These past weeks have been filled with academic excursions. Here's some info about four of the places that we visited...
This museum was about… the history of immigration and immigrants in France. It did not go over well with most of the group. Even though 75% of the museum was in French and most of the students don’t understand French, enough was understood to realize that this wasn’t a great museum. Not due to lack of artifacts, art, etc but rather that the museum glossed over a large part of France’s role in the lives of these immigrants… many of whom came from countries that France had colonized.
It wasn’t all rainbows and pink butterflies, but many of the descriptions around the artifacts/art and the informational plaques left out any major details of xenophobia that immigrants did encounter/do encounter in France. Also, not a whole not of talk about how the French colonies were… colonized.
This museum was about… the history of immigration and immigrants in France. It did not go over well with most of the group. Even though 75% of the museum was in French and most of the students don’t understand French, enough was understood to realize that this wasn’t a great museum. Not due to lack of artifacts, art, etc but rather that the museum glossed over a large part of France’s role in the lives of these immigrants… many of whom came from countries that France had colonized.
It wasn’t all rainbows and pink butterflies, but many of the descriptions around the artifacts/art and the informational plaques left out any major details of xenophobia that immigrants did encounter/do encounter in France. Also, not a whole not of talk about how the French colonies were… colonized.
History of French colonization
There are also spiral staircases that you are not allowed to climb on.
This museum was very dark. That’s the first thing I learned. Very low lighting everywhere, excluding the bathrooms.
The main exhibit presented art/artifacts from indigenous
cultures of Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. Everything was in one long
room, with display cases and things mounted on the wall in no particular
pattern (that I could see). You would wander through, and if you followed the
path correctly, you would see one region at a time.
“If the Marx Brothers designed a museum for dark people,
they might have come up with the permanent-collection galleries: devised as a
spooky jungle, red and black and murky, the objects in it chosen and arranged
with hardly any discernible logic, the place is briefly thrilling, as spectacle,
but brow-slappingly wrongheaded. Colonialism of a bygone era is replaced by a
whole new French brand of condescension.” NYT Travel Section Review
There were three temporary exhibits that I saw. Still in the
dark. Propaganda posters from Vietnam, tattoos (very cool), and “Tiki Pop.”
Tiki Pop was an exhibit on the influence of island life/the culture of Oceania
on North American pop culture in the 1960s. There were clips from movies/TV
shows produced at the time, posters, drinks, products, etc, all glorifying
island life.
The Catacombs are a popular place to be on a Wednesday morning
The catacombs were originally a quarry beneath Paris. In the
late 18th century the French started filling them with bones taken
from graveyards due to the “risk they posed to public health. ”There are
between 6-7 million bodies worth of bones down there.
Before the bones
It’s not just a pathway with bags of bones; they’re laid out
very neatly along the walkways. The skulls are laid out in patterns among the
long skinny bones (arm/leg bones, that’s as much as I know). Here's a photo of a
heart-shaped one. It was creepy.
Peace & Love
There were also plaques along the way...
In the morning, remember that you may not live until evening.
In the evening, remember that you may not live until morning.
That's all I've got for now! Back to work.
I loved the DR, but it’s true that we can hardly talk about what’s not going well in DC if we compare it to the 
But then in France… it really couldn’t have been much more different. American music and TV shows are just as popular, yes, and so is Obama for the most part… but I just got hit with stereotype after stereotype after stereotype about Americans. Be it from a French person, or another international student in my class. Do I generalize about people from other countries? Yes. But considerably considerably less now than before this year… and also, I’m not thick enough to actually approach someone from another country and ask them a question equivalent to “So how many times a week do you eat at McDonalds?”