For various reasons, I visited Paris three times in 2013. I didn’t feel like blogging about it, because there’s not much I can say about Paris that people wouldn’t already know, and I blogged about it during my first visit there. But as I go through old travel photos in my computer and delete some, I will share a few interesting observations from my trips.
When I first visited Paris, I still had a journalist card, which was very useful in entering museums. Last year, without a journalist card, I visited only those that offered something for free or were super interesting.
Still, museums are interesting not only as storage rooms for art and historical artifacts, but also as spaces where people interact. Here a tourist is trying to get a fancy angle of a juggler.
An exhibition of Art Spiegelman’s work (he is famous for the Holocaust-themed cartoon, Mouse) revealed that Spiegelman also created this kind of art:
As I was visiting before the presidential election, I saw this creepy poster for Sarkozy. Someone painted over his eyes so that he looks like a giant tower, surveying the sea to see if no immigrants are coming by boat.
A travel agency advertises its services using racist-essentialist dolls:
A chocolate store advertises its goodies with a very queer Santa:
The Eiffel tower vanishes into fog:
A collection of bears from Berlin arrived to represent each country. Here’s one for Luxembourg:
The last time I was there, there was a demonstration against the marriage equality law, which would allow homosexuals to marry. People were distributing leaflets about it, and I even saw two elderly men fist-fighting on the subway about it, one shouting at the other “I saw you went to that demonstration!” It was very unexpected that France is so polarized about this.