Jeu de Paume

Croissants
Except for Fred who missed his plane this morning, I was the first up.   I walked down to the local patisserie and got a brioche covered with tiny rocks of sugar.  The croissants were so beautiful in the window that I had to take a picture.  Came back upstairs and settled down with the Tribune and waited for everyone to get up. 

Once we got our day together which usually takes until about noon, the girls land I left.  We are slowly hitting up the stores, a little bit at a time.  Everything is for sale.  Big SOLDES signs in every window.  It is hard to resist but the deal is, you must love what you buy.  You have to say, if I don’t go home with that, I am going to keep thinking about how I should have bought it.  Then, it is a good purchase.

The boys met us at the Jeu de Paume.  The first time I came to Paris, the Jeu de Paume, was an impressionist museum.  Small and lovely.  Years later, the entire collection moved to the Museum d’Orsay.Now the Jeu de Paume has exhibit that run over a course of time.  Today, the Richard Avedon exhibit opened.  250 photos that span his career.  The exhibit is fantastic.  The kids continued to discuss the photos through lunch.  Emily said that you could literally spend 20 minutes just sitting in front of each photo and taking in the emotion and character of each shot.  So true.  I particularly liked the “family” wall which is an entire wall of portraits of the key people and influencers in government during the election of 1976.  Shirley Chisolm, George Bush, Tip O’Neal and more.  My all time favorite was a photo taken for Harpers Bazaar of Audrey Hepburn standing at Parisian bar in a Dior dress and Art Buchwald whispering in her ear.  Although the most haunting were the photos Avedon took of the people who work in the American coal mines.  Those faces were mesmerizing and also made you uncomfortable.

We left, strolled the the Tuilleries and made our way over to Cafe Marly.  A classic Parisian cafe.  The inside looks into the Louvre and the outside over looks the square where the IM Pei glass pyramid rises above the ground and where you enter the Louvre. 

Fred went home and we all went to pick up something and stop by Michel Cluizel, a chocolatier on StTower of chocolate
. Honores.  Everything we had was delicious.  I had a slice of dried and sweetened orange dipped in dark chocolate.  The best was the chocolate flowing down the wall.  I had visions of someone sticking their finger in the chocolate, just for a lick.

Today is the day to get your monthly Metro pass.  The entire experience did not go so seamlessly.  It took us many Metro employees until someone told us you could not get the monthly until July 1st.  That person handed us some Orange pass and said to use it on the 1st.  Ok?  We finally found a very nice woman behind the glass window who told us to get our pictures taken in booth, she would then cut up the pics for us to put on the Orange thing and then we would sign our names, pull off the stick and laminate them.  Couldn’t have been more helpful.  We followed her advice and sat in the photo booth and came back to her with our pictures. She scanned the VISA, not big on AMEX here and gave us the stubs that we put in our small laminated folder.  You still have to take out the ticket and zip it through the turnstile each time.  Somehow, I think you should be able to wave the card and the doors automatically open. 

Then, we made our way home, stopped by Bon Marche to pick up some goods for dinner.  Way too expensive.  Sticking to the local spots near us in the future, although everything is quite good. 

Josh appears to have been bitten alive by something.  What is wonderful is the pharmacies.  We went to 2 today.  Loaded us up with meds.  He is an utter mess.  Huge welts everywhere which look infected.  Hopefully we got the right stuff but it is really nice to be able to walk into a pharmacy, talk to someone who seems to know what they are talking about and give you serious drugs.  Something to be said for the health care system here. 

Zemanta Pixie

Comments (Archived):

  1. judy

    I am in SF and recently we had Annie Liebovitz exhibit that was also in Brooklyn Museum – did you see it? Anyway she has a superb (what else?) photo of Avedon and his camera when he was sick and weak and he loved being photographed by her J