Showing posts with label comradery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label comradery. Show all posts

Sunday, November 17, 2024

My Last Day In Paris, Part Two

or Not My Last Day In Paris, Part Two

A photograph of a woman from the shoulders up whose face is blurred from turning her head during the exposure. She is wearing a green coat with a white scarf around her neck, knotted loosely just below her neck.
Sumei à l'Hôtel du Nord ©2024 Patrick T. Power

It's best to read Part One first.

After parting with Sumei, a light rain began to fall in the city as I made my way to Le Dock. Based on the photos I took, I rode the métro to a stop near the Louvre, probably Concorde, then walked from there. Amongst my favourite things to do in Paris (or, really, anywhere, I guess) is to photograph the reflections in the wet pavement. And so it was that I noticed the reflections of the red illuminated awnings of the entrances at the Ritz Paris in Place Vendôme.

A photograph taken at Place Vendome in Paris during a light drizzle of rain. The wet pavement takes up most of the photograph and it reflects the arched entrances of the Ritz Paris hotel.
Ritz Paris, ©2024 Patrick T. Power

Everything so far had gone swimmingly, and I took to heart the first three letters of the name of a shoe store, I think, or maybe one that sold clothes in general. La joie. Joy.

A photograph taken in the early evening of part of a business's window sign. I can't recall what the name of the business was, but it started with these three letters: JOY at the far right of the image. The rest of the image is of the translucent glass of the window. The letters are the negative space formed by a black rectangular field, in other words, translucent on black.
La joie, ©2024 Patrick T. Power

I must have gotten something to eat at around this time as I didn't take another photograph for well over an hour, and didn't get to Le Dock for another hour after that. While I recall so much about the day and the trip, I'm at a loss as to the space of time between Place Vendôme and Le Dock.

A casual portrait of a friend in a bar. He is at the right side of the frame, sitting at the bar. His body is facing towards the camera, but he is facing to the left of the frame, his chin resting in his right hand.
Sebastien at the bar, ©2024 Patrick T. Power

Ten or twelve of my friends made it out that night, a Tuesday, as well as a couple I think I'd never met before, and borrowing a mobile, I called one more—Phil—to encourage him to show up. It turned out that it was a good thing he did.

A photograph four people cramming into a selfie, which we didn't call selfies at the time. I am in the center and take up most of the frame. There is a woman's head popping into the lower right corner, a man leaning into the picture above her and slightly behind me, and another woman looking in from the laft of the frame, almost with her head on my shoulder.
Aru, Me, Pierre, and Audrey, ©2024 Patrick T. Power

A native of Switzerland, Phil had been living in Paris for some time. He's a musician and founded/runs a music school. When my original lodging plans hit a snag, he let me stay at his place for two or three nights. This is important to note because Phil's ex-girlfriend from Sweden, Linn, was also staying with him for a spell as she was in Paris for a medical appointment. She and I had talked at some point and we discovered that we were scheduled to fly out on the same day.

With only a couple of exceptions, I probably knew Phil best of all my Flickr friends, so I was hoping to see him before I left. At around 11:30 PM he made it. Almost immediately, he said, "I wasn't going to come because you were supposed to leave today." I said, "No, I leave tomorrow." He said, "No, you were supposed to leave today, because I took Linn to the airport this morning, and you were supposed to leave on the same day she did." Of course, he was right, but as I had my backpack with me which held my itinerary, I got it out to check it.

A photograph of my intinerary which shows that I was scheduled to leave Paris on 15 November 2005.
Un vol raté, ©2024 Patrick T. Power

With that revelation, of course, there was really nothing I could do except carry on with the fun. Figuring out what to do to get home would have to wait until morning. Which, of course, it did.

A three-frame panorama taken at a bar. The bar itself is at the right and recedes to the back of the building. The bartender is nehind it. He wears a t-shirt which says, FREE BREAST EXAMS. There is a group of people gathered to the left of the bar. There are stairs at the far left whic lead up to another smal gathering space. There is no one upstairs. There are three lamps which hang down from the ceiling. They are designed to look like aluminum trash cans. Liquor lines the brick wall behind the bar. There is a bicycle helmet on the nearest end of the bar.
Mes amis, ©2024 Patrick T. Power

But all of a sudden, it occurred to me that had I made my 1:55 PM flight, I would be landing in Detroit at 5:05 PM, which pretty much was what time it was in Detroit at that very moment. My friend Melissa had offered to pick me up at Detroit Metro, which meant that she might very well be sitting in her car wondering where the hell I was. I borrowed Phil's phone and called her. As I think of this now, I was incredibly lucky that in November of 2005 both she and Phil had mobile phones, because I wouldn't get one for another five years. Anyway, she was just about to arrive at the terminal when I reached her, and being the kind, sweet human being that she is shrugged it off as no problem. (I think. I hope.) While it was a pretty big inconvenience to have wasted four hours of her time (in rush-hour traffic, no less), it could have been SO much worse had I not remembered this. The rest of the evening is a bit of a blur to me now, and not because I was drunk (I wasn't). I went back to my hosts' apartment not knowing what I was going to do. I hoped, of course, that Northwest Airlines would work with me to get me on another flight, but I would soon learn a lesson about airlines and missed flights. (Long after my trip, I was curious about where I was at the time my flight was taking off, so I looked through my photographs and checked their time stamps. I was with Sumei at Hôtel du Nord)

The following morning, Catherine, with some assistance from her brother Julien helped me to book a flight home. At the time, it was considerably cheaper to book round-trip—versus one-way—tickets, so that's what we did, but in order to keep the price down, we went with a departure date that would mean nine more days in Paris. In may ways, those last nine days were the best days of the trip.

Part One

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Saturday, November 16, 2024

My Last Day In Paris, Part One

or Not My Last Day In Paris

A five-frame photographic panorama of Canal Saint-Martin in Paris's 10th Arrondissement taken from Quai de Valmy looking towards Avenue Richerand. Canal Saint-Martin fills up most of the image with only a little bit of the buildings on Quai de Jemmapes appearing at the top of the frame. Those buildings and trees along the canal appear as reflections in the water. To the left of the frame, in the foreground, is a big group of fallens leaves and some trash on the water's surface. The panorama was stitched using Photoshop's Photomerge, and because of the stretching of some of the frames necessary to stitch them, the image is not rectilinear. It almost looks like the five images are laid on top of each other, except that there are no visible signs of the overlaps, and the outer two frames (left and right) are rather distorted because of the stretching process.
Canal Saint-Martin, ©2024 Patrick T. Power

Probably anyone who knows me even a little knows that I love Paris. Thanks to the generosity of several Parisians, I made my first trip there in November of 2005. I have many stories to tell from that time, but because someone posted something to Facebook this morning that reminded me of something that occurred nineteen years ago yesterday, I thought I would write about that day.

First, I have to preface by saying that my trip was to last two weeks, from 1 November (when the plane left Detroit) to 15 November. At some point during that last week, I decided to make a trip to Madrid, Spain to visit another friend whom I'd met on Flickr. When I booked that flight, my plan was to go to Madrid for three days and two nights, return to Paris, take the whole next day to wander the city one more time, then leave for home the following day.

That was the plan anyway.

Everything actually went pretty smoothly, and on that last full day, I contacted a few of my friends and recommended we get together one last time at Le Dock, a now-defunct bar not too far from L'Opéra Garnier. One of our Flickr pals, Philippe, was a bartender there, and the place was sort of the unofficial Flickr watering hole.

So, that morning, between 9:00 and 10:00, I caught line 1 at the Place Blanche métro station, which was just across the street from where I was staying, and headed to Place Saint-Michel. The trip required changing trains at Gare de L'Est (made famous in the film Amélie), and as I waited for my connection to arrive, I decided to sit on the platform for a while and people watch. In the mornings, as you might imagine, trains were packed with commuters, and as I watched them load and unload every few minutes, I imagined a series of photographs taken over several hours from the spot I was sitting, recording what each train looked like as the doors closed before departing. While I waited, a young woman rushing to get onto a train, unwittingly dropped her scarf. I hurriedly picked it up and handed it to her just inside the door, in time for the doors to close. I took but three frames while I waited at Gare de L'Est, all of the reflection in a stairwell.

Photograph of a reflection in the mirror on a stairway at the métro station at Place Saint-Michel in Paris. While the colour red-orange dominates, it also is an image that juxtaposes lines of the ceramic tiles with those of the reflected ceramic tiles and the stairs.
À Gare de L'Est, ©2024 Patrick T. Power

Once at Saint-Michel, I walked around the area looking for souvenirs for my kids (I am SO BAD at buying gifts for people), took a few pictures at the fountain at Saint-Michel as well as along the Seine, then walked over to explore around Cathédrale Notre-Dame, then Hôtel de Ville before catching another train at the Hôtel de Ville métro stop. I had arranged to meet a friend in the Belleville section of town, so I got off at République station. My route took me past Canal Saint-Martin—also made famous in Amélie—along the way, so I stopped to take a few pictures. The panorama at the top of this post was taken there. Along Boulevard de la Villette, I came upon this woman in a beautiful coat.

Photograph of a black woman walking in front of me with a coat that appears to have an African design of some sort. Her head is turned to her left and partly visible. She has corn-rowed hair that looks to be of a similar colour patternas her coat.
Sur Boulevard de la Villette, ©2024 Patrick T. Power

I met my friend Sumei, but not before getting a photograph of part of the façade of Palais des Glaces, a theatre on Rue de Faubourg du Temple.

Black-and-white zoomed-in detail photograph of a section of the façade of Palais de Glaces on rue Faubourg du Temple in Belleville, Paris. The façade has what appears to be a carving of an elephant crammed into a rectangular space. This photograph is a crop of about half of the carving, and includes most of the head and top half of its torso, looking very crammed within the space of the image's dimensions.
Palais des Glaces, ©2024 Patrick T. Power

Sumei and I headed back to Canal Saint-Martin and we took a bunch of pictures there, me with my Nikon CoolPix 8800 (a rather glorified point-and-shoot) and she with her dSLR, a Nikon D70s.

A Prisma AI conversion of a photograph of two men talking near the middle of the Passerelle des Douanes, which spans Canal Saint-Martin. The app's Dallas filter gives the image a painterly appearance.
Passerelle des Douanes (Prisma conversion), ©2024 Patrick T. Power

Sumei is another of the people I met via Flickr, and, in fact, I think this was our first in-person meeting. We stopped to have a coffee at Brasserie de l'Hôtel du Nord on Quai de Jemmapes, which runs along the east side of the canal. Hôtel du Nord is famous as the setting for the eponymous 1938 film. After coffee, Sumei had a little business to tend to. She worked for real estate company at the time, and she had to get a signature on a lease or a deed or something in the La Chappelle neighbourhood, so I accompanied her. Afterwards, we visited Église Saint-Bernard-de-la-Chapelle (Saint Bernard Church of La Chapelle), which was built from 1858 to 1861. I have a thing for religious iconography, despite my atheist ways, so we spent about thirty minutes there before she had to get on her way home in the south of the city.

Black-and-white photograph taken inside Église Saint-Bernard-de-la-Chapelle.
Église Saint-Bernard-de-la-Chapelle, ©2024 Patrick T. Power

Part Two

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