Ray found another cheap fare going from Munich to Abu Dhabi to Colombo, Sri Lanka. So we took Ryanair from Dublin to Paris, spent a day there, flew on Lufthansa to Munich to see Lukas, staying overnight. Then we took Etihad to Abu Dhabi, spending a day there, and on to Colombo.
Sunday, March 26
The flight on Ryanair was not that bad, but it did leave late in the day, and it went to “Paris”. Ryanair saves airport fees by flying to cheap airports, like Beauvais, about an hour’s bus ride out of Paris (not that much farther than CDG).
Paris was in a bit of an uproar on that weekend, and it wasn’t at all clear that buses would be running to get into town. The nation was angry that the president was attempting to enforce arithmetic by fiat, rather than going through the legislature. He wanted to raise the pension age to 64 because there aren’t enough Moroccan teenagers to pay taxes to support the rest of France. I understand the objection, but if you have accepted that the world should have eight billion people, and half the wealth held by a few hundred multibillionaires, and you don’t want all the rest to live in shacks of corrugated sheet metal (most already do), then you are constrained in your ability to fulfill the desire for all society to live half their lives as consumers.
The bus from Beauvais was running as usual. It took us to Porte Maillot, and a short Uber trip took us to Hotel Boissière we’d often stayed in in Levallois-Perret, back when Avid had an office there. The rooms haven’t gotten any bigger, but the price hasn’t gone up much either.
Monday, March 27
Our plans for Monday didn’t involve public transport at all. But as we walked around, we saw the effects of the garbage collector’s strike, with trash everywhere. There should be regular garbage strikes to remind people how much crap we purchase and discard.
We did the usual going to one place for fresh-squeezed orange juice, another for pastries, and then to a bar to eat the pastries and juice with coffee and tea. Then we walked from the hotel towards Palais de Tokyo as a goal (open on Monday!). On the way we were distracted by two monumental Catholic Churches. Sainte-Odile had a tall tower (which drew us there in the first place), and three domes. It also had very interesting stained glass with words identifying the scenes depicted. One was the “miracle of the cows”, and we still haven’t really found a reference to that anywhere. Another building we walked past with oddly intersecting walls turned out to be the church of Saint-Pierre de Chaillot, which had interesting black-and-white frescoes. Its main entrance was being renovated, but we’d gone in the back. Saints were also pictured on the hoardings covering the renovations.
Palais de Tokyo had two great exhibitions happening. One was a retrospective of Miriam Cahn, an artist we’d noticed at the Venice Biennale last year, where she had works in one little room in the Giardini building. Here she had works in several large rooms, and every one had a warning about possibly offensive images (which we are always excited to be notified of). Many of her works are sexually graphic, but in general they are comments on mistreatment of women, by men in general and soldiers in particular. The only named painting in the show, “fuck abstraction!”, was a reaction to the treatment of Ukrainian citizens by Russian soldiers, though it was taken by some critics as pedophilia.
The other show, “Exposed”, was a 40-year retrospective of AIDS and art about it. There were a few Derek Jarman works, and many others from artists I hadn’t heard of. The curators seemed to treat AIDS mostly as a philosophical challenge and barely mention the contribution of scientists, in their explanatory timeline, even when the scientists were French. (Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier won a Nobel Prize in 2008 for having discovered the virus, in 1983.)
Then we walked to a little restaurant, Ripaille, which had an ordinary “formula” of 39 euros for entree+plat+dessert. This is a place you can walk into and say “feed me,” and they will. The food was all interesting and fat and the waiters were nice.
All in all, a perfect day.
Tuesday, March 28
Our next destination was Munich, and we had to get to the airport. Lucky we were flying that day, since Lufthansa had had strikes in Munich the two days before. There were reports that traffic on the Metro to downtown, and on the RER commuter train to the airport, were somewhat disrupted. So, again, we ordered an Uber, and had a smooth ride, in a snazzy Citroen, to the airport.
We didn’t have to check in, so we went right to the gates. It turned out to be in the little “Gates 60-68” area, which didn’t have much to offer, including seating, at first. Everybody in Paris was arriving early in case there were delays in transport. I got annoyed at Brioche Dorée, which had a fancy-looking Italian espresso machine to attract customers, but if you actually order coffee, they make it from a little pushbutton machine. It wasn’t great. Finally the plane arrived, a bit late, and took us to Munich. Dennis, who we’d just seen in Colombia, let us use his Lufthansa Express Bus 10-pack QR code for the trips into town and back.
Dennis and his son Lukas and we took the subway down to Schlesinger Tor where there was a little noodle soup restaurant called “Max’s Beef Noodles”. Ray’s pretty sure its owners are Uyghur. It had a line out the door but we were seated after about 20 minutes, and it was delicious. But we couldn’t see the noodle making floor show easily. Unfortunately, Lukas (who is four) found the wait and the noise more than he could handle and ultimately was unhappy. So we hurried back to Dennis’ house where we slept on his comfortable sofa bed.
Wednesday, March 29
In the morning Dennis got Lukas ready for school, and we walked with him towards the airport bus, stopping for juice/coffee/pastries. Soon we were off to Abu Dhabi. The Etihad Dreamliner made a big loop around the tip of the Negev, avoiding Israeli airspace, but came back up to catch a favorable tailwind blowing toward Kuwait.
The taxis in Abu Dhabi are cheaper than the Ubers: Uber said it’d be 100 dirham to our Ramada Downtown hotel, but in the taxi it was only 80. After sunset, we took another taxi to Al Mrzab, an Emirati restaurant, where we had perfectly-cooked lamb and rice, an arugula salad, mutabal (like babaganoush), and a delicious lemon-mint drink.
Thursday, March 30
After breakfast at the hotel (it was Ramadan, and the hotel breakfast buffet was full of infidels eating after the sun came up) we took a taxi to the Louvre. It is a modern building which is different from the Louvre in Paris. The collection is much smaller, but it is all beautifully presented. They are trying so hard to indicate the unity of religions and peoples. Every section has something for each of the major (monotheistic) religions. There is a flow, fairly chronological. We basically saw everything (except the videos) in the time we had there. Speaking of running into works you weren’t expecting, there is a Paul Gauguin museum in rural Tahiti, which hasn’t the funds to purchase any of his works, and so has color copies and lots of ancillary material. When we were there in 2010, we saw a copy of “Enfants Luttant” (1888) which I briefly wondered where it was but forgot about that. Now, suddenly here it was on the wall. They also have, speaking of Massys, the Money Changer and his Wife. Salvator Mundi still hasn’t showed up.
The impression overall is that the museum is waiting to be populated. They really need to hire Richard Serra. Some of the spaces are so large that ordinary size paintings just get lost in them. It is an impressive building, designed by Nouvel who did the Institut du Monde Arabe – you can see his touch on the shadows.
Later Googling about the Louvre: in the fine print, it says that the museum here is only licensed to use the name “Louvre” until 2037. So it’s really less like the Norman Bridge Annex than it is like the GeoCities 3Com Stadium and Dog Park.
And about the breakfast room: I looked up Abu Dhabi in Wikipedia, and learned that only about 11% of the people living there are Emirati, and only about 76% of them are even Muslim. So it isn’t surprising that they make accommodation for the eating habits of the other quarter of the residents. Restaurants are closed, but if you are completely concealed from public view (2nd floor breakfast room at the hotel) you are allowed to pursue normal hours.
At sunset we left the museum went to Bu Tafish, a seafood place in some gated area. The taxi dropped us off in front of a mosque and someone pointed out where we needed to walk. They had a buffet, but also a menu. We opted for the menu, as buffet food isn’t great for that long. We had a grilled grouper with spices, which was great. It was disappointing that the “crab salad” was made out of K-rab (also known as surimi). And a little kunefe for dessert.
Friday, March 31
There have been many flights this time which leave late in the day. We checked out of the hotel, whiled away the time somehow, and went to the airport in the evening for a red-eye. We had whiled away the last day in Dublin before flying to Paris. This time, we bought an extra half-day at the hotel, and whiled away this last day writing cards and puttering at the hotel, before flying to Sri Lanka.