tucked into mountain ranges, or forgotten towns along riverbanks, they feel as distant now as they must have two hundred years ago, but for different reasons. Then, it was mostly the matter of getting there. Today, though getting there is easier, there is the issue of inconvenience. Is there a hotel to book? What sites are there to see? We tend to leave the inconvenient places to National Geographic. My idealization of this kind of inconvenient travel is slightly illogical considering my sensitive stomach, my lack of physical fitness, and my general disinterest in hardcore Patagonia-type backpacking adventures. But, you know...there's always the chance that some day I may blow a few thousand dollars making my way to the monasteries of the Himalayas to see the sun rise over Nagarkot. I suppose generally I like to be inconvenienced in the sense of being/feeling displaced--not passing McDonald's every two blocks, not finding a GAP around the corner--but I'd also rather not hike 300 miles to find things to eat that aren't in my knapsack. That is, I suppose, my personal dilemma, if not the dilemma of every tourist--that anything convenient will likely destroy some authenticity of a location. Rarely do inconvenient places entice visitors. During my weekend in Prague, I found myself wishing I could have visited within a year or two following the Velvet
Revolution--that perhaps that could have offered a real glimpse into the heart of the city, the scars Communism left there etc. (nevermind the fact that I would have been three or four years old at the time...). A few things remain that, I think, are tiny relics of that earlier Prague. If you find yourself in the city, I highly recommend you try to experience them yourself. They are: 1) The metro. Perhaps comparing it with Paris's stations has a lot to do with my opinion, but there's something very Post-Communist about many of the stations, design-wise. Generally speaking, it's easy to lose yourself in the culture and local life of any place by using public transportation, and sitting in the car of one of Prague's metro trains surrounded by Slavic language, it's easy to imagine what the city might have been twenty years ago. Visual aids: 1, 2, 3, 4. 2) Walking the city at night. Like Paris, the city closes up around 6PM, save a few restaurants and bars. During my time there I didn't find any particularly hopping areas as far as nightlife was concerned, even though we stayed right off Wenceslas Square (where there are some clubs) on a street full of sex shops and cabaret theaters. The city is lit, of course, but something about walking the city at night felt especially dark and quiet, probably due to the high number of pedestrian areas. A dark, quiet city is something I've rarely experienced, especially as early as 8PM. It was more refreshing than eerie. 3) Trams. There is something very Dr. Zhivago-y about them, though I realize that neither the film nor Omar Sharif have anything to do with the Czech Republic. If you find yourself in Prague, I recommend taking the tram from Charles Bridge up to Prague Castle. Again, there's something delightfully Post-Communist about the trams, but unlike the metro, its in the most storybook "Hey kids! Communism!" kind of way. (Sorry. It's getting late, I've been working on this post for a long time, and my figurative language--and perhaps my general grasp of English--is beginning to escape me.) Visual aids: 1, 2, 3. 4) The post office. My room mate for the trip, Kristin, and I went into a post office to get stamps for postcards. The office was in what seemed like a restored train station, with pews for waiting customers, and a lot of open space. The postal workers behind glass along one wall. The environment really did feel more like a station than a post office. Kristin and I walked up to ask about stamps. The woman behind the glass was surprised and somewhat angry as she explained that we needed to take a number. A man in a very elevator-operator uniform approached us and showed us where to take a number. Once we did, we sat on a pew, and immediately our number appeared on a digital marquee above the woman we had asked for stamps two minutes earlier. Sunday morning, our last day in Prague, I woke early and ate alone before wandering through the city flâneur style. As the sun rose and bathed Old Town Square in pink, I strolled past the the clock tower and the statue of Jan Hus. Very few people milled through the square as waiters set up chairs and tables on restaurant patios. With so few shops open at the early hour, I decided to check out the churches. Sure enough, Týn Cathedral's doors were open, and I stepped inside to find a service in session. The church's pews were filled with Czechs, all dressed very casually. A priest at the altar chanted a prayer, and the congregation chanted in response. There was something quite ordinary, yet quite surprising about witnessing this, similar to the je ne sais quoi of Parisians walking their dogs outside palaces. Here were the locals that seemed to be missing all weekend, gathered in blue jeans and hoodies inside the Týn Cathedral, a church constructed in 1256. The interior is decked with gold and Baroque-style altars. Tycho Brahe, the famous astronomer, is buried there. Perhaps this curiosity and disbelief in mixing such rich history with the mundanity of daily life is uniquely American, since many historical buildings in our country have an entry free and roped-off rooms, or else have been privatized. I'm thinking specifically of early government buildings in Philadelphia. The more I see of the world, the less I know what to say about the places I have visited. Rarely have I thought of an answer to satiate my friends' curiosity when returning from some new city. More often than not, I settle on a few sentences that cannot be disputed, like "It was more touristy than I expected," or "The buildings are really beautiful." To capture the essence of a place after catching only a glimpse is like writing about love without platitude; it rarely happens. It is much easier to write about the nature of travel itself than the way a specific voyage has reshaped the traveler. Rarely can one describe transformation until long after it has occurred. And so, as ever, I return to the subject of Travel Itself. Many others have captured it better than I. Pico Iyer, in his essay, "Why We Travel: A Love Affair With the World," writes:But the worshippers these days are consumers, not creators. They are
mainly foreign tourists who come to see the eternal Mona Lisa,
post-modern American artists, the French Impressionists and Moliere.
The city chemistry that produced rawness, dynamism, change and
challenge seems absent.
As a resident of Paris, I will admit that
parts of the city are museum-like, but there remains a
large portion of Paris's character tucked away in quiet
neighborhoods--pieces of the city rarely written about in travel books, and rarely noticed by visitors who skip from one site
to another via metro. While those producing cutting-edge work in the art world may have moved elsewhere, Paris is still a hometown. The daily market, the tiny bakery, the ateliers in Haussmann-style
apartment buildings: to an outsider, these things seem picturesque, if
not fantastic. To Parisians they are relatively quotidian, though not
unappreciated.
Parisians adore the city's parks, if only because their well-groomed dogs can trot along behind them as they stroll past former palaces. I once stood in line at a bakery as the pâttisier helped an old woman remember which was her favorite cake. Vous ne vous souvenez pas ce gateau? Ça c'est le gateau que vous avez acheté pour l'anniversaire de votre fils le mois dernier! Je crois que vous aimez ça. When he had finally convinced her that it was, in fact, the cake that she liked (she continued to disagree with him, even after sampling a piece), he bid her goodbye and told her he'd see her tomorrow. Only in Paris do bakers help senile old women stay finicky (and on a daily basis, at that). The way the French embrace and disregard their history simultaneously--the way they respect and grow weary with their oldest living generation--will remain for me the je ne sais quoi of life in the city. Maybe a photo can explain better than my words can. This photo was taken in the library of École Militaire, Paris's military academy. The library houses hundreds if not thousands of antique volumes, some dating back to the French exploration of China. The painting pictured is authentic and original--not like the cheap copies and modern imitations we're used to seeing in America's dentist offices.
I remember, in fact, after my first trips to Southeast Asia more than a decade ago, how I would come back to my apartment in New York City and lie in bed, kept up by something more than jet lag, playing back in my memory, over and over, all that I had experienced, and paging wistfully through my photographs and reading and rereading my diaries, as if to
And:
extract some mystery from them. Anyone witnessing this strange scene would have drawn the right conclusion: I was in love.
For if every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can't quite speak the language, and you don't know where you're going, and you're pulled ever deeper into inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you're left puzzling over who you are and whom you've fallen in with. All the great travel books are love stories, by some reckoning--from the Odyssey and the Aeneid to the Divine Comedy and the New Testament--and all good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.We travel, then, in search of both self and anonymity--and, of course, in finding the one we apprehend the other.
Prague was, indeed, a bit of a love affair, and offered more than I expected in mulling over ideas about Travel Itself. Walking the dark streets under the tram cables of such a sleepy city, or strolling through Old Town Square at sunrise, I found a bit of the terror and wonder I always hope to run across in exploration.
Every September dozens of sites across all of France open to the public for one weekend. The public is invited, often for free, to visit some of the governmental institutions, private residences, old mansions, and other national treasures generally inaccessible during the year. For example, the Hôtel de Ville is open for tours. At the Eiffel Tower demonstrations are given to reveal how the elevators work. Unfortunately, with only one weekend, it's hard to squeeze everything in, since by the middle of the day lines can be long for the more popular sites. If you ever find yourself in Paris during September, try to time your trip to coincide with the Journées du Patrimoine. However, Paris isn't the only city that participates; sites across all of France open to the public for the same weekend.
Ayelen, my Argentinian friend, and I only made it to École Militaire before seeing tremendous lines elsewhere and eventually wandering up to the Marchés aux Puces (a HUGE flea market in the north of the city, report coming soon). The best strategy, perhaps, is to visit the more popular sites during the early morning, and the lesser ones later in the day. Oops.
You can read a little more about the history of École Militaire on Wikipedia. Today it is an institution for military higher education. I believe students actually live on the premsises, since during our visit we noticed a cafeteria. There are also stables, a library, and lots of fancy offices decorated in typical 18th century style.
Our second full day in Paris (03 September 2008), Abroadco booked a bike tour for everyone studying with the company. There are twenty-six of us all together this fall--twenty-four girls and two boys. We live all over the city in apartments, home stays, and in the dorms at Cité U, an international student center with public facilities and lots of student services (but no regular curriculum or faculty, to my knowledge). Cité U houses hundreds of Paris's international students in a number of dormitories organized by language. Most American students at Cité U live at the Fondation des États-Unis. More photos from the tour on flickr (some forthcoming). So, in short, don't dismiss city bike tours. The tour was one of my favorite things that I've done in Paris as a tourist.
Our bike tour was with the Fat Tire Bike Tour company, which has a work force composed primarily of post-undergrad sporty Americans who have been living in the city for many months and don't speak a lick of French. They are the type you would find playing frisbee or tossing a football on the quad, except now they've graduated and do so in some of Paris's most beautiful parks. Oh. And they give these bike tours. This is not a tone of criticism, but of pure delight and amusement. They were quite lovely and gave a very entertaining and informative tour, peppered with terms like "bro," "cat," "chick," and "totally awesome," referring of course to famous people and events throughout French history. If you go on the tour any time soon, see if you can get Ned as your guide.
