On your Mark … Get Set … Museum!

June 14 ‐ Paris

Today was the day of our first museum.

We went to the Dali Museum in the morning. That is, we attempted to go to the Dali Museum in the morning, but we got monstrously lost on the way there. Can I just say that the maps of Paris are not very precise…

Instead of going to the Espace Dali in the morning, we spent the morning wandering the Montmarte section of Paris. The funny part of this is that we had met some Americans living in Paris the previous night, and they had said we had to go wandering in the Montmarte section of Paris, and we told them we would, though we had no specific plans as to when. Montmarte was in fact a pretty nifty bit of town. We watched street performers and looked at the neat scenery. We even ran into a statue that was of a man coming out of the brick wall.

Also on the way to the Espace Dali, we saw a fruit and vegetable stand.

We bought vegetables as snack food… I had the best bell-pepper I have ever eaten. It was so delicious.

After much walking in circles, we finally found it:

The museum was fun. There were none of his larger famous paintings, however there were a ton of sculptures that he did – and they were pretty neat. The thing about Dali’s work is that once he finds an image that he likes, he uses the same idea over and over. So we got to see the 3D versions of Dali’s melting clocks, and the elephants from several of his paintings in the mid-40s.

   

I was pretty excited about the space elephant. The Dali Museum had all these great little description placards in English! (more later on how museums in Paris that know they have an international audience refuse to have any kind of information available for anyone who doesn’t speak french) with the piece’s title and medium, but also analyses of the work – which made it infinitely more interesting. It was an absolutely tiny museum, with only about 2 dozen works in it. The Space Elephant, according to the description, represents the onward march of (structured) technology, even on fragile, nearly invisible legs.

Zelda was pretty excited about the series of photographs of Dali and his fantastic elastic mustache.

   

But! The day didn’t end there. After the museum, we were off to the circus!

Now if you thought the Dali Museum was hard to find… (and you should have! Because we told you it was) then the circus was even harder.

Well, that’s not actually true – the circus was easier to find, but much much harder to know where it was. We checked the website for the circus performance, and it simply said that the show was ‘on the Ile Sanguin, about a 5-10 minute walk from the metro’. No address. No directions.

‘Ile Sanguin’ is not an address. It’s not a big island – but it certainly not the size of a circus tent, either. So after some reasonable period of panic, Zelda and I decided to head off to the metro station, and see if we could just find it from there.

And there were signs! The circus troupe had put up signs all down from the train station to the actual circus tent leading us there. By the way, the circus tent was set up in the middle of a beautiful garden.

The show was fantastic!

We were actually there on opening night.

The show was a circus rewrite of swan lake. The show opened on a white sphere in a spotlight, and shadow koi fish swimming on the stage, barely noticeably. And then a set of clowns walked onto the stage, with white tutus affixed to their backs like wings and flapping their arms. There was ballet, acrobatics, miming, clowns, juggling, fantastic costuming – and we had second row seats.

I was especially fond of the man who swung from cloth hanging from the ceiling. Zelda especially liked the acrobat who did one-handed handstands and semi-contortionist poses while moving between two spinning plates. Perhaps the most impressive, though, were the pair of acrobats who did hand stands on each other’s hands, flips, and various hanging-from-the-ceiling tricks. They were markedly impressive.

After the show, we hung around the gardens until the sun started to set, and then we headed back to the metro and to our apartment.

Until next time!

-Ida