As promised, the first of many photo essays of my travels around Paris.
As I’d mentioned earlier, I’m in France for the month, as I am every year, house-and-cat sitting for Chris and his wife Joelle, while they’re away on vacation. And while I still have to blog full-time while I’m here, it’s still pretty neat being anywhere out of DC, and especially in Paris.
Thursday night I ventured out to meet my friends Régis (the name is far prettier in French) and Olivier at the Pompidou Center to see the new Lichtenstein expo (I only learned a few years ago that in French an exhibition is actually called an “exposition,” as an “exhibition” is to take off your clothes and flash your genitals in public).
The Pompidou Center is a neat building, built in the 1970s, kind of inside out, and it houses the largest modern art museum in Europe. While we Americans call the place, “the Pompidou Center,” the French simply call it “Beaubourg,” after the location, which was apparently a big ugly parking lot.
I’ll take you on a tour of the Lichtenstein exhibit another day, but for now, a quick photo essay on the Pompidou Center itself, with a few cameos of Régis and Olivier. (All photos shot with my iPhone, and the Hipstamatic app, which can sometimes do some awfully nice effects.)
A quick shot on the Paris metro, on the way to Beaubourg.
Outside of the Pompidou Center, you see what I mean by the building being a bit inside out. That’s the escalator, in the tube at the bottom – more shots from inside the escalator in a bit.
A shot going up the escalator to the top of the building where the museum is.
Up top, in the long hallway that’s again kind of outside the building in a long glass (plastic?) tube.
Régis and Olivier enjoying the view of Paris from the top of Pompidou. Paris, like much of Europe, isn’t a particularly tall city. So, like Washington, DC, once you get about six or seven stories up, you get a fabulous view (of the city – well, of the guys too).
A look down from the top of Pompidou at the plaza in front of the building.
Lots of construction cranes, all the time, in Paris. In spite of the fact that France is in the middle of yet another recession, property values in Paris never dropped like they did in the states over the past 7 years. (They did drop in other French cities, I’m told.)
Just some pencils in the Pompidou center gift shop.
Régis in the gift shop, doing that brooding French boy thing.
View of the Eiffel Tower, to the right, and the crowds hanging out in the Pompidou Center plaza down below.