Day 3 - Paris (2/4) - Versailles gardens, Basilica of the Sacred Heart
supplemented with some of Jiekai's pictures in lieu of mine, which have been lost for eternity due to his cockitude
There was an option to rent cars to traverse the Versailles gardens at €28/hour. If my budget had been higher I might've rented one. Cheesily though, the buggies played piped music.
*View down through the Basin du Dragon*
This picture has been lost for eternity due to Jiekai's cockitude
*Basin du Neptune (Long passage, pool in the background)*
This picture has been lost for eternity due to Jiekai's cockitude
*Fountain base (Babies)*
This picture has been lost for eternity due to Jiekai's cockitude
Even though it was only early Spring, the gardens were magnificent, 1999 storm notwithstanding. I wonder what it's like in Summer.
*Baisin d'Apollo (Chariot rising from the water)*
This picture has been lost for eternity due to Jiekai's cockitude
*Back of the palace from the Baisin d'Apollo*
This picture has been lost for eternity due to Jiekai's cockitude
*Statues around the Baisin d'Apollo*
This picture has been lost for eternity due to Jiekai's cockitude
*Grand Canal with a view of the Palace*
This picture has been lost for eternity due to Jiekai's cockitude
*Gardens path from the Grand Canal*
This picture has been lost for eternity due to Jiekai's cockitude
After walking down to the Grand Canal, I hitched a ride up with an old German couple, though I hit my head on the roof when hopping on. They were probably East Germans (since they told me East Germany was very beautiful - more so, they huffily commented, than Paris).
*Bassin et Parterre de Latone (Pool, sculpture)*
This picture has been lost for eternity due to Jiekai's cockitude
*View of the Palace from Orangerie*
This picture has been lost for eternity due to Jiekai's cockitude
Seen in Paris: "Bibliotheque et discotheque". Wth.
I saw a girl with purple stockings on which there were black polka dots. She wore white socks with bands of various colours on them. Ugh.
I think this is the building housing Napoleon's tomb
Parisian street shot
Seen near Basilique du Sacre Coeur - "发明者" (Fa1 ming2 zhe3 - literally, inventor). Too bad the shop was closed, or I'd go in and ask what he was inventing.
Basilica of the Sacred Heart
View from the top
The Basilica of the Sacred Heart was very beautiful, but no photography was allowed and besides, there was a service going on at the time. The French service music was beautiful though, especially sung as it was by the nuns (so much for 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 - we need to bring back the Castrati!), with one of them conducting the audience (just like in NYPS).
The only thing I didn't like about the place was the stained glass, which looked like modern art - ugly letters and childish and amateurish sketches in many panels, rather than the medieval style of stained glass (illustrating a story with images of people in colour). The mosaics and paintings inside were nice though.
At the top of the dome, I heard the most intelligent thing said by a American throughout the whole of the trip: "We have to do this kind of thing when we're young".
Outside the Basilica, I also had my very own Eurotrip experience.
*Stupid Mime outside the Basilica of the Sacred Heart*
This movie has been lost for eternity due to Jiekai's cockitude
Coming down from the Basilica, I found the funiculaire (lift) and took it down (my metro pass got me a free ride). Damn, I should've found it *before* coming up instead of after.
At the foot of the funiculaire there was a free public toilet (open from 6am-1am - what, do they want to prevent hobos from camping inside?!), which I availed myself of. This was one of those funky self-cleaning toilets, and while waiting for the queue to shorten I made some observations. The toilet cleans itself after every use. This is terribly inefficient, since the cleaning process takes 5 times as long as the average male spends in it, and 2 times the average female. There's no need for the whole toilet to be washed each time, for this leads to a long queues. Besides which, it leads to ridiculously high expenses for a free public toilet. Maybe a light cleaning of the toilet should be done ever 2-3 uses, and a thorough one ever 5-6 uses. Users would also have the option of pressing a button to order a thorough cleaning if they found it to be in an unsatisfactory condition. Incidentally, the toilet itself was quite weird, for there was no toilet seat, only the cold bowl. Maybe this is to stop people from getting too comfortable, lest they stay inside for too long.
There was a calligraphy guy advertising to give people "your name in Chinese". I was tempted to ask for my name in Chinese.
On the Metro, I saw some Chinese guy reading "华高报" (Hwa2 gao1 bao4 - Chinese High Newspaper) as he was doing the Asian Squat. So it's really not just an Ah Beng thing.
One good thing about having black hair is that if you grab a dusty ventilation vent cover because the stupid Paris metro train cars have no hand rails, and then brush your hair out of your eyes, no one can tell the difference.
I'm still not sure if I got all of my money back on the Paris museum pass (there was no student price for it, but there're student prices for most attractions), but it let me past many queues and surely that is worth something.
Some would argue that the management of places like the Versailles Palace and the Basilica of the Sacred Heart are free to set whatever rules they want for the place. If they want to charge exorbitant admission prices, charge paying visitors for using the toilets or prohibit even non-flash photograph and video cameras, they are entirely at liberty to do so. Yet, besides the immorality of these various practices, there is a further point: these attractions are not strictly private property, but rather quasi-private property - as National Treasures or World Heritage sites, they belong in a larger sense to the People, the Nation and to Humanity even. The management which reaps the profits is merely a custodian of the place. This is the same reason why they would not be allowed to blow up the places, a la the Bamiyan Buddhas, or perhaps even allow the area to be used for the filming of hardcore pornography. There would be a public outcry, if not an emergency law rammed through to seize the area and put it in new hands.