Place des Vosges Naptime

The rain started today as we made our way home from exploring the endlessly interesting St-Denis/Château d'Eau area. There are some great cheap food options around there, mostly Turkish and Middle Eastern. Also a small but decent covered market, a fancy pâtisserie called Tholoniat that we've heard good things about, some divey bars, the beautifully old (1860!) Brasserie Flo (located within the coolly isolated Cour des Petits Ecuries), and many warren-like passages devoted to wholesale clothing and/or the sex trade. 

Anyway, this post is not about that. This is about remembering, during the coming rainy days, what we did a couple days ago when it was 70ºF and we spent part of the afternoon lying on the grass in Place des Vosges. Lying on the grass, specifically at Place des Vosges, is a top five favorite activity for us. 

Here is what you would see if you joined us.

so relaxing

Last Weekend

We had a pretty spectacular weekend. 

On Saturday, while pursuing nice, reasonably priced shoes on Rue du Faubourg St-Antoine, we stopped by Le Lieu du Design, which is hosting a food-related design show. There were a lot of fun, quirky and sometimes even useful entries.

Chocolat Chaud-on-a-Stick and Pot-au-Feu Animals

 edible finger puppets and extra-virginal white chocolate Marys

the exhibition space, with Lia and wall of Alessi

tattooed and spiked crabs and clams

 a different view to highlight the Wu Tang detail

savory aperitif cakes to be cooked and served in shells

compound butter gems

chocolate record

As you can tell by the photos below, Saturday night we partied. A couple of Lia's coworkers hosted a cocktail party, fueled by gracious donations of Canadian rye, Italian meatballs, guacamole and champagne, among other things. 

Sunday we attended a performance by Paris native Eliane Radigue at Centquatre (104), a remarkable arts space housed in what was once the municipal funerary services complex. Eliane Radigue is an electronic music artist whose very austere, minimal works use long, slowly transforming, overlapping, modulating waves of sound, sometimes embellished with samples of voice or instruments. It's an exercise in intense listening or intense boredom, depending on your taste. In this interview she explains her creative process and technique: http://vimeo.com/8983993

 Most of her career was spent in front of one of these:

That's not a switchboard operator, it's an avant garde musician.

Unfortunately, she no longer performs on the giant ARP, just a large mixing board.

Here she is after the performance.

art faces

Centquatre is currently home to La Manège Carré Sénart, an amazing carousel made up of mechanical bugs and animals. Some parts can be operated by levers and hand-cranks. It's really cool.

in action:

 We found this gem of a room divider just down the block from Centquatre.

We walked home along Canal St-Martin, which on Sundays is closed to car traffic, making it a lovely spot for a waterside stroll.

Meudon

Meudon is a town/suburb a couple kilometers to the southwest of Paris. It is home to a large national forest as well as an observatory. The observatory was built in the late 1800s, on a high plateau called the Grand Terrasse, which was once the grounds of a 16th century château. The grounds are still well maintained and provide a sweeping view of Paris. 

a 360 degree panorama

Meudon Nation Forest                          observatory                                       precipice                                       Meudon/Paris

the view to the east, overlooking Meudon and Paris

Lia on the edge of the terrasse and the observatory to the west

The high temperature was about 20ºC/68ºF- perfect for the year's first pique-nique. We found a noble tree in a corner of the terrasse, far from the park guardhouse with its "Pique-Nique Interdit" sign. How can you ban picnics? 

The tree would have shaded the southwest corner of the château, had it not fallen into disrepair and been burned down in 1870 while it housed occupying Prussian soldiers. 

As you can see, the dappling was perfect.

After lunch, we struck out into the forest. The trees are just starting to sprout leaves.

one of the many patches of white wildflowers throughout the forest

Château de Vincennes

Before coming to France, my mental image of the word "château" was a stately manor, probably in the country, surrounded by grape vines and a rigidly symmetrical garden with precisely trimmed hedges. I assume I absorbed this correlation along with the untold number of French wines that bear such a scene on their labels. 

Something like this:

Lia at Château de Sceaux

It wasn't until I began exploring the sights of l'Île-de-France and learning a little of the French language that I discovered that château can also mean, quite literally, castle. 

As in a giant war fortress with a moat and dungeon. 

Like this:

let's step back for a shoddily constructed panoramic view:

Château de Vincennes is a very castley château. Handily located at the eastern terminus of Metro Line 1, it lies outside the Périphérique, but technically within Paris, because the surrounding Parc de Vincennes is a part of the city. Like many large houses on the outskirts of Paris, it was founded, in the 1100s, as a hunting lodge for the royalty. In the 1300s, things got fortified- walls were erected and the keep was built. It is, wikipedia tells me, "the tallest Medieval fortified structure in Europe." 

Keep(hah!) in mind that the above photo is just the donjon, or keep, of the Château- the oldest and most protected part of the complex. Below is a map of the entire layout. The keep is the the square area on the bottom. It is surrounded by a moat, as are the exterior walls. The doorways on the right and left traverse the surrounding moat and are the only ways to access the grounds. The chapel is the caterpillar-looking thing above the keep.

http://www.cheminsdememoire.gouv.fr/page/affichelieu.php?idLang=en&idLieu=1621

The site from which I stole this image has a wealth of information and photos. Check it out.

 While the whole complex is cool, the keep is definitely the star of the tour.  

 the moat and bridge

above: looking up from the bridge

below: the bridge from the gatehouse to the keep

The surrounding lower area, between the moat walls and the keep tower, housed servants and workers.

Inside the tower are the royal living quarters.

There are a lot of large fireplaces.

Amazingly, many of the decorative elements are still intact. With bright new paint and the original wood wall panels, it must have looked very regal indeed.

Many of the walls were adorned with paintings and graffiti, mostly done by prisoners.

here's one with Lia looking scary

After touring the royal living area, you can descend into the lower level of the tower.

The most protected room housed the well and was also used for food storage.

Château de Vincennes hosted many prisoners over the years, the most famous being the Marquis de Sade. Here is one of his letters, displayed in the room in which he wrote it during his seven years of captivity.

Upon finishing our tour of the keep, we found the chapel beautiful and closed to visitors. 

Here's the exterior. The interior? My guess is high ceilings, stained glass, crosses and saints.

We had lunch and crossed "Visit a Castle" off the to-do list.