Paris Trip

Picture from http://www.flickr.com/photos/77075989@N00/1298398424

Yes, yes, y'all. I went to lovely sunny Paris. As I was going alone and I could do whatever it was that I wanted, no “it’s so boring” cries to contend with, I decided to go museum crazy. I spent hours and hours researching on the internet. I planned not to be stuck looking like a tourist feeling foolish even though many times, I did. Standing in the queue for the tourist office at Gare du Nord was one of them, the second was ignoring the discrete sign, written in French, not to take the audio guide outside. The guard corrected me gently while I tried to nonchalantly walk past. Very unusual for a guard to do that because as I learned, to my horror, they love to shout over there. Man, do they shout. I was expecting it as all the reviews and the experience from my last trip showed me, but it was still a shock to my system. The pleasant surprises were the Musee du quai Branly and the Louvre. The Louvre is amazing, a museum so big it has separate wings, each wing is bigger than the British Museum and it had four of them. The first day I planned to settle myself in easy, I wanted to go the black areas. See how they lived, see what they did, the foods they ate. Did they behave like regular Africans or were French Africans different. I spend many fruitless hours googling serch terms such as: black Paris, Senegalese Paris, etc, but just could not find anything. Eventually I came across this Travel group, geared at Americans, that just seemed so bogus I could not bring myself to subscribe to them. "Black Tours of Paris" they conveniently called themselves. I had a look at all the tours they offered but it looked like all they were doing was going to the white places and pointing out all the black highlights. It just did not seem like fun and that shoddy picture of a bridge and a wall were not doing them any favours either. I gave up at that point, for a few weeks, until the bright idea dawned on me. Why didn’t I look for black museums, or museums with African or Caribbean themes? That way I could get to one place look for flyers to my next destination. Yes, I thought and them promptly googled for museums. I found an amazing website

http://www.soulofamerica.com/paris-guide.phtml http://www.soulofamerica.com/paris-advice-and-observations.phtml

Its a bit irritating, the constant use of the word "sisters". Two good areas to visit are

Little Africa by the Metro station Chateau Rouge

Black Hair area by the Metro station Chateau d'Eau

But the overall advice was good. Tips such as

Don't take photos of the American Embassy. They have armed guards that are not obvious until you point your camera towards the American Embassy.

Makes you wonder about the unfortunate position that the tip giver found themselves in. I can see the confused tourist, camera in hand, frozen to the spot as several armed men, probably shouting at her in French, rush towards her. I try not to laugh as it is not funny when you are not in that situation but it is really funny when you are not. They also gave you a nice big list of all the museums

http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/home.html

Musee quai Branly. http://www.quaibranly.fr/en/collections/permanent-collections/africa/index.html Did I mention that their museum was amazing? You sit in the dark for most of it and the artwork is subtly highlighted with light. Kind of makes you think that the curators still think of the art of non-European peoples as primitive and dark. I know better, as the exhibition space in the British Library is a darkened room but the French are so strange and seem to still carry attitudes that brought about negrophilia. I had to wonder. It was an amazing exhibition. There was nothing traditional about that space. Not the seats or the nooks and crannies or the fact that the dark made me feel so comfortable and warm I did not notice so much the herds of people that moved around me, whispering to each other and consulting their guide books as they went along. Another website I found was

http://cafedelasoul.com/ Taking you beyond the Eiffel towel since 1998.

Oh I loved their spunky funky tagline. Its just a shame I didn't see this website before I went there.