Paris, City of Queues
You don’t need the Paris museum pass. Go to Mariage Freres at the Place de la Madeleine, buy three tins of tea instead.
Serves us right for trying to be practical while on vacation (from which we will need a vacation). We bought a Paris Museum Pass, which promises that we can make unlimited visits to the museums and that we don’t have to fall in line—we can go straight in by just flashing the pass.
Lines at the Louvre. Go on the first Sunday of the month, when admission is free. In the dead of winter, when there are fewer visitors. Then you can imagine that the zombie apocalypse has happened and you are trapped in the Louvre. There are worse fates.
We bought a 2-day pass for 42 euros, with the intention of cramming the 7 exhibitions we wanted to see after we got back from the Austrian sticks. True, experience tells us that we can go to just one or two museums before we get art overload and our brain shuts down, but we figured that by averting our eyes and ignoring everything but the shows we wanted to see, we could fool ourself into staying alert.
The Frank Gehry-designed Fondation Louis Vuitton in the middle of nowhere, the Bois de Boulogne. Note to Ricky and Raul: We went. The building is the event, as Noel would put it. The collection: Non-event of the year, possibly the decade.
Immediately we found out that the museums we went to were, for some reason or other, not covered by the blasted pass. The Paris Museum Pass IS NOT HONORED at privately-owned museums and temporary exhibitions at public museums. It is not good for the Marchel Duchamp exhibit at the Pompidou, the Garry Winogrand show at Jeu de Paume, the newly-opened Fondation Louis Vuitton, and even the newly-reopened Picasso Museum. It is so useless for our purposes, there should be a line for hapless gits so we could flash the Paris Museum Pass and someone could say, “You can’t use that here.”
We queued up for an hour at the Picasso. Apparently only a certain number of people can be admitted at any given time, or else you can’t see the art for the crowds. The press of humans is useful for staying warm as it is getting very cold.
Only get the Paris Museum Pass IF it’s your first time in Paris, you’re on a package tour, you’ve never seen the permanent exhibits at the Louvre, Orsay, Pompadou and the other majors, and you need to see everything in 2, 4, or 6 CONSECUTIVE DAYS. And you have a car and driver, because getting from one place to the other using public transportation (and we love the metro, though it smells exactly like the Quiapo underpass) will eat into your time budget. And your brain won’t overload and shut down.
We should’ve used the 42 euros to buy lunch with a glass of champagne at Fauchon dammit.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
November 12th, 2014 at 19:53
Oh my. Not even at the Picasso Museum? Can you book tickets for the other five exhibitions online? So, was the Picasso worth the one-hour queue? (Hope you walked from there to the Place des Vosges— one of those smallish parks that I imagine must be beautiful in the fall). Were you able to go to Mont Saint Michel? (So many questions haha).
November 13th, 2014 at 01:27
Deadma na ako sa mga museums. vin vin et cafe cafe na lang.
November 13th, 2014 at 15:20
E nandoon si Lolo Marcel (Duchamp) at si Lola Marguerite (Duras).
Kung vin-vin, cafe-cafe lang, di sa Maynila na lang, wala pang jetlag.
November 13th, 2014 at 15:26
avignon: It’s infuriating because the Picasso is actually listed on the museum pass as “closed for renovation”, so one assumed that when it reopened as it just did, the museum pass would be honored. Fortunately it was worth lining up for, and the queue gave us insights into what our friend calls “French engineering” (covered in our next column). There was a queue for people who had bought tickets online and people without tickets. Neither one moved.
The trees are beautiful, with yellow, orange, purple, brown leaves. In a week or so they should be naked.
November 13th, 2014 at 18:19
The Paris metro smelling like the underpass was EXACTLY how I described it first time I went there. In the sweltering heat of summer. In a crowd of Chinese tourists.