Art Nouveau in Nancy

We traveled last weekend to Nancy, France. It is a 3 hour train ride east of Paris.

Nancy is where Art Nouveau started at the turn of the 20th century. Sarah and I are both big Art Nouveau fans, so we enjoyed it a lot. The city provides a map with all the Art Nouveau architecture on it. We walked and walked looking at different buildings. It was really cool because there were a lot of houses with interesting Art Nouveau detail on them that weren't by a famous architect. This made the whole town fun to walk through.

I've posted some pictures, but I want to caution you. If you aren't an avid architecture fan, you might have trouble wading through them.

http://picasaweb.google.com/suzypics2/Nancy

We also ate at a famous brassiere, Brassiere D'Excelsior. There is a picture posted at picasaweb that shows the ornate interior. I had some nice profiteroles. Profiteroles are vanilla ice cream filled pastry puffs smothered in warm dark chocolate sauce. This place brought a gravy boat of chocolate sauce to the table and smothered them after serving them. Yum!

Japonaise Ceramiques

Last weekend we went to the French National Ceramique Museum in Sevres on the outskirts of Paris.

It was on the grounds of the famous Sevres Ceramique Manufactoring plant, which was founded by Louis XV to make fancy smancy pottery for the French Aristocracy. They were having an exhibit of contemporary Japanese pottery, and it included some really wild stuff. It was a good exhibit.

We also went thru their pottery from 1800's, some of the Napolean III era stuff that I've recently taken a liking to. They also had a bunch of Art Nouveau vases that just swept me away.

This brings me to our weekend plans for tomorrow.... After looking at Art Nouveau pottery that was Fancy Smancy, we decided to travel to Nancy. Nancy is a big Art Nouveau center, so we're going to check it out.

Mont Saint Michel

We took a quick weekend trip to Mont Saint Michel on the coast of Normandy. It has been an abbey since the 900s. After the French Revolution, religion was "out", and Mont Saint Michel was a prison for many years. It was built on a granite island out in the middle of the bay. They have *really* strong tides here, the whole bay is a muddy mucky mess at low tide, and then surges in as the tide rises. It is low tide for some of my pictures, and high tide at others.

In the 1860s they built a causeway out to the island so you can reach it without going through the mud. The causeway caused a lot of the bay to silt up, they have just broken ground on a project to build a bridge out to the island, and get rid of the causeway. The project looks rather involved (finishing in 2012) , I'm glad we got to see le Mont before construction cranes descended on it.

The island itself is....well.... a tourist trap. A very nice one, but definitely a tourist trap. Packs of tour buses descend on the place during the day. Sunday was especially packed because it was the first Sunday of the month, and entrance to the abbey was free. Numerous museums and monuments are free (and crowded) on the first Sunday of the month in France.

The abbey was fairly interesting. You could see the numbers on the stones in the terrace, stone masons got paid by the number of stones. After the floor was laid, stone mason #8 would get paid based on the number of stones with '8' in them in the floor. Some interesting architecture, some of the gothic arches made for fun photos. When it was used as a prison, they installed a huge human hamster wheel. The prisoner power from the wheel was used to drag supplies up a steep slope into the abbey.

We were staying overnight, which ended up being a really good thing. It meant that we had the place to ourselves after the day trippers left. It was magical at night and in the morning. We walked along the fortified wall around the island, and walked out on the causeway a bit so we could see the abbey lit up.

Mont Saint Michel pics are at:
http://picasaweb.google.com/suzypics2/MontStMichel

Soup kitchen battle in Nice

France is having its own immigration issues, and a lot of the immigrants are Muslim. There is a private organization in Nice that isn't happy about the immigrants, and they seem to be focused on the Muslim immigrants. They have an interesting way of fighting the immigration of Muslims into France.

The anti-Muslim group serves free soup to the homeless in Nice. The kicker is that they only serve pork based soup (Muslims can't eat pork). A pro-Muslim soup kitchen group started distributing non-Pork based soup across the street. Lots of soup on the streets of Nice.

The French government cracked down on the Pork soup scheme, calling it discrimination against Muslims on public property. So the anti-Muslim group is looking for private property to serve their Pork based soup from, and they are protesting the French government crackdown. (Everyone loves a good protest in France)

While I don't agree with their issue of being against immigrants, I found the battle of the soup kitchens to be an interesting story.

We're off to Mont St Michel this weekend. Travel Travel Travel.

Marche aux Puces

This weekend we went to the monster Paris Flea Market. A little different than the vision that springs into my head when I hear the words "Flea Market". The place was overflowing with really nice antiques, and an aweful lot of it was *way* out of our price range. We asked about an Art Deco tea set, it was only 1400 euros, and didn't include cups and saucers. The candlesticks we liked were 425 euros. Ouch. They had a lot of Art Deco and Art Nouveau pieces, which we really like. So I imagine we'll be going back to look again sometime. Different stored specialized in different things, one place specialized in Art Deco ceiling lights, another in Art Nouveau fireplace surrounds.

We did manage to buy one thing, a candelabra. It holds 5 candles, and has a slightly curvy Art Nouveau look to it. The silver plating isn't in perfect condition, but we dined by candlelight tonight, and really liked it.

Wednesday nights at the Louvre

Sarah and I are trying to start a new routine for Wednesday nights. I thought that if I posted it in my blog, there would be a slightly better chance that we'd stick with it.

We got a year pass for the Louvre, and so we are going to try to go every Wednesday night to do a small bit of it. The Louvre has over 35,000 objects in its collections, and I hope this way we can see more of it without getting overwhelmed.

To get an idea of the scale of how big the Louvre is, check out this PDF of it:

http://www.louvre.fr/media/repository/ressources/sources/pdf/src_document_50760_v2_m56577569830634872.pdf

Last night we did 4 rooms of the Levant collection, mainly from Syria and Cyprus. They were from 2000 to 1000 B.C. Definitely built to last.

Amsterdam

Sarah and I enjoyed a long weekend in Amsterdam last weekend. I didn't do a lot of photography, we spent most of our time in museums and walking the canals.

We got museum passes, which worked out really well. Museums in Amsterdam aren't cheap (most were roughly 10 euros).

We arrived the day after a freak windstorm swept northern Europe, in fact our high speed train wasn't so high speed because of the weather.

We enjoyed the food a lot, there seem to be numerous vegetarien options, it reminded us of some of the veggie places in Austin.

I've posted some photos:

http://picasaweb.google.com/suzypics/Amsterdam

And here is a list of the places we visited:

• Anne Frank house
  
• Rijksmuseum - awesome Rembrant paintings
  
• Heineken brewery tour
  
• Canal boat ride
  
• Van Gogh museum
  
• Amsterdam history museum
  
• Hermitage museum
  
• Rembrandt's House
  
• Horticulture garden
  

I think I enjoyed the Van Gogh museum the most. Van Gogh only painted for 10 years, and the museum was able to cover those 10 years in amazing detail. It was interested to follow the different techniques he used as he befriended other artists, and also see how his painting style changed over time.

The tour of Rembrandt's house was cool because we got an in depth demonstration of his etching techniques. That really made the etching collection they have come alive. They were able to recreate his house very accurately because Rembrandt went bankrupt while he owned it, and thus everything he owned was cataloged and sold at auction.

The Hermitage was the biggest disappointment, they have just opened the Amsterdam "branch", I was hoping to see some of the biggies from St. Petersburg Hermitage, but they really didn't have much at all.

Avignon Pics

I've posted some Avignon pics:

http://picasaweb.google.com/suzypics/Avignon2007