CHERRY BLOSSOMS
Yesterday, after a quiet morning in our Airbnb, we decided to visit the Parc de Sceaux, an hour away by RER train to see the elegant chateau with it‘s huge surrounding sculptured tree park and cherry orchard which must have, when it was built, been out in the country, far from Paris. During the 1700’s the life of the nobility glittered here but the estate was confiscated by the state during the French Revolution in the last ten years of the 1700’s.
We got off late, took the the Metro to Gare du Nord following the directions on Apple Maps. Let me pause for a second to say how easy Google or Apple makes travel in a city that is new to you where you don‘t know the language. As in Istanbul or Berlin, maps can tell us all of the alternate routes including walking, car, subway and train, including the names of the routes and stations and when the next subway or train will be leaving, and even including, in Germany and likely in France, what the quickest route is and the most scenic route is. So it is so easy to get around as a clueless tourist.
But not quite that easy as we learned in the Gare du Nord, a large train station where we couldn‘t find our train. But we did follow signs to our train, got on and only after fifteen minutes as we surfaced and recovered GPS discovered that we were veering away from where we wanted to go. So we got off the train, reversed ourselves, got on the train back which came immediately, and this time found the train to Sceaux.
We were coming to see the cherry trees in bloom, which is spectacular at this time of the year and had been told that we should get off the train a stop early to walk through the town of Sceaux which borders on the park. We did, but the walk to Sceaux was a mile and we were worn out and very hungry when we got there in midafternoon.
The restaurants we tried were inviting but it was between meal times and they were only serving desserts. We had been planning for a delicious French meal, but we happened on a Bangladeshi Indian restaurant who were serving food and ate there. The meal was quick. (How can Indian restaurants in Paris or Delhi have menus a mile long with everything under the sun offered and produce a meal in five minutes? Do they precook everything and throw most of it away at the end of the day or do they cook everything from scratch, very, very fast?) Anyway, it was good, but a little expensive. Then we had an ice cream cone in a patisserie where one young man ran back and forth between the cash machine at one end of the room and the gelato offerings at the other end, trying to handle customers paying at one end of the line and receiving their cones at the other end. Chocolate, it turned out, was frozen so solid that he had to work and work to get a single scoop, exclaiming all the time how strong this was making him, so we switched to softer raspberry. It was delicious.
And then came the park, which was enormous, seeming to spread a mile in every direction. At the top of the hill was a huge chateau which, luckily, didn‘t appear to be open to the public. And below it stretching as far as the eye could see were the gardens with vistas, long corridors of trees and ponds, stretching off to the side.
But even in this huge space the picnickers were every ten feet. We had come on the day after Easter, which in France is a national holiday. It seemed everyone in Paris had come to see the cherry trees in blossom. Except that we couldn‘t find the cherry trees. We walked and we walked, looking for pink, and finally met an English speaking family who were looking as well. They asked a passerby and we were pointed into the distance.
And there, sure enough, off to the side was first an entrance way to the cherry orchard of Japanese lanterns and then the cherry trees themselves, and under every cherry tree picnicking and lounging families sitting on blankets on the grass, a great number of families Japanese.
It was almost a circus. We walked through the crowd and the trees and found one tree, which for a moment had only one small family underneath it so that if you lined up the tree trunk and the family and cropped the edges only the cherry tree is visible. That was the tree that we had come to see.
But we weren‘t done yet because it was another mile or so to get out of the park and then to the train station. The whole walk was about four miles and I was exhausted. But we had seen the fabled cherry trees in bloom. But most of all we got to see huge numbers of French families and others on their day off enjoying their escape from the city. The whole day was confusing, comic, exhausting and just the French experience we had come to have.
But even as we were walking I couldn‘t help thinking of the opulence of the Chateau and grounds. No ordinary people ever walked these paths when nobility lived here. This was what led to the French Revolution and the revolt against an oppressive feudal system. In fact, a great number of the grand buildings that we have seen in Paris, the Louvre among them and the grand classical churches including Notre Dame, come from the time when the few were very rich and the rest of us were barely able to get by. It reminded me of visits to the Taj Mahal, a beautiful, jeweled tomb for Shah Jehan‘s favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal, that no one could visit after it was built and is now swarmed by ordinary Indian tourists and people from around the world taking selfies. Moghul grandeur at the Red Fort and other monuments were for the rulers only. And the same is true of the Biltmore House in Asheville, where the Vanderbilt family vacationed but no one else was invited.
There is a tremendous irony in the fact that elegant exclusive palaces and tne tombs built for the wealthy now delight the very ordinary people who had been excluded. In India and France these places are free to visitors, in the more capitalist United States these visits cost a great deal and the poor are still excluded.
What amazed me about the Parc de Seaux was how so many of the thousands of trees were kept carefully trimmed into box like squares and how uniform the long lines of poplars were. The boxwoods were all kept sculptured triangles and circles.
What a huge amount of work paid for by the state, and when only the nobility lived there, what an extravagant waste. It somehow connects with the enormous yachts of Russian oligarchs and the the very rich around the world. There is something obscene about this display of wealth and something liberating about having hordes of Parisians and tourist lounging under every sculptured tree and flowering cherry.
By the end of the walk I was too exhausted to care. But today, clear headed again, and myself quite rich, maybe not quite as ostentatiously rich, but very comfortable and free to travel and explore my experience of Parc de Seaux and the rest of Paris which both sets me apart as the entitled rich and is an example of an ordinary, common person delighting for some reason in the buildings of the very rich from along ago, I feel odd and uncomfortable about the irony in the way that I live.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 