Fragonard Parfums and Domesticity

This morning, I decided to get out of my room for a bit. Since I had already seen all the major tourist attractions with my dad, I decided to look up something new. I typed in the google search box "free things to do in Paris" and a Perfumerie was listed on one of the sites. It said that they had a museum right in Paris that gave free tours. Everything else that came up was something I had already done.
So perfume it was.

After breakfast i headed out to find Fragonard Parfums on Rue Scribe.
I'm not gonna lie, it wasn't that exciting. The website that I had found built it up way too much and had a lot of information wrong.
This is what it said: "Fragonard's Perfume Museum occupies two stories of 19th Century townhouse on rue Scribe in the 9th arrondissement. After entering on the ground floor, you head upstairs to a series of large rooms with a mixture of period furnishings and perfume exhibits." What they ment to say, is you go upstairs into one room relatively the size of my kitchen, and look at a number of display cases along the 40 or so feet of wall.

They also say "One of the more intriguing exhibits is the orgue à parfum, or "perfume organ," so called because it resembles the keyboards of a seven-manual cathedral organ with its tiered rows of ingredient bottles arranged around a balance or scale that the perfumer uses when mixing and testing fragrances."
Here's the picture they gave:
Looks cool, doesn't it?

Well, this perfume organ shown in the picture is not at the Paris Museum. It is in the Fragonard Museum in GRASSE! Go figure. The one that they have in Paris only had 300 perfumes and is about the size of a bathroom vanity.

And the free, English-language guided tour they mentioned? HA! I got an English information card. So is life.

Despite my dissapointment, I still enjoyed myself. I don't blame Fragonard, I blame the website haha. And I certainly learned a lot about the history of perfume. For one, I didn't know that musk came from deer. (You probably all knew that but oh well.) Also, i was surprised to find that you need a TON of flowers just to get a little bit of essence (i.e. you need to distil 1000 kg of orange blossom, to get 1 kg of essence.)
But yeah, that about sums up my new perfum knowledge haha - at least the stuff worth mentioning.

To learn more about all this check out the Fragonad website. (click here)

They wouldn't let me take pictures in the museum, but I'll post some pics of what I saw on my walk there:



An apartment building under construction.

A store that I really liked. Didn't buy anything though.


The store had a lot of incense and incense holders. These were my favorites.

I went in to this delicatessen shop to look for some belgian chocolate for my mom, and the lady let me sample some amazzzing truffles.

This is the "Place de la Concorde." Here, over 15,000 people were guillotined during the French Revolution, including King Louis XVI and his wife, Marie-Antoinette.

"Let them eat cake!!" (I actually heard somewhere that she didn't really say that - it was just a bad translation or misunderstanding)

Anyway, here is Fragonard (Well, the outside of it):





On my walk back to the hotel, I decided to stop at Saint-Eustache to check out the inside. Although they are currently rennovating it, the church is still beautiful. And huge. I think the ceiling is higher than the one in Notre Dame. Here are some pics:

This is Saint-Eustache. Here, King Louis XIV made his First Communion.
This piece of artwork is near the entrance to the church. I found it cute that a little french girl had decided to climb up it.
This is the inside of the church... The ceiling is SOO high!

After my day out on the town, I decided to return to my hotel and tackle some chores. First, I decided to do laundry - It cost me 8 euro just to wash my clothes - That's about $13. Ridiculous.
Once I had paid for my token, I went through the tedious task of trying to figure out the hotel washing machine. They don't have settings like we do - their are buttons with various temperature options ranging from 30 degrees celcius to 95. With this, I had to turn on my computer and do some research. It took me about a half an hour but I finally figured out which setting would be considered a warm load.
With that all sorted out, I went back down to the laundry room to try my luck. I ended up putting 3X the amount of soap needed in the machine - There was a button that automatically put soap in and I thought it was the "start" button. After pressing every button on the machine numerous times I managed to get the damn machine to work.

40 minutes later I went back down to get my stuff. Thankfully, everything survived.

All in all, my clothes survived.

My next chore was to make myself dinner - that one actually went rather smoothly. I made myself a delicious BLT sandwhich and only burned myself once.

Following suite of the washing machine, the dishwasher proved to be just as difficult to manage. I fiddled with the knob for a while - thought that I had turned it on, but after an hour of it making this horrible noise I decided I must've done something wrong. I was right. I had been putting it through the rinse cycle when the thing hadn't even filled up with water. A little more fiddling and i got it to work.

After that I quit life and went to bed.

A Search for Food/ Computer Troubles

Today i woke up, abandoned my comfy couch-bed, had breakfast, then went on a search for food.

Since the rest of the program doesn't get here until Wednesday night, I needed to make sure i had enough to last me the next few days.

Considering I know nothing about food shopping in Paris, I decided to go on a lonngg walk to scope out the grocery scene. I ended up grocery store hopping. In the first store I came across, ED's, I had a random encounter with an older parisian gentleman who wanted me to help him spread the word about a "gym" that he had opened. It was weird. I was just looking at the food trying to figure out what i wanted, when the man came up to me and asked me if i needed help. (I can't imagine that I looked lost or anything because I wasn't having any trouble picking out the food) Anyway, I thought he might be a sales clerk so i turned around and gave him a head shake for acknowledgement. I thought that if I didn't speak, he wouldn't know that I was American. No such luck. He kept standing there, then asked "Are you British?" I turned to look at him again and told him "No, I'm American." That probably wasn't the smartest thing I could've done because the man conitinued to engage me in small-talk, telling me about his son going to school in Oregon and finally asking if I like "gym class" (meaning the gym), and then requesting my phone number. I told him I didn't have a phone but I easily cave under pressure so I gave him my e-mail address. Odd.
After that, I hurried out of the store without getting anything. I ended up buying most of my food at a nearby Monoprix.
Here are some pictures along the way:
My Apart'hotel is right near the Pompidou Center where there are tons of sidewalk entertainers. Here is a gentleman with an outfit made entirely of recycled plastic.

A of view of a row of entertainers - I couldn't get them all in the shot. There was also a mime and two musicians.

The fountain at the Pompidou.

I found a store that had the coolest stuff. These clocks were my favorite.

Followed by these smiley toasters.

Once I got back to my room I headed for the computer to fix a few problems I had been having. My computer has a mind of it's own - it picked up on the fact that I'm on a french server so it felt the need to changed my preferences so that all my websites came up in French. It took me FOREVER to figure out how to get google to stop redirecting itself to google.fr.

On top of that, I tried to use the computer downstairs because my internet connection sucked but the keyboard was French. Instead of being a "QWERTY" keyboard it was an "AZERTY" keyboard. Needless to say, it took me a while to get anything accomplished on that thing.

On my own

So, today I brought my dad to the airport and said goodbye. I don't have any pictures of that whole trip - i was more concerned with getting him there on time and everything. I do, however, have a video of my new room at L'Hotel Citadines : ] Don't laugh at the video - I sound ridiculous (It's hard to talk and figure out how to make a video at the same time!) Anyway, here it is!


Okay you can laugh now. I know I sound like a goon.

Continuing with the whole video thing, here's a new song that I like : )
It's called "Hot Summer Night" by David Tavare - they've been playing it all the time over here.



Also, I wanted to tell you all about the visitor I had today... Due to the fact that there are not screens in the windows, a little bird decided it would be cool to fly in and chill with me. I freaked out, scared him away, then closed the windows. He must really like me though because when I opened them again a few hours later he came back.

Dad's last Day

August 23rd, 2008:

Day 5 - Dad's last day

August 23rd, 2008:

Day 5 - Dad's last day

August 23, 2008:

On my dad's last full day in Paris, we had to take a trip to my future hotel, Citadines, in order to drop off my luggage.

My dad had to fit in the tiny two-person elevator with my luggage. He could only take one bag at a time haha

We each took a bag and lugged them across Paris. (We walked... the metro would have been to hard with all the stairs)

Once we had gotten rid of my bags, we decided to walk toward Notre Dame.

Pest control? I saw this shop around the conner from the hotel. Yuck.

On the weekend, a lot of little book stands open up along the River Seine.

BIRD FEEDING N.D.

Day 4 Cont. - Jardins de Versailles

August 22nd, 2008:
By the time we got to the gardens, most of the rain had stopped so we were able to walk around without getting soaked.

Me in the garden.

Me again.

The garden without my face in front of it.

Orangery.

Close-up of the weird dinosaur-esque plant-thing. I have no clue why it's there.

The garden again. The Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C. was modeled after the Grand Canal that you can see here off in the distance. King Louis XIV had it built to supply the fountains in the garden with water - he chose the River Seine for it's water source.

This is the Bassin de Latone. I didn't take a very close shot of it, but basically the woman on the top is named Latona and in Roman mythology she is the mother of Apollo and Diana (who are also on the top of the fountain). Here, Latona and her children are being tormented but Zeus has stepped in and turned the miscreants into frogs. (Well, he is in the process of doing it because they aren't all frogs yet).

Another fountain :]

There are a couple of cafés in gardens. This happens to be the same exact one where I ate 4 years earlier with my two friends from highschool.

Last time I was here I got a tuna sandwhich but this time I decided to get a hotdog. The hotdogs in France are made differently though... I should have stuck with the tuna.

After our lunch, we decided to walk through the gardens and head over to Marie-Antoinette's Estate. Unfortunately, we got rediculously lost and walked about an hour before ending up back where we started. Very frustrating.

We decided that we deserved to go out and relax after our tiresome day. Thus, we went to a Parisian bar and had some drinks.

We didn't actually go to Bar A Tapas... we just walked by it but i liked the dim lighting in this pic so I decided to put it up haha.

At the bar I had a Mojito. It wasn't very good... the leaves were shredded and I felt like I was drinking grass.
But whateverrr. I had my dad finish it haha.

After that, we went back to the hotel and went to sleep.

Day 4 - Versailles

August 22nd, 2008:
Originally, my dad and I had planned on going to the beaches of Normandie but when we woke up to find it raining, we decided it would be a better idea to skip Normandie and go to the Chateau de Versailles where we could stay warm and dry.

Since Versailles is located in a suburb outside of Paris, we had to take a train to get there...

Me and my dad on the train.

The train ride only took about an hour and before we knew it we were in the town of Versailles heading to see the Chateau.

This is the Versailles Town Hall.

The Town Hall has a really cool clock in the front - it really works too.

Versailles!! It is under construction right now so the middle part looks pretty ugly.

My dad with his umbrella that he lost on the train ride back. *sniff*

Close up of the construction.

Before we left Paris, we had bought our tickets for Versailles at the train station. It ended up being a great deal because not only was there a huge line to buy tickets once we got there, but we also got a free audio guide. Each room had a number that we could type into our audio player, which would then play a recording teaching us about the significance of that particular room that we were in.

This is what the signs for the audio guide looked like.

Our audio tour started on the lower level of Louis XIV's Cathedral.

Louis XIV was the king who was mainly responsible for building the Chateau de Versailles. His father, Louis XIII, had previously built a hunting lodge on the property, however, it was Louis XIV that decided to expand the lodge and make it the headquarters of the French government. The construction at Versailles was in progress almost all of Louis XIV's life. This chapel was built when king Louis was in his 70s. He died a few years after it was completed.

From the chapel, the tour takes you to a bunch of rooms filled with paintings and sculptures of the Bourbon family (the royal line).

This is the Bourban family tree. I know you can't make out any of it, but I put the pic up here to show you that they explained who everyone was before you went in to look at the artwork. Otherwise people would be like "who in the heck is Maria Teresa?? and why is she in so many of these paintings??" (Maria Teresa was the wife of King Louis XIV).

This is a portrait of King Louis XIV when he was a young boy. I thought it was funny because until I read the info card I thought it was girl.



This is what the set up of the rooms looked like.
Not to exciting unless you're a history buff. It was like looking through a giant photo album except the pictures are bigger, probably exagerated, and on the wall.

This is the top part of the chapel where the king and nobility would sit during mass. It is sooo beautiful!

The painting on the ceiling is incredible.

Hugeee fireplace in the ballroom.

There were a tonnn of people at Versailles - I'm assuming because of the rain.

Most of the rooms in the King's State Apartment are decorated and named for a Roman god or goddess. This is the ceiling of the Mars Drawing Room where Mars is depicted in the center on his chariot. Like this one, all of the other rooms have a painting of the god/goddess that they were named for on the ceiling.

The King's bed!
Every morning there was a ceremony for the "rising" of the king. Important people got to watch the king fet washed, combed, shaved etc.
Fun.

The Gardins of Versailles. Can you imagine waking up to this view every morning?

Famous painting of King Louis XIV. sexy man.

Me in front of the Hall of Mirrors.

The Hall of Mirrors without me in front of it :-P

Close up of one of the chandeliers. This isn't one the originals though; there are only two orginals left and they are on the ends of the hall. During the revolution a lot of things were destroyed/removed from the castle. As a result, Versailles is very sparsely furnished.

The Queen's bed. All the royal births happened here - Publicly. The public had to be able to view the birth so that there were many whitnesses that the baby was really from royal blood.

That pretty much sums up the interior of Versailles. Out of all the rooms in Versailles, very few are open to the public.