Arividerchi Paris

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Today we had to move out of our garret by eleven in the morning, so we all showered up (though not together) in our surprisingly forceful and surprisingly hot shower, and then carted our things over to Geoff's to stash for the day. To repay Geoff for his generous storage, we took him to brunch at the little cafe at the end of our street where we had our first meal in Paris and we all got croque Madame. Croque Madame is the same as a croque Monsieur, but with a fried egg on top. Croque Monsieur is a ham sandwich with the outside of the bread smothered with cheese and baked. It's fabulous. While we were at the cafe a police music video featuring a very young Sting was playing. Inexplicably.

My parents have had a little trouble transitioning from Italian to French, and thus there are a lot of grazzi, porfavores and bonjournos that worm their way into our conversations. I expect when we get back to Italy tomorrow they will finally find their grove in French.

It began to rain while we were eating, and continued for the duration of our ten minute walk or the George Pompidou museum where we had planned to spend our last hours in Paris. The george Pompidou museum is beside the highly entertaining George Pompidou park, and is defined thusly: Centre Georges (also known as the Pompidou Centre in English) is a complex in the Beaubourg area of the 4th arrondissement of Paris, near Les Halles, rue Montorgueil and the Marais. It was designed in the style of high-tech architecture. It houses the Bibliothèque publique d'information, a vast public library, the Musée National d'Art Moderne which is the largest museum for modern art in Europe, and IRCAM, a centre for music and acoustic research. Because of its location, the Centre is known locally as the Beaubourg (IPA: ). It is named after Georges Pompidou, the President of France from 1969 to 1974 who decided its creation, and was officially opened on 31 January 1977 by President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. The Centre Pompidou has had over 150 million visitors since 1977. The idea for the Centre Pompidou as a nerve centre of the French art and culture, bringing together in one place the different forms of expression, can be traced back in a way to Malraux’ ideas. In the 1960’s the city planners decided to move the foodmarkets of Les Halles, the historical structures were greatly priced and it was proposed that some of the cultural institutes would be appropriate occupants. The Centre was designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano; the British architect couple Richard Rogers and Su Rogers; Gianfranco Franchini, the British structural engineer Edmund Happold (who would later founded Buro Happold); and Irish structural engineer Peter Rice. The project was awarded to this team in an architectural design competition, whose results were announced in 1971. Reporting on Rogers' winning the Pritzker Prize in 2007, The New York Times noted that the design of the Centre "turned the architecture world upside down" and that "Mr. Rogers earned a reputation as a high-tech iconoclast with the completion of the 1977 Pompidou Centre, with its exposed skeleton of brightly colored tubes for mechanical systems. The Pritzker jury said the Pompidou "revolutionized museums, transforming what had once been elite monuments into popular places of social and cultural exchange, woven into the heart of the city." Initially, all of the functional structural elements of the building were color-coded: green pipes are plumbing, blue ducts are for climate control, electrical wires are encased in yellow, and circulation elements and devices for safety (e.g., fire extinguishers) are red. However, recent visits suggest that this color coding has partially lapsed, and many of the elements are simply painted white. Artists featured at the museum include Dali, Picasso, pollock, Warhol, Matisse, and munch, among many, many others.

As I have expressed before, I don't really get modern art. Aesthetic for me seems to trump everything else, and I like to wonder how an artist was able to make the art. In the case of the statue of David by michaelangelo the beauty of the statue is matched by the awe at how it was created. In some pieces of modern art, they are not beautiful to look at, and I know exactly how it was created, by squeezing a bunch of paint on a canvas and then placing ones bottom in it and bum-scooching around for a couple of hours. There was a lot of great modern art at the Pompidou that I know to appreciate by default, such as Picasso and Matisse. Some of the pieces I was awestruck by, and enjoyed them perhaps somewhere near the level at which theyre supposed to be enjoyed. Others I thought were pointless or worse, idiotic.

We stopped for a coffee and a chance to rest our feed halfway through our museum visit, and noticed it was absolutely pouring outside. Definitely a good choice to be inside. However, an hour and a half later when we left it was gloriously sunny and hot. We went for a little goodbye Paris walk on the way home to Geoff's, and took our photo in the bridge. I was distracted by all the baguette in the seine. What did this mean? Is that that you do with day old baguettes? Are French people actually made of baguette, and someone had fallen into the water and broken up into his constitutional parts?

We took a cab to the train station and had a lovely meal at the train station restaurant, which is combatting with typical French success a rather serious pigeon infestation. Upon boarding our train we were delighted to find it was assembled in seats rather than beds, since we weren't keen to go to bed at seven forty five. We watched a movie on dads iPad and enjoyed the beautiful views out the window until bed time, at which point we managed to disassemble our room into the three beds. This room seems to be better designed than the one we had on our last sleeper train, since the room around each bed is equal, thus I am on the top (and deposited myself here without a ladder) mom is in the middle and dad is on the bottom.

The train arrives in milan at 5:30 in the morning, at which point we will board a train bound for Verona, where we will spend our last night. Due to weird technical reasons, we cannot actually stay on our train to Verona, because the kind of ticket that you have from Paris doesn't get you farther than Milan. Hopefully I don't leave anything important on the train in my sleepy stupor, or step on my mother's face getting out of my bunk.

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