Versailles and The Eiffel Tower

I'm blogging on a different computer now (we left Paris and are in the small city of Amien until taking the ferry to jolly old England tomorrow) but the keyboard is the same frustrating format. Apparently French has so many different accents and such that everything has to be rearranged to fit.

Anyway, these pictures are from the day we went to Versailles, Louis the XIVs pleasure palace and main crib, if you will. The vast estate has an enormous palace choc-full of art and finery, and immense gardens with many fountains and even a canal where Louis would hold boating parties. Tres jolie! The complex also contains two smaller palaces and a faux Austrian hamlet built for Marie Antoinette, to escape the 'rigors of court life.'

We walked several miles seeing it all and then went home exhausted. As luck would have it, we were there on November 10th, the day before Armistice day commemorating the signing of the treaty of Versailles in 1918. The next day we saw in the paper that Angela Merkel, the prime minister of Germany had been in Paris with the French President to observe the holiday.

The next morning we went to Sacre Coeur, a church built to spiritually stave off the seige of Paris which ocurred in the Franco-Prussian war in the 1890s. It's a beautiful church and it's spire is the second highest point in Paris; the first being the Eiffel tower.

Later that night we went up to the Tower but got there too late to view the sunset. The view of Paris at night is unbeatable but impossible to photograph (at least with my camera and photographic skills).

Paris 2--Notre Dame etc..

The next day we went to visit the Conciergerie, where the prisoners of the French Revolution, including Marie Antoinette, were held prior to being carted off to the guillotine (see the actual blade above). This is on the Isle de la Cité, the small Island in the Seine which is where Paris originated and the seat of power dating from Roman times all the way through the medieval kings of France.

Right next door is the beautiful church, Sainte-Chapelle, built by Louis the IX in 1239 to house Christ's crown of thorns which he bought from the emperor of Constantinople for 135,000 livres (the chapel itself cost another 40,000). The stained glass is really breathtaking (see pictures above).

Next we walked to the other end of the Isle de la Cité to see Quasimodo's old stomping grounds, Notre Dame. Here we got a view of the gargoyles, the pipe organ (which was playing scary music while we were there), and the flying buttresses (you can imagine the jokes from Rory and Jasper).

Finally, we made our way to the Arc d'Triomphe, Napolean's monument to his own military genius, and Jasper and I climbed the 284 steps to the top and got our first view of the Eiffel Tower.

Paris--Musèe d'Orsay

We got an appartment in the 11th Arrondisment, just a 20 minute metro ride from the Louvre and the Musée d'Orsay, the latter being our first destination in Paris.

This is the Mecca of impressionist art, with more Monet, Van Gogh, Matisse et. al. than you could see in a day. Rory really liked this Degas statue of the young ballerina, and I was ga-ga for the Gaugin and Renoir. The Building is a former railway station and is a beautiful behemoth built in the late 1800s.

Later we walked around looking for a good cafe and ended up in front of the Centre Pompidou, Paris' modern art museum.

The top pictures show us in front of the Pompidou where a large drum and dance group was performing. There's also a picture of Rory in her new stylish coat in our stylish Paris apartment.

The lower pictures are of the Musée d'Orsay.

from Torri to Paris

We went in to Ventimiglia to buy the train tickets. The pictures show us in Ventimiglia the blustery morning that we caught the TGV to Paris.
Also a couple of pictures of Ventimiglia, which in the old town looks a lot like Torri, with a maze of small passageways.
The bottom two pictures show Dawn and Michael, an English couple who were also staying at Torri Superiore. She is a physician, so we had some good discussions about the state of healthcare, and Michael knows a bunch of songs and plays the guitar, so we had a good time playing music.

Torri 2--OLIVES!

Our first day at Torri we arrived just as a large group of guests was leaving and we were basically told that everyone was going to relax after luch and we'd discuss our 'jobs' around the dinner table. On day 2 it rained hard in the morning, and it was too wet to pick olives, so we did some cleaning up and then took a nap and read until dinner.

On day three we finally went and picked olives.

We learned that there are many methods for picking olives, including manual, mechanical and even chemical methods for getting the olives to fall into a net so that they can be carted away. Right off the tree they are extremely bitter but apparently the bitterness is in the water soluble fraction of the olive and is removed during the making of oil or by soaking in brine for several months.

Massimo (seen dumping olives into the press above, and below picking olives) uses the very old fashioned method of simply picking the olives and letting them fall into a net placed beneath the tree. This is complicated by the fact that this is very steep terrain and the trees are on terraces so the olives fall down and another net needs to be placed below.

At the end of 3 hours of picking, between Rory, Jasper, Theresa, Myself and Paula (another volunteer), we had the two buckets of olives you see on the wheelbarrow that I'm pushing (below). We picked for 3 days (mostly just in the morning) and ended up with 15 'misures' of olives, each one of which made about 2 liters of oil.

Massimo was quite happy with this and we gained a whole new understanding of olive oil! I was really lucky to get to go to the olive press just down the street, the Ballestra Livia, and watch the oil being made.