Something for the Weekend? (26th/27th September)

Once more, a few suggestions for interesting or unusual things to do in Paris for the coming weekend. This will be the first weekend of Autumn, but the sun is forecast to shine, so I’m sending you out into the streets again!

Please add any events or activities you think should be promoted or which you would like to promote yourself in the comments, and let me know if you have any events in the coming weekends you would like to promote.


La Fête des Jardins
Throughout the weekend, just about every park and garden in the city will have some kind of activity organised. It may be tasting food, learning how to pot plants, or just live music, but ‘something for everyone’ is the cliché that comes to mind.
For those looking for something a little out of the ordinary, try the Parc de Buttes Chaumont which is always a fascinating visit, but which this weekend will also feature a demonstration by the city tree-surgeons! On a quieter note, many of the secret and private gardens of the city’s religious institutions will be open, with most of these being situated on the left-bank in the 6th and 7th arrondissements.
Click here for the full programme (5 Mo PDF).
26th and 27th September, various locations.

Rue Stick – an “Affichage Sauvage”
On Sunday afternoon, a group of street artists are planning to decorate a pair of bare walls near the Bastille with the idea being that the more of them there are, the less chance they will be stopped by the police! Many well-known names on the scene will be present, including Nice-Art, Kouka, Tian and Titifromparis, and the atmosphere should be fun and festive. The two walls span the corner of two streets and provide a surface of upwards of 7Om² - enough space for some spectacular creations!
Click here for more information.
Sunday 27th September, 1.30pm
Rue des Lions Saint-Paul and Rue du Petit Musc
Métro Line 7, Station Sully - Morland

Les Portes Ouvertes des ateliers de Ménilmontant
Several districts around Paris have an annual weekend where artists open up their studios to visitors, and this weekend it is the turn of Menilmontant in the North-East of the city. Outside of any discussions as to whether these are true artists or just part-time painters and photographers, it is an excellent opportunity to explore the normally closed passageways and courtyards of this old and largely unspoilt part of the city.
More information here, including maps and mini-biographies on each participating artist.
Friday 25th to Monday 28th

Spectaculaire
The Autumn is considered to be the beginning of the artistic season in France. In an attempt to promote some of the forthcoming events, the city of Paris has had the curious but interesting idea of organising a promotional weekend alongside the river Seine. The 1 km long space will be organised by theme, including music, theatre and museums, and 12 stages will host over 100 entirely free performances over the weekend.
The full programme can be found here.
Saturday 26th and Sunday 27th from 10 :00 – 18 :00
Port de la Gare & Port de Tolbiac (Metro: Quai de la Gare)

Last Weekend of the Planète Parr exhibition
Just a reminder that this weekend marks the last chance to visit the fascinating and amusing exhibition of English photographer Martin Parr’s pictures and private collections.
Jeu de Paume, 1 place de la Concorde 75008 Paris
Saturday 26th and Sunday 27th from 10:00 – 19:00

Hôpital St Louis - le Musée des Moulages

The recent Journées du Patrimoine gave me the opportunity to visit a museum that had long been an unobtainable grail for me - the very private Musée des Moulages Dermatologiques (museum of dermatological casts) within the walls of the Hôpital St Louis. An extraordinary experience, but certainly not one that I would recommend to everybody!

Living close to the hospital, I often find myself wandering around inside. A hospital is a city within the city, and the barriers between the two are very clear at the walled Hôpital St Louis. It is a place that was designed to be cut away from the rest of Paris, left apart to live alone and treat the outcasts and virulent sufferers. Today outsiders are welcome, and families come to picnic in the 17th century quadrangle at its heart.

In one corner there is a building that has always fascinated me. The Musée des Moulages. The doors have always been resolutely closed, apparently open only at sporadic times and then only to students or professionals that have previously requested a visit. Last Sunday though, I finally found them open. At first sight, the interior seems a little like that of a light and airy country house. Busts of famous doctors stand in the hallway alongside paintings, bookcases and a statue of Saint Louis. To one side, a sweeping staircase leads visitors past a procession of leading dermatological specialists upwards towards the museum.

The building dates from 1889 and was designed to house the growing collection of casts. The Hôpital St Louis was still on the periphery of the city and because of its self-sufficient autonomy had developed a world-renowned speciality in infectious skin diseases and afflictions. Three doctors were responsible for the creation of the museum. Alphonse Devergie donated his collection of paintings and drawings, but it was the doctors Fournier and Lailler who added the collection of casts. It is an institution which always had the intention of teaching and educating, and the two doctors believed that it would be more useful if the exhibits were three-dimensional.

The sight that greets you as you push open the doors is remarkable. A rectangular room bordered on all four sides by a double level of wooden display cases housing literally thousands of casts. The earliest dates from 1867 and the most recent 1958, but all share a gruesome, realistic form. The collection includes full heads, mouths, tongues, noses (or lack of!), arms, feet...and more intimate parts of the body. Any unusual or exceptional skin disfunction was quickly captured by the team at the museum.

The majority of the collection was produced by a man called Jules Baretta. It was the Doctor Lailler who found him, producing paper mache models of fruit in the Passage Jouffroy in Paris. He was so taken with the quality of the work that he immediately invited him to take up a post at the hospital. It was a radical change for Baretta, but he took to the work, producing incredibly realistic models which included features such as hair and colourings.

The collection is sorted by affliction, but I didn't want to look too closely at the details. Photos of the exhibits were not permitted, but respect for the 'patients' (and for my readers!) would have prevented me from taking any pictures anyway. I did want to capture the particular atmosphere of the place though, an installation that is almost unchanged 120 years later. Apparently students would learn little from a visit today (some diseases have been eradicated and many remedies are now known to be wrong), but it remains a fascinating historical monument (recognised by the state in 1992). One can only imagine the suffering as a plaster cast was placed on a painful or intimate place, but perhaps the patients were reassured by the fact that they were helping to further science and medicine.

I was there as a tourist of history and architecture, and this is part of the beauty of this hospital for me. It is history dragged into the modern day, centuries old stones that still exist for the reasons they were first put down. As I left, I saw that it is impossible to separate the reality of these buildings from the grim remnants of the past and today's thin, worn out individuals who are wired up to drips but still pulling on guilty cigarettes. We like to think we live in a safe, modern world, sheltered from the kinds of afflictions found in this museum. The reality is that we are towers of sand next to the solidity of these bricks and stones.

Note: If you are interested in visiting the museum, it is theoretically open from Monday to Friday, 9:00 - 17:00. However, you will only be allowed to enter if you have previously arranged a visit, and generally you will need to have a good reason for visiting (if you work in the medical profession for example). To contact them, call 01 42 49 99 15 or mail them at biblio.dermato@sls.aphp.fr.

There is a lot more to say about the Hôpital St Louis, but I'm not sure that a blog is the best place to do it. For this reason I am working on a walking tour of some of the most interesting hospitals in the city, including this one.

Paris People: Gina Rarick, Racehorse Trainer

A woman in a male-dominated business is not a unique situation, but an American woman in the very closed world of French horseracing is certainly a more unusual proposition. I met with the racehorse trainer Gina Rarick who gave me an insight into both the sport and how she has managed to find her place in this business.

Where does Paris begin and end? My vision of the city takes it out beyond the concrete ring-road into greener suburbs, and indeed it seems that you do not need to go far to find stables and racetracks. It’s just a 20 minute train ride out to Maisons-Lafitte where Gina Rarick is based, and once you pass the skyscrapers of La Defence and cross the river Seine twice, you find yourself in what today looks like a pleasant country town. Maisons-Laffitte is famous for its chateau, and most of the stables are now situated in what was previously the hunting forests of this large old house. I arrive on a bright Saturday morning and a whiff of crisp Autumn hangs in the air. The leaves on the trees are turning a ruddy orange but are still clinging on to their branches, and I pull up my collar and cross to the sunny side of the street.

After a 15 minute walk I arrive at the stables and feel as if I am hundreds of kilometers from Paris. The stables are an attractive collection of buildings from the 1920s built around the owner’s house. Rarick rents some units here and is ready to welcome me when I arrive. I immediately see that she is a ball of determined energy, with a passion for her job that is often apparent in those who have made radical mid-life switches.

“I’ve always loved horses” she tells me, “even if I was actually brought up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin”. From these small town origins she moved to Chicago where she became a journalist, working first for Knight Ridder then for the International Herald Tribune. Her specialty was the commodities markets, but it was far from being her passion. She began taking horse riding lessons in her spare time, and when an opportunity came up to transfer to Paris, she jumped at the opportunity.

She continued working for the IHT, and used horses as a means to integrate into French society. She joined a club and began competing at show jumping meetings (“against 10 year olds” she points out), and slowly managed to get her newspaper to accept articles on horseracing. With these commissions she was able to travel to the top meetings around the world (the Grand National, the Kentucky Derby, the Hong Kong Derby) and meet many people in the industry. It grew to become an obsession and soon she was sucked into the world of jockeying and horse ownership.

Finally, there came two turning points. Firstly, to her great surprise she competed in and won a journalists’ horse race at Saint Cloud near Paris, and secondly the IHT began feeling the effects of the economic downturn and began offering attractive redundancy packages. Rarick knew that it was a ‘now or never’ moment, took the money and decided to set herself up as a qualified racehorse trainer.

On September the 1st 2008 she became the first American woman to receive the necessary qualifications to train and race horses in France. “It’s been a really exciting adventure” she tells me on this day a little over one year later. “I now train seven horses, and although ideally I would like to increase that number to a maximum of fourteen or fifteen, I believe I have made the right choice by becoming a boutique yard”. Generally she has had to scrape around the lower levels of the horse sales, mostly in the UK, using her sense of feeling to make intelligent purchases, and as yet she has made few mistakes. “All my horses have either won or been in the money” she tells me. Indeed, when she tells me how the system operates in France, I’m tempted to invest myself!

“It really is the best country in the world to be a racehorse owner” she tells me. Prize money is high, and because bookmakers are kept away from the sport, all the money generated by the state run PMU system is channeled back into the sport. “It costs around 2-3000 Euros to buy a horse” she explains, “and perhaps 20000 Euros to keep it in stables and have it trained. If your horse wins just two races in that year though you’ve covered your investment”. Rarick owns some of the horses herself, whilst others are leased to external owners (mostly ex-pats). “If you want to get into the game slowly, you can just lease one leg and pay 25% of the fees”. Watching her as she carefully bandages up the leg of one of the horses, I’m sure that the limb would be in good hands.

Rarick is very modest about her role as a trainer. “The ratio for producing a successful runner is 40% breeding, 40% care and just 20% training” she explains. “In fact, the worst thing you can do is to over-train them and tire them out. You just have to keep them fresh, good and happy”. Rarick lives over the street from her horses, and can spot new scratches or bumps in seconds. After preparing thier lunch (including a can of Guiness for one of the horses!), she gives them all the once over, stroking them and talking to them softly as she does so. Clearly she loves her job and the beasts she looks after.

What is the downside of the game in France then? Rarick considers for a second then gives her opinion. “It was difficult to be accepted at first. Sure I’m a woman, and there are some jockeys who have a problem with that, but I’m also an American. The game is different in the States, where a form of doping is seen as fair and legal, and people here kind of assumed that I work in the same way. I have no experience as a trainer in the US though, and I’m completely anti-medication”. However, as opposed to the UK, there is no elitist element to the sport, and winning on the track has helped her to become accepted.

"You should come and check out a race meeting one day" she suggests. It's a deal. The next time she has a runner on a weekend in the Paris region I'll be there. I'll even have cash ready to back her horse whatever the odds are. Gina Rarick seems like a winner to me.

Note: There's plenty more to write about on this topic. I'll report back after attending the race meeting!

Gallopfrance: If you are interested in investing in a race horse or just interested in the sport, be sure to check out Gina Rarick's website. She also runs a very interesting and informative blog.

Something for the Weekend?

As an experiment, I have decided to create a new feature each Friday with a few suggestions of interesting or unusual things to do in Paris each weekend. This weekend is particularly rich in events, so it is a good time to start! Please let me know if you have any events or activities you think should be promoted or which you would like to promote yourself.


Les Journées du Patrimoine
My suggestions have already been mentioned here.
Various sites around Paris, the 19th and 20th September.

Le Techno Parade
The fact that there is now an ‘official store’ for this event should tell you that this is not exactly an underground happening, but there should be some interesting surprises this year. Perhaps best of all will be the float representing the electronic scene of Istanbul to celebrate the current ‘Saison de la Turquie en France’.
Saturday 19th – begins 1pm at Place Denfert Rochereau and ‘finishes’ at 8 pm at place de la Bastille.

Tattoo Art Fest
Now is perhaps the time to confess that I too have a tattoo. It’s just a small one, and quite discreet, but discretion will probably not be the word of the weekend at this event. Tattoos have of course become far more mainstream in recent years so it seems natural that the industry should now have its annual exhibition.
18th – 20th September
Parc Floral de Paris (Metro Chateau de Vincennes, Line 1)

Biergarten in Paris
The Café Titon has become something of an institution for the German population of Paris, and to celebrate this fact they have decided to organise an outdoor ‘Biergarten’ to celebrate the start of the Munich Oktoberfest. Expect sausages, beer and lots of music!
19th and 20th September
Rue Bouvier (around the number 11) Metro Rue des Boulets, Line 9

An evening of music!
Good friend and occasional contributor Tim Pike will be performing tonight at the bar La Tactique on Rue Pascal, in the 5th arrondissement of Paris. I’ll be there!
La Tactique, Rue Pascal
8pm

One Year Already!

I promise, this is the last time I will mark any kind of significant date or number on this blog! One year though seems important. I didn’t imagine that I would still be writing a year later when I made that first post, but then again, I didn’t imagine anything at all. Blogging was a new world to me, but it is one that has taken me on a fascinating journey.

365 days, 48 followers, 140 posts. Figures are important in blogging, but should not be the objective. As a matter of fact, the statistics for the blog increased exponentially for the first few months, but have stabilised more recently. I used to watch them carefully, but I realised how unimportant they are when I discovered that you could bump them up significantly by posting a link on sites such as Stumbleupon. Traffic increases, but these are visitors who stay for mere seconds before skipping on to the next site.

Blogging for me is about making connections with people. There are those who stop by and leave a message, those whose blogs I visit and enjoy, and those that I have met and talked to whilst researching my posts. I made a conscious decision early on to concentrate on detail and research, firstly for my own interest and culture, but also because I believe I can only respect whatever audience I have if I attempt to bring them something new and different.

Blogging is also about sharing. This may seem like a strange opinion to hold when you consider that it is in fact a very personal activity, but I have also deliberately avoided talking about myself and discuss only what I see. If I look forward from this point, my major objective is to open this space up to other people. The subject is Paris, not me, and it would become very dull if I only described my perspective and my place in this city. It is for this reason that I have created two new regular features; Paris People, where I meet others who live and work in the city and talk about their jobs and passions, and Paris Polaroids, where people can contribute anything they like about their experience of the city.

The other major deviation during the year was the creation of the Paris Walks PDF documents and their hosting on the http://www.freepariswalks.com website. Again, for me this falls into the zone of sharing, and I have been delighted to see that the three walks have been downloaded around 1600 times now. This is something that I will strive to continue over the next year, even though it means a crazy amount of work for me! Who knows, I may even decide to break out of the internet and do some (very occasional, but free!) guided tours...

Work? This is certainly the wrong word. Time. Yes, this all demands a lot of my time, but it is time spent on something that brings me pleasure, and I think this is the crucial factor for a long-lasting blog! What I do, I do first and foremost for myself, but when I saw two people following one of my walks last weekend, I was happy to think that I had perhaps encouraged people to go somewhere they may never have gone by themselves.

So, whoever reads this – regulars who I know and thank, or anonymous visitors who have always sat at the back of the room in silence, I can tell you that I’m not finished yet! Coming up will be investigations into many other parts of the city and a breakout to the suburbs, features on racehorse trainers, street artists, photographers and bar owners, and I sincerely hope, contributions from many of you too!