La Place de la Concorde from afar

Here are still more photos from the top of the Tour Montparnasse. If you read this blog often, you'll get tired of hearing me introduce the photos every day. Remember, though, that some other reader might just drop into the blog through a Google search and not have seen earlier posts.

The tightest shot is the one above. As you can see, restoration and renovation work is going on and is hidden by huge decorative tarps. There must be scaffolding behind them. The U.S. Embassy is just barely visible on the left. In the middle of the place is an obelisk that was given to the French king Charles X as a gift by Egypt nearly 200 years ago.

The scariest part of the Place de la Concorde for Americans is driving around it. There are almost no lanes marked on the pavements, and cars, trucks, and buses seem to fly around the place in a wild free-for-all. Actually there are rules for the traffic flow. The main one is priorité à droite — you are expected to yield to vehicles on your right. And there are traffic lights all around the place.

In this last photo, you can see the U.S. Embassy building on the far left, the Hôtel de Crillon in the middle (being restored and renovated by new Saudi Arabian owners, evidently), and the colonnade of the (identical) Ministère de la Marine building farther to the right. In this view, you can see the long narrow buildings that are the Galerie du Jeu de Paume (farther back) and the Musée de l'Orangerie (more in the foreground). Both are in the Jardin des Tuileries, which is part of the Louvre complex. The Eglise de la Madeleine is on the upper right, linked to the Place de la Concorde by the Rue Royale.

Two subjects, three photos

There have been times in the past on the blog when I thought anybody who read it regularly must be getting tired of seeing photos of grape vines, vineyard plots, and grapes. Or sunsets and sunrises. Or food. Now I'm wondering if you who look in here often are getting tired of photos of Paris from on high. Oh well — here are some more.

The photo above is specifically for CHM. It was taken looking toward the southeast from the top of the Tour Montparnasse, down the Avenue du Maine past the cemetery. The church on the left is Saint-Pierre-de-Montrouge, and CHM said in a comment yesterday that his grandparents got married there late in the 19th century. The church was built between 1863 and 1872.

This second photo today shows a famous Paris hospital, L'Hôpital du Val-de-Grâce. It's a military hospital, and anytime you hear about a major politician or government official who has had to be hospitalized, you hear about the Val-de-Grâce. The domed building is the Église Notre-Dame-du-Val-de-Grâce, built over a 20-year period in the first half of the 1600s in the French classical baroque style. It's on the southern edge of the Latin Quarter of Paris. There is a large modern wing of the hospital that you can see on the right side of the photo.

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Here's one more photo that I want to post today. It's something completely different.

One warm day last week, I was upstairs watching a film on TV or doing something on my computer. I went downstairs to the living room for some reason, and there was Walt "watching tennis on TV" with Bertie. Bertie watched me carefully as I picked up my camera and snapped a picture...

Le Cimetière du Montparnasse

The Montparnasse cemetery covers nearly 50 acres of ground on the Left Bank of Paris. It was created in 1824 on what was then farmland outside Paris. In my photo below, you can see how much greenery it contains. You can also see most of the southeastern quadrant of Paris.

Here's an enlargment of the lower right corner of the photo above, looking down on the neighborhood between the cemetery and the Tour Montparnasse.

As always, you can display the photos at a larger size by clicking or tapping on them to open them in a new window.

Focusing in on a Paris neighborhood

Did I ever mention that Paris is my favorite city place in the world? I guess that might be obvious. I lived there for about five years many years several decades ago, and I've never gotten over it. Walt and I have spent innumerable vacations in Paris, just wandering the streets — enjoying the sights and atmosphere. Here are some photos of one neighborhood where I've ended up spending a significant amount of time over the years.

The elevated métro line is the one that runs from Nation to Etoile through Montparnasse.

The beautiful building with the green dome at the corner is easy to pick out, even from the top of the Tour Montparnasse.

It's amazing how the apartment buildings are all packed together. It's like a 3D jigsaw puzzle.

I would love to see into some of these windows and know what the different apartments are like inside.

How do the taggers manage to get up here and make their mark on such high walls?

At least one friend who reads this blog will recognize this neighborhood immediately...

Ratatouille

I guess since the famous animated movie came out a few years ago, everybody now knows what ratatouille means. It's a southern French dish of stewed summer vegetables — tomatoes, eggplant (aubergines), zucchini (courgettes), bell peppers (poivrons), onions, and garlic. The city of Nice gets credit for inventing it, but the first time I ever tasted it was in Marseille in 1970, when I was a student in Aix-en-Provence.

If you don't have peppers or garlic, that's okay, actually. You can still make a simple ratatouille. It's more of a method than a recipe. Two other ingredients you really need, however, are olive oil and thyme. I like to put some red pepper flakes in mine, along with salt and black pepper, of course.

Why is the dish called ratatouille, though? Well, it's probably a dialectal combination of two verbs: ratatiner, which means to shrivel up, to get wrinkly, and touiller, which means to stir, with the idea of mashing or lightly crushing included. To make ratatouille, you stir and crush summer vegetables in olive oil until they are shriveled and start to fall apart.

Fresh tomatoes from the garden are always better.

Ratatouille doesn't even rate a mention (that I can find), much less an article in the Larousse Gastronomique food encyclopedia. It's not really a French (read "Parisian") dish. The LG does include a couple of recipes for zucchini and tomatoes prepared as in Nice or Menton, but without eggplant.

Ratatouille really is a seasonal, summertime dish that is especially good when the weather is hot and sunny. At the same time, you can buy it in jars at the supermarket. Just heat and serve.

Usually you cook ratatouille in a pot on top of the stove. Recipes vary considerably. Some say to brown the vegetables separately and then put them into a pot in layers to cook, with a little water as needed, for 30 to 60 minutes. Others say just put all the vegetables in a pot with olive oil and then stir and mash them as they cook, until they are tender. Some even say to mash the cooked vegetables with a potato masher to blend the flavors well. You can serve ratatouille hot, warm, or cold.

Another version is ratatouille cooked as a kind of gratin in the oven. Arrange slices of tomato, eggplant, peppers, and zucchini in a baking dish on a bed of lightly sauteed onions. Drizzle olive oil over all, sprinkle with salt, pepper, and thyme, and add a little bit of water. Put the dish in a slow oven — 300ºF, 150ºC — and let it cook for 60 to 90 minutes. Turn the heat down as it cooks, or cover the dish, if it starts to brown too much. Add more water as needed, but not too much.

Ratatouille baked in the oven is what I made a couple of days ago. I had vegetables left over after I packed the slices into a baking dish, so at the same time I made a pot of more traditional ratatouille on top of the stove. As the oven-baked dish cooked and dried out, I spooned on some of the liquid from the stove-top ratatouille to keep it moist. That worked out pretty well.

Walt has a plan to make a pizza using ratatouille, with some of the cooking liquid drained off, as the topping, and with melted cheese. I think that sounds very tasty.

Vendanges

The term used in France to name the grape harvest is « les vendanges ». Usually around Saint-Aignan, les vendanges take place in September, but harvesting can start as early as August or as late as October. This year the summer was warm, rainfall was infrequent, and the harvest is now. The grapes are pretty.

Most of the harvest around the Touraine is done by machine, but some vineyard parcels are harvested by hand. I've noticed more of that this year than in the past. Wine prices in the area have gone up quite a bit over the past five years, so maybe the vignerons (growers-producers) can afford to hire more workers than in the past.

 

The vignerons seem to be harvesting white-wine grapes for the time being. A lot of Sauvignon Blanc grapes have been taken in already. The parcel of Chardonnay grapes down the hill, north of our house, has been done too.

Red grapes — Cabernet Franc, Gamay, Côt (known as Malbec elsewhere), Pinot Noir, and Pineau d'Aunis — are still on the vines. It's supposed to rain this weekend, but I haven't seen any mad scramble to start picking them so far.

 

Let's hope the weather goes back to sunny and mild by Monday or Tuesday. Too much damp weather won't be good for the grapes that are still on the vine, and it will also be bad for our tomatoes, many of which are still ripening.

I took all these photos, including the sunrise above, yesterday morning, using my Canon SX700 camera. I have come to the conclusion that I get better close-ups when I don't put it into macro mode to take them. As you can see, the weather was perfect for photography at eight o'clock in the morning.

Some Left Bank shots

From the top of the Tour Montparnasse, the Left Bank of Paris is not across the way, but just below where you are standing. I know I've already posted a photo of the Eglise Saint-Sulpice, but here's another, slightly different one:

I've also already posted a photo of the Pantheon in this series, but again, here's another, from slightly farther out. The big charcoal-gray high-rise building behind it is the recently re-furbished tower of the Jussieu university complex:

More to the west is the abbey church called Saint-Germain-des-Prés. It's one of the most ancient churches in Paris,with origins in Roman times. One early church building here was sacked by invading Vikings in the 8th or 9th century, and the church was rebuilt a century or more later.

Below is a stitched-together image of part of the Palais du Luxembourg (the cupola) and the blocky Théâtre de l'Odéon behind it.

I'm not yet finished posting these photos taken at the top of the Tour Montparnasse. Here in Saint-Aignan, life now is devoted to processing tomatoes and other garden produce...

Right Bank landmarks

From the top of the Tour Montparnasse, you can enjoy a good view of domes and rooftops on the opposite bank of the Seine. One example is the Palais Garnier, built in the 19th century. It used to be called L'Opéra de Paris, but now that there is another opera house in town (at Bastille), it's usually referred to as the Palais or Opéra Garnier these days:

Less well known is the Eglise Notre-Dame de l'Assomption with its cupola, built in the 1670s. It's located on the Rue Saint-Honoré not far from the Tuileries and the Place de la Concorde, and nowadays is the biggest Polish church in Paris:

Nearby also is the Eglise de la Madeleine, at the top of the Rue Royale. Napoleon had it built as a Masonic temple in the neo-classical style. It was nearly turned into a train station when the railroads were built in the first half of the 19th century, and was finally consecrated as a church in 1845:

Stitching central Paris together

I've been doing more stitching in Photoshop. This panorama, which I made from two photos that were not taken at the same zoom level, shows a section of central Paris from the Louvre on the left over to the Samaritaine department store on the right.

Here, below, is a close-up of the Samaritaine building. The store could use a good Samaritan itself, since it has been closed for several years now. I wonder it it and its fantastic roof deck will ever open up to the public again. In the background you can see the new roof over the Forum des Halles.

And here's a part of the Musée du Louvre and, at the upper right, the dome of the Bourse du Commerce. The dome in the foreground is the Institut de France, and that's the Pont des Arts over the river.

I still have a lot of photos that I took from the top of the Tour Montparnasse that I want to edit and post. It's a good diversion from the processing of zucchini and tomatoes from the garden.

And now for something...

...completely different, but eminently seasonal. After the zucchini season, which is not yet finished, comes the tomato season. It's now. We are coping. Tomato salads, tomato sandwiches, tomato sauce, tomato paste... you name it. And of course tomates farcies — stuffed tomatoes.

I made a ground beef and lardons fumés (smoked bacon) farce for some of the largest tomatoes we've harvested. They are enormous and ripe right now. There are also a lot of smaller tomatoes that we plan to dry in the oven at low temperature and put away for the winter.

The stuffing for the large tomatoes was the pre-cooked ground meats along with onions, fresh basil, and finely diced cornbread. The cornbread was dense and eggy, and I decided to put some of it in instead of using breadcrumbs or rice. I also diced up a couple of smaller tomatoes and added them to the mixture.  It turned out tasty.

Walt planted six or eight varieties of tomatoes this year. Some he grew from seeds in the spring, and a few were contributed by our American friends who live down the road from us. That means we now are harvesting tomatoes of every size and color. The tomato season will go on into October unless the weather turns very bad.

To prepare the tomatoes, which should be ripe but still firm, you just cut off the cap (the stem end) and save those to use as "hats" for the stuffed tomato bottoms. I scooped out the tomato pulp and seeds using a melon baller (called a couteau parisien in French, if I'm not mistaken). The pulp, seeds, and liquid went into the sauce pot with other tomatoes that weren't so large or were misshapen.

On Saturday, Walt made the sauce — about 10 liters of it — and ran the cooked tomatoes through a food mill to remove the seeds and tough skins. Then he poured some of the smooth sauce into lasagna pans and set the pans in the oven for a few hours at low temperature, stirring the thickening sauce every half-hour. The result: home-made tomato paste we'll be able to enjoy over the winter too.

The Grand Palais and the Pont Alexandre III

The roof of the Grand Palais in Paris has recently been the object of extensive restoration work. The new glass used is stronger and more transparent because it's laminated (safety) glass rather than older glass that was reinforced with a metal grid. The Grand Palais is used as an exhibit hall and museum. It was built in the late 1800s and is located on the Seine near the Champs-Elysées.

From the top of the Tour Montparnasse, which is located three kilometers (2 miles) to the south, I took one photo of the Grand Palais and another of the Pont Alexandre III, the bridge across the Seine that was built at the same time. Here they are.

You can click or tap on the smaller images above to display them at a larger size (as with all the images here). Using Photoshop Elements, I was able to stitch the two photos together to make the one below. It was easy to do even though the two photos were not taken at the same zoom level.

I also took this zoomed-in photo of the gilded dome of the church at the nearby Hôtel des Invalides, a 17th century military hospital built during the reign of Louis XIV, France's "Sun King."

Under the gilded dome you'll find the massive marble tomb of another of France's great monarchs, the Emperor Napoléon.

Le Paris moderne

Paris is not quaint or bucolic. I've known people who expected it to be like that before they visited the place for the first time. They were surprised to find themselves in a crowded, bustling, modern city. Here are some architectural signs of that reality. (As always, you can click or tap on the images to see them at a larger size.)

President Georges Pompidou, who succeeded Charles de Gaulle as president of the French republic and then died in 1974, had the building (above) now known as the Centre Pompidou built 40 years ago. It's in the Beaubourg neighborhood on the Right Bank, right next to the old neighborhood called Le Marais (the swamp). The Pompidou Center opened in 1977 and houses a library, médiathèque, and modern art museum. Some people affectionately refer to the building as « la raffinerie ».

The complex of buildings above has been called la TGB  — la très grande bibliothèque — just as the French high-speed train (le train à grande vitesse) is called le TGV.  It's a library — it's the new national library or Bibliothèque Nationale and is also referred to as the François Mitterrand library. Mitterrand was president from 1981 until 1995 and sponsored the building of this library, the Louvre pyramid, and a new opera house at the Bastille. The library is supposed to look like four open books standing vertically together, I think.

This last photo shows the 13e arrondissement (district) of Paris, a city which is divided into 20 arrondissements. As you can see, it's almost all modern, with a lot of high-rise buildings. It's in the southeast corner of the city on the Left Bank and is home to a large population of Asian immigrants, meaning it has a lot of Asian groceries and restaurants. It borders on the 5e arrondissement, which is the Latin Quarter.

The Luxembourg Garden and Palace in four photos

The Luxembourg Garden is one of the largest green spaces in central Paris, covering 23 hectares, or 57 acres. (Trivia for me: that makes the Luxembourg Garden 100 times the size of the piece of land we live on near Saint-Aignan.) You get great views of the garden and palace from the top of the nearby Tour Montparnasse.

In the photos above and below, you can see many of central Paris's main monuments and sights. On the upper left is the Centre Pompidou, a modern art museum, library, and cultural center. Toward the top center is Notre-Dame Cathedral. On the right are the dome of the Pantheon and the modern tower in the center of the Jussieu university campus. (Click or tap on the photos to enlarge them.)

Just outside the eastern gate of the Luxembourg Garden is the Latin Quarter. The Luxembourg Palace, on the north side of the garden, is the seat of the French senate. The palace was built between 1615 and 1645 to serve as the royal residence of Marie de Médicis, who was the mother of the young king Louis XIII and his regent. The Luxembourg Museum is also located in the park.

I've taken and posted photos of the Luxembourg Garden and Palace several times before. See these posts from August 2013 and September 2009, among others. You used to be able to take a tour of the Senate chambers when the body wasn't in session. Maybe you still can. I did it once, and I was allowed to sit in Victor Hugo's seat for a minute or two, if I remember correctly.