Paris Day Two: Copenhagen to Paris; Centre Pompidou

From the Comfort Hotel in Copenhagen, it was a short walk to the airport. All indoors. As we knew from last year’s trip, the Carlsberg Aviator’s lounge is quality. Carlsberg on tap, good coffee, bread, and cheese, among other things. So, we ate there. Harper and I recreated the breakfast beer picture Cole and I took last year.

The flight to Paris was short and uneventful. Charles De Gaulle Airport has some crazy, avante garde walkways. They kind of snake up and down where you’d expect either escalators or maybe just a flat surface. It was fun, but a bit of an adventure with roller bags.

Upon exiting the secured section of the airport, there was a crowded scrum of drivers picking up passengers and what I suspect were unlicensed drivers looking for fares. There was good signage pointing to the official taxi pick-up location. Once we cleared the scrum, the crowds abated somewhat and, by the time we got to the taxi stand, there were very few people around. We hopped right into a taxi.

Our Airbnb was in the center of the city (just a couple of blocks north of Notre Dame Cathedral). On the way in from the airport, there was a long stretch where the sidewalks were crowded with just about nothing but men. It was at least 10:1 men to women in this area. At around noon on a Sunday. And there were a lot of people. This was not a small sample size. Amy noticed the same thing and remarked that “if there are no women, there’s a reason for that.” I don’t think I want to walk those particular streets.

By the time we got to our place on Rue St. Martin, the demographics had equalized and the neighborhood was energetic. The road actually didn’t get all the way up to our door – or at least not at that time of day – there was some vehicular traffic early in the morning, but it was all pedestrians and tables and merchandise when we arrived.

We had to walk about half a block from where the taxi dropped us off to get to our apartment. It had two bedrooms, a very small kitchen, and a decent sized living/dining room. The bedroom Harper took was very narrow and, oddly, had a window into the hallway with curtains over it.

After unpacking our stuff, Amy and I headed out for groceries. There was a decent grocery store maybe two blocks away where we were able to grab essentials like coffee, bread, beer, wine, and cheese to have in the apartment for snacks and breakfast. This has become something of a ritual, and it cracks me up how much easier this has been for us in Paris, Berlin, and Lisbon than it was in Rome.

Our first encounter during that Rome trip was with a very elderly Italian shopkeeper who didn’t speak a lick of English with our Italian being comically inadequate and him insisting on getting items for us off a shelf. These other shopping trips have not required much in the way of direct communication. Grab the stuff, go to the counter, say “bonjour,” ring it up, pay by credit card, “merci.”

We rounded up Harper and headed out to the Centre Pompidou which was maybe a tenth of a mile away. The primary attraction was the Modern Art Museum. Candidly, I’m not a huge art person. And a lot of modern art is just beyond me. Still, this was worth the visit. It helps having my daughter able to explain some of it to me.

One of the things she mentioned is that some of the modern artistic efforts are a response to photography. With cameras able to reproduce the world so easily, artists are looking for other ways to capture the essence of things. So you get styles like Expressionism and Cubism.

Harper observed that a lot of modern art is divided between, on the one hand, pushing the limits and concepts of what it means to be “art,” and – on the other hand – simply saying “screw you” to rich people. Maybe they’ll buy it. The “readymade” exhibits (e.g. hanging up a shovel or laying down a toilet from a hardware store and calling it “art”) strike me as an example of the latter.

Dinner that night was crepes at the nearby Creperie Beauborg. I had never had savory crepes. They were pretty good. I had one with ham, cheese, and egg. Harper had the better idea with the Norwegian crepe, featuring salmon and cream cheese. While we were looking at the menu, what I took to be an English-speaking spring break school trip arrived with a bunch of students. The staff had its hands full for a bit. For dessert, we got crepes with chocolate which hit the spot.

Through the magic of VPNs and subscription services, we were able to wrap up the night by watching the Indiana / Michigan State basketball game. The broadcast had several nice shots of the band, and we were able to see Cole a few times. While it would have been more fun (for us) to have him in Paris with us, seeing him on TV was at least some consolation.