Day 50: Versailles and Offenbach

And today we go to Versailles.
Versailles: Loius XIV, XV and XVI’s monument to excess and decadence.  No wonder the people revolted. Luckily the palace survived the revolution, as I’m sure it is a great money spinner now for the French. Just like Ludwig’s tributes to the Sun King back in Bavaria are huge tourist attractions.
We met Shaz, Shan and Ken at Abbesses and metro’d our way, with a little bit of getting lost between line changes for just that little bit of added excitement, to our RER station at Musèe d’Orsay.

We then had a nice and comfy double-decker train ride through the burbs of Paris to Versailles. No need to check the map which way to go when getting off at Versailles Chateâu Rive Gauche, just follow all the other fellow travellers.
As palaces go, this is pretty mightily impressive. The sheer size alone is impressive enough, let alone the gold leaf across the roofs and upper windows. Grandiosity on the grandest scale.

The girls had all seen the palace before so they headed for the gardens while Ken and I queued up. Inside the palace, with the grand apartments and the hall of mirrors, I couldn’t but help feel I’d seen this before. Old Ludwig had done a fine job in bringing the splendour and largess of the Sun King and his descendants into Bavaria, even to the point that I actually thought that the Hall of Mirrors in Schloss Linderhof was more impressive than its inspiration. Wow. Not to say that the Versailles Hall of Mirrors was by any means deficient. Maybe it was just that there was such a huge crowd of people moving through this place that it was a bit of a distraction to the actual building, art and atmosphere. Still though, this was truly quite an amazing place to be.

So we spent a couple of hours walking through room after room of palace extravagance. Halls of statues, beautifully painted vaulted ceilings linking royalty back to the gods, and room after room of decadent furniture and walls and walls of the most beautiful paintings. I think the members of the Women’s March, chasing Marie Antoinette through these opulent grand apartments, showed quite remarkable restraint.

So, with how amazingly over the top the palace was, that was absolutely nothing when compared to the gardens!
The gardens were a real treat, and I wish I could have spent all day there exploring every fountain, secluded secret garden and statue as well as the odd garden cat.

The girls had been exploring around on a golf cart, and having an absolute ball. Apparently there were segways here too, which would have been a great way to explore the vastness of the gardens however they did not seem to be available today.
So we grabbed lunch and beer, lunch supposedly being a Salad Niçoise. At least that was what the menu said. I’ve never had one so I had to take their word for it, as apparently these things can have quite a bit of variety in their composition and arrangement. Though this one did have what appeared to be the main components: tuna, tomatoes, olives, beans, hard-boiled eggs, anchovies. Did I say I had beer? It was another hot day, and that beer went down a treat. ;-)

Glacè of course was good too. We wandered further through the gardens, and grabbed some macarons at Angelina Versailles. I cannot get me enough of these macarons.

We gave the Petite Trianon a miss, and headed out into the gardens behind. The Temple de lÁrmour and the Hameau de la Reine, a quaint village of Flemish houses, barns and mills amongst meadows and lakes were beautiful. An idyllic retreat for Marie Antoinette where she escaped from the bores and trials of the regal lifestyle to dress in muslin and milk the cows and goats. Her escape from the complexities of court life into the simple life of the peasants won her no favours amongst the people who mistrusted her, seeing this as a mocking of the poor. The poor girl couldn’t win a trick.

And so we also escaped into this village from the past, walking amongst fields of flowers, enjoying the cool breezes amongst the tress, watched goslings glide behind their parents through the brooks, and seeing the farmyard animals go about their business: including one rooster that was taking extreme issue with a rabbit, and a goat that thought the food box was better put to use as a bed.

I parted ways with the others to try and explore as much of the gardens flooded with baroque music as possible, before we made our way back to Paris. I grabbed another ice cream and visiting a good number of the many fountains, including notably the musically synchronised Mirror Fountain, and my favourite Bosquet de la Salle de Bal, (aka Grove of the Ballroom), an amazing sunken terrace with cascading water and fountains with a classical orchestral soundtrack.

Leaving the palace behind, we stopped across the road from the station for a drink, then trained it back to Montmartre.

We got some more authentic Parisian hospitality at La Cave Gourmande on Rue des Martyrs, near Abbesses Station. We were seated without too much fuss, but when we asked for an English menu, we got a firm “No.” Our request for a drinks menu received the same reply. “No.””
OK, the table down from us clearly has a mojito, but when I request the same, the waitress rolled her eyes and walked off across the road. I didn’t know if I was getting a drink or not. She eventually returned from the restaurant / bar across the road with my mojito and everybody else’s drinks. Ok.
The topic of dinner came up, and she seemed to come alive, walking down past a few tables and returning with a chalkboard with the menu, written in English! I ordered snails as an entrée which seemed to get me a little respect and the steak frites for mains.

Between snails and steak, a guy holding guitar walked up and started singing and playing. He was really good. He played Coldplay and Powderfinger amongst other numbers. He was absolutely awesome. He played four or five songs and then took a collection. I think he was so happy that he collected so much money, as he then  played an encore of Hey Jude for us all. Extreme talent.

Following dinner, the girls went back to the apartment and Ken and I went down to the glitzy (polite way of saying it) part of Montmartre to catch a cabaret slash burlesque show. We walked into La Nouvelle Eve where we could hear the closing number finishing up.
The suited gentleman at the door happily took our money for the next show (we didn’t have a booking) and said come back in ½ hour, or if we wanted to we could wait here for the next show. We sat on the purple crushed velvet couch as we listened to Paris je T’aime and the applause from inside.
The doors opened and the people leaving were raving about how wonderful the show was, more elderly woman flirted with us, and almost an hour later the guests for the next show started arriving. We were directed to our seats on the upstairs balcony and ordered our complimentary champagne.
The lights dimmed, the music started, and an amazing evening of dancing, comic acts, singing, glamour, girls in amazing costumes, and girls sans costumes, intermixed with hilarious audience participation began. I was most thankful to be up in the gallery, safe from being dragged onto the stage. The star of the show was amazing and sang this really cool samba version of La Vie en rose, amongst many other numbers. Girls leapt in the air and landed on the stage doing splits with a bang, then guys did the same in a cringe worthy way. No photos or video were allowed, but Ken managed to sneak a few photos in.

And of course the highlight of the evening was my absolute favourite, the bawdy cancan. I love Offenbach, I love the dancing, I love the dresses, the frills, the loud colours and the happiness and fun of it all. The girls kicking their legs right up in the air touching their heads with their shins, then the guys doing the same, then throwing themselves onto the stage. They must finish each evening with a new set of bruises on bruises.
It was an amazing and very Parisian evening that I enjoyed more than I can express. I wish a theatre company would stage Orpheus in the Underworld, I haven’t seen that play in ages, and of course Galop Infernal reminded me of it.
The shows between the dancing were much better than I anticipated as well, with some pretty amazing jugglers named Les Philips, that scared the wits out of some poor young New Zealander from the audience: juggling hats, bowling pins and other items around him, and knocking hats and glasses off his head with the bowling pins.
Other shows included an acrobat Yvest et Simo, who somehow managed to stand on a plank, that was placed on 3 or was it 4 cylinders rolling back and forward, that was on top of a table. He told us we didn’t need to worry, as he was an acrobat. He nearly took out some of the Contiki travellers in the front row.

I managed to find one of the other acts on youtube as well Jèrôme Murat

The evening wrapped up with the star of the show dragging four members of the audience up on stage: a Japanese American, an older Australian with a very impressive moustache, and two younger guys from the large Australian Contiki group. She then preceded to do a complicated dance number which each of the guys had to replicate, being judged on their dancing skills by the volume of the audience's applause.
Needless to say the older Aussie guy one. His prize was getting married to one of the dancing girls wearing, and then not wearing a wedding dress. He was then dragged behind the curtains, only to return shortly carrying a newborn baby. Ha!
Apparently we were solicited by some young woman as we passed the hotels and other various establishments along the Boulevard de Clichy on our way back home, as well as the dodgy men trying to lure us into peep shows and whatever else was going on down here. 

More pics from this awesome day are here.