Oh Lordy, What Ever Happened to the 1940s?

With posting stuff right now, I want to mention my triumph of the day. I had dragged myself out of bed at 10am this morning to go to a meeting at NYU that I really didn’t have to go to but I kind of wanted to go to anyway. Plus I was expecting a package and I needed to fix my schedule… excuses, excuses. Once the meeting was over by 1pm and it was time to go home, I found myself sighing heavily and dragging my feet out the gate. I didn’t want to stay at school and hang around really. But going home only meant locking myself in for the next 8 + hours and eating more baguettes with peanut butter, the chocolate/caramel swirl mix I got in London, and rillettes. I swear that the more time I spend in my apartment, the more I seem to eat. The days last semester when I was down to 2 meals a day have long since past. Reason #1 why I need but don’t want to go back to school. I need something to control my hunger.

I was on my way out the door when my professor suggested to me an exhibit she was wanting to go at the Grand Palais, one with the towns of France in miniature. Typically, I would take the suggestion, smile, nod, think to myself “I really SHOULD go” and then end up going home anyway. But this time I decided to try something different. Instead of going straight back to my comfortable abode, I found myself marching down the Champs Elysees to the Grand Palais, a space I also hadn’t seen but had learned so much about last semester… and into the exhibit. First of all, the Grand Palais is spectacular. I was in simple awe staring up at the high, iron ceiling. But the exhibit itself was spectacular in itself as well. These miniatures are far from small, all so massive and detailed that I stared in disbelief. It only makes sense to me that they were constructed in a time before the modern day, as I can’t imagine anyone having the same amount of patience nowadays to construct models with 100,000 + different types of trees included.

I read all the posts on the side and walked to each of the 16 miniatures, giving each their moment in the sun… The Alps models ultimately being my favorite thanks to their rolling hills and decadent examples of nature beyond even the others. Grenoble was also one of my favorites. I hadn’t been to any of these towns yet, but I could appreciate them nonetheless. And I wondered what it was like for anyone visiting who had visited, or even lived in these spaces… how different they must look from a 19th century perspective. Imagine pointing out your home, or where your home would be, on the model. The exhibit was topped off for me with a brief mostly one-sided (not on mine) conversation with a couple. The wife was just about as short as I was and went to look in the magnifying glass-type contraption they had on each one to enlarge the display only to find it was too high for her. She made this comment to me about how they only make things for tall people and I smiled and said I completely understood. This got her riled and she continued to go off on how stupid it was to me. I convinced her somehow to stand on her tippy-toes, which is what I did and it worked just fine, all during which her much-taller husband stood in the background smirking half out of support and half out of amusement. I can’t say I understood everything she said to me, but I enjoyed being included in their lives and secretly wondered if they knew I was foreign through it all.

This was the first time I actually went out of my normal comfort zone and routine to go to one of these exhibits. Now I can smile with pride every time I see the sign advertising it on the Metro, knowing that I had made the effort to go. Just like breaking the ice on the bus, I feel like I have broken the ice on going to these things. This exhibit on miniatures may have been the first, but it certainly won’t be the last. What’s more Parisian than casually going to an exhibit during some free time on a Thursday afternoon?