Month: August 2014

[Dec 2014: After 4 months, I’m finally getting around to writing this up. I’ll let everyone know about it after it’s done, so if you happen to see this, you are getting a sneak preview!]

Landed in Paris at 6am. After clearing customs, my first order of business was to see if they had pay showers in the airport someplace. At the very end of this trip, I would be coming straight off living on a sailboat for a week, and thought I’d probably need to clean up. Alas, there was nothing to be found, only perhaps lounges for frequent flyers, which I was in an earlier career, but am not anymore.

Moving on, I navigated the train system to Gare du Nord, then the city blocks past the nearby Gare de l’Est to end up at my little hotel. It was still pretty early in the day and my hotel room wasn’t available, so I dropped off my suitcase, having extracted the camera and map for a day of sightseeing. Bought a SIM card for the mobile phone, texted the new phone number to a couple people, ate some train station food. Hit the pavement!

First up, a stroll past the Canal Saint-Martin, which was just a block east of the hotel, and recommended by my cousin Susann. A beautiful, quiet boulevard, with tourist canals leisurely working their way up and down the canal, through the locks and under the pedestrian bridges.

The Centre Georges Pompidou is the main modern art museum of Paris, and a place I’ve been trying to get to every time I’m in Paris. On this trip it was my highest priority, and I would finally succeed, but not quite yet. I walked up a little before 11am to find A) they weren’t open yet and B) there was a pretty big line. I’d come back later.

South across the Seine to Ile Saint-Louis (the smaller of the two islands in the river), wandered the streets, passed east of Notre Dame (which I’d get closer to later), and came out on the other side of the river on the Left Bank. Made my way up to the Pantheon, a collosal cathedral-like structure that looks like a cathedral but is nonetheless a secular celebration of the notable characters of France’s long history. The interior you are presented with upon entrance is fabulous and ornate and amazing, with astonishing details wherever you look. For example, seemingly tucked in a corner is a huge mural “Death of St. Genevieve” about the patron saint of Paris.

But the real deal is downstairs in the basement, where the remains of dozens of notables lie in what is essentially the national mausoleum of France. Marie and Pierre Curie, Victor Hugo, Voltaire, Rousseau, Zola … the gang’s all here.

Back down the hill towards the Seine (past some Autolib electric cars) to the Musee de Cluny, the Museum of the Middle Ages. The exhibits were a bit dull (tapestries, ceramics, etc.), and I was admittedly starting to feel the lack of sleep, but the setting was pretty spectacular. Deep within the museum was an entire Roman bath, a huge room with marble everywhere you looked. And on the grounds outside were fabulous gardens, full of lunching Parisians, not just tourists. Great place to stop for lunch, so I did.

Onwards to the gardens of Luxembourg Palace, and an entire section of Paris that I’d never even sped through. Lush landscaping, beautiful architecture, long rows of carefully pruned trees. Took a few pictures for my Dad, who’s a big fan of hedges — and now that I think about it, I don’t believe I ever sent him those pictures, hmmm. Found a quiet spot among the young people (and kids) and took a short nap under partly cloudy skies.

Back north, across the Seine and onto Ile de la Cite and Notre Dame. The famous cathedral was another obvious tourist stop that I’ve attempted multiple times, but the lines are always massive, and they were again today. So I wandered around the outside a bit (had already taken a longer look on a previous trip) and stumbled across … an old battle tank being driven down the street.

Pictured here is the tank on the flatbed truck before, no lie, an older gentleman climbed inside, fired it up, and drove it off the back of the truck, down the street, and straight through an entryway and into the courtyard of the stately old building, perhaps the police headquarters. Who knows! A fairly large crowd had gathered (this was tourist ground zero, right next to Notre Dame) and everyone was pretty incredulous at the surprise event. I got some great video of it. Moving on …

… To a Piper Cub right around the corner. Celebrating the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Paris from the Nazis, the display commemorated the moment on August 24th, 1944, the day before the actual liberation, when Leclerc’s approaching resistance forces flew an aircraft just like this one over this spot, dropping leaflets to the police below saying “hold on, we’re coming“.

Finally, Centre Georges Pompidou. The most obvious feature of Renzo Piano’s early career design is that it turns a building inside out — putting major structural and functional elements on the outside of the building, instead of hiding them behind a curtain wall. Rode the iconic escalator up to the museum floors, and spent around two hours poring through everything they had.

Nina Pereg’s 8-minute video “Sabbath” had me transfixed for the duration — longer, actually. It shows a street scene in Jerusalem, where Orthodox Jewish men (boys, actually) move barriers into the street at the beginning of the weekly period of rest.

Stooping through a short tunnel-like entrance led to Joseph Beuys’ “Plight“, a large room lined in thick rolls of felt (Beuys really liked felt) and enclosing a piano.

These are just the two things I happened to take pictures of. There was sooo much.

Grabbed some food someplace, and crashed into bed for my first sleep in 40 hours.

I’m going to Europe! I’ll be on my own this time, as Sharon just could not get away from work, and the trip’s timing is pinned down per the explanations below. The map above sketches out the general plan, taking place over a total of 16 days. I’ll be in Paris for a day, seeing things that I haven’t yet in our previous two visits (Dec 2008 and Sep-Oct 2011). I arrive at 6am, and so will have about 12 hours to do stuff before I collapse right after dinner time. I can’t sleep on airplanes, so this is how I deal with the jet lag — pushing through that first day. The current plan is to see Pompidou Center, Musee de Cluny, Notre Dame and Pantheon, and if time allows I will check out the Luxembourg gardens and Ile Saint-Louis.

The next morning, I get on a train, well a series of trains, that will deposit me in Annweiler, Germany. This is the small town that my family hails from (on my mother’s side), and we are having a family reunion to celebrate the 50th birthday of my cousin Stefan. During my entire freshman year of high school, I lived in this town, going to the local high school with Stefan, so I’m obviously familar with it.

After the festivities, I’m hitching a ride with another cousin and her family back to their home in Heidelberg, overnighting with them and then catching a train the next morning to Geneva.

The main reason for this trip is the sailing, discussed below. The timing is dictated by the family reunion event. However, when planning this I saw that I would obviously need to travel between point A and point B, across the Alps. Looking for an opportunity to do soemthing along the way, I spotted Geneva …

Hmmm, what do I know that’s in Geneva? CERN! The world’s premier particle physics (read: atom smashing) research facility is located just outside Geneva, in a campus that sprawls across the countryside, actually straddling the French and Swiss border. I have been a close follower of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for years, including keeping up with the construction, the initial “beam on” of Sep 2008, the subsequent shutdown due to failure, startup again, and then most notably the triumphant declaration in July 2012 that they had confirmed the existence of the Higgs Boson. These little particles are all rather abstract of course, but think of it this way — the LHC is the simply largest machine humans have ever built.

Anyway, I’m going there. They have public tours, however I don’t know that those tours actually get you down into the underground tunnel or any of the four colossal test chambers. So I’m trying to see if anyone I know knows a guy who knows a guy who can maybe get me in … While I’m there I’ll tool around Geneva for 2-3 days, seeing what there is to see — I haven’t actually planned that out yet! I’m leaving the exact departure day and time up in the air, to be flexible in case someone can get me into the LHC tunnel.

Next, back on a train to the French coast of the Mediterranean and some sailing! As I wrote about last summer, my uncle Andreas is a (mostly) retired German businessman who has a condo on the French coast and does quit a bit of sailing. His biggest boat is a 41-foot Euros, built in the 1970s by the French shipwright firm Amel. My uncle has had the boat for years and has gone on many sailing voyages with it (these pictures are from earlier trips).

I have been planning this sailing trip for about two years. Two summers ago, Andreas went on two-month trip around the Mediterranean, and was joined by friends and family at various times during the trip. I heard about this and declared my intent to join him someday, and we quickly made plans to target this summer for the trip (2013 was already off the table, I forget why).

Now, I really don’t know how to sail. I mean, I understand the physics of it, but that’s not worth much. So last summer I spent a month of Saturdays driving up to Acworth (Atlanta exurb) to take sailing lessons on Lake Allatoona at the Atlanta Yacht Club. They teach you the basics — what are the parts of a typical small sailboat, how does the wind work with the sails, what is the lingo used to communicate between the people operating the boat. They shoved us out on the lake in little “420” sailboats, each manned by two people, and we learned on the go. By the end I was pretty comfortable with it, although most days we had very little wind.

A few weeks ago, I had a refresher session with a friend who has a boat on that lake. We didn’t have much wind, but he and I are both into electric cars so we managed to pass the time 🙂

Sailing is quite a visceral experience, especially if the wind has kicked up. And with that in mind, I really do hope that we get some serious wind. I mean, I’m looking forward to lazing around in the sun, but also to some bare-knuckled tacks and jibes. I don’t think I’m suspectible to seasickness, but I guess I’m going to find out.

I’m not sure I want to captain the boat — I think I’ll be happy to just take orders and move the sails as I’m told. There will be three other people on the boat with Andreas and me — a friend of his, his young son (my cousin) and his son’s girlfriend. I know for a fact that they are all quite experienced at sailing, and so I hope they’ll let me do something besides run the radio.

The tentative plan, shown in this last image, will be to disembark from the home port (Port Camargue) and spend eight days workong our way around towards Corsica and back. I really don’t know much about the plan beyond this map, and am leaving myself at the mercy of Andreas and the others.

At the end of the sailing voyage (or at least my part of it) we will arrive in Marseilles, where I will catch a train back to Paris, straight to the airport and back to Atlanta.