Paris, Part II: A Moveable Feast

Exhausted after a long day spent running around on only three hours of sleep, we slept in until about ten on Saturday morning. Compared to Friday, we took a slightly more relaxed approach, spending the day enjoying the atmosphere of the city more than visiting tourist sites.

We spent the large part of the afternoon in the Latin Quarter, the neighborhood to the south of the Cathedral of Notre Dame known for its shops and cafes. During the 1920’s, the neighborhood was a favorite in the expatriate writer community. With ease we spent a couple of hours wandering the narrow, cobblestone streets, stopping periodically in different bakeries and stores. At one point, I bought a cheap yet fantastic baguette for a snack, and soon after we shared a package of fine chocolate. Later, we spent at least half an hour in a bookshop literally overflowing with old books. Amanda found a leather bound copy of an early edition of A Farewell to Arms, her favorite novel, in French. Before leaving the quarter, we came across a New Orleans-like brass band playing in the street (They were not particularly good). Although I am sure that the area is much more tourist heavy than it was ninety years ago, it was nice to contextualize the descriptions of Paris that I have been reading about for my independent study, particularly in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast, by seeing some of the exact areas referred to in those books.

During the afternoon, we also visited Les Invalides, a hospital and recovery home for soldiers built by King Louis XIV. Militaristic and fort-like on the outside, we did not pay to go inside of the building to the see the museum, instead choosing to just visit the courtyard and the church on the south end of the complex. A wall with a giant glass window in the center of the church divides it into two separate chapels, allowing the king and his non-aristocratic soldiers to attend mass at the same time in the same building without necessarily being in the presence of each other. Relative to the splendor of the palaces that the king built for himself, the soldiers chapel, though grand in scale like the rest of the complex, remained sparse and simple in its ornamentation.

Although Napoleon’s tomb now rests in the King’s chapel, we did not pay to go inside to see it, concluding that none of us felt nearly awed enough by Napoleon to want pay to see his tomb. The French perspective on Napoleon proved intriguing throughout the weekend. My history courses have usually portrayed Napoleon as a temporarily successful conqueror whose penchant for imperialism was relatively unpopular and, fortunately, stopped by the British. Despite this foreign perspective, though, the French seem to treat him as a hero who fought for French dominance, which, admittedly, he did. As I will discuss in a later post, this draws an interesting comparison to Berlin, where the Germans, though conscious of their own historic notorious leader, have repudiated the “insane politics” of their national past.

Following that visit, we walked along the Seine back toward the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Michelle and Amanda shopped for souvenirs with the vendors selling out of large green lockers attached to the railing above the river while I did some shopping of my own at the souvenir shops across the street. Afterwards, we stopped for pictures outside of Notre Dame before going in for the Saturday night mass.

At the Cathedral of Notre Dame

From Left to Right:

Me, Amanda, Michelle

We went into the cathedral to be sure of getting a seat before mass and sat in the pews during vespers. It was odd to sit during a service while tourists still wandered around the building. The prelude to the mass began with a sinister sounding organ that called to mind the dark tone of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Despite the darkness of the music, though, its fullness was a relief after weeks of subdued masses in London. Interestingly, although I do not speak French, I felt much more engaged during the mass than I have at Latin masses in London.

Like some of the masses in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart on the Notre Dame campus, this one followed an hour time limit while recording for replay. Bright, unnatural LED lighting and a television camera on a crane created a strange juxtaposition in the gothic building, the oldest cathedral I had visited at the time.

During mass, a couple of young people sat behind us, and Michelle and I recognized one of them as a member of the Irish Guard. We caught up with them after mass and confirmed that they were, in fact, also Notre Dame students, so we had a short conversation, necessarily remarked upon the coincides of meeting Notre Dame students in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, and posed for a picture before going our separate ways for the evening.

Outside of the cathedral after mass, we met up with Anna once again and returned to the Latin Quarter for dinner. During our afternoon in the Quarter, we spent some time checking menus and prices, looking for a place to eat dinner. Outside one restaurant, a gentleman had stepped out of the door to give us business cards for the restaurant, promising a free glass of wine with our meal. When we returned in the evening, he greeted us warmly and quickly found us a table.

More so than the previous night, this restaurant specialized in traditionally “French” cuisine. We all ordered set meals like the night before, and I had vegetable soup and a beef kebab with excellent ice cream for dessert. Anna ordered escargot for her appetizer, and the picky eater in me can proudly say that I tried one of the snails. Covered in a heavy pesto sauce, I did not particularly enjoy the chewy texture, but I did not immediately gag, as I may have when I was younger.

After two leisurely hours, we departed to do some final sightseeing. First, we took the Metro to the site of the Bastille, but, as many of you know, revolutionaries demolished it brick by brick, so there was nothing in the area to really see. Hoping to at least find a plaque or other marker for the site, we asked a few people in the area for directions, but everybody that we asked seemed very confused by our interest.

Next, we returned to the Arc de Triomphe to take a few pictures in front of the landmark at night. Michelle, Amanda, and Anna humored me, allowing me to play with the camera settings until I finally took a good picture. I’ll let the results speak for themselves.

At the Arc de Triomphe

(Notice the Eiffel Tower in the Background)

From Left to Right:

Michelle, Me, Anna

We finished our night tour of the city with stops at the Opera House, the Ritz hotel, and the hill of the Sacré-Coeur. Exhausted, we returned to the hotel to rest before our train back in the morning.

Overall, I enjoyed Paris even more than I expected that I would. The relatively relaxed atmosphere provided a refreshing contrast to the hectic pace of London. Unlike the standard pub food common throughout London, the food in the restaurants and bakeries showed a sense of delicacy worthy of the word ‘cuisine’. Much of the city has retained the feeling of an era long past, where the cars feel like the only sign of industrialization among fine stone buildings, street cafes, and cobblestone streets.

Despite this level of comfort with the city, though, it did not feel like a place where I would want to live. Perhaps it was the simply the language difference or the way that all of the people in the city – from waiters to people asking for money in the street – showed a much more confrontational manner than I have grown used to in London, where everyone ignores everyone else all of the time. Regardless, though, it did not have the draw that I feel in some cities – particularly the Twin Cities and Washington, DC.

Clearly, though, the fact that I have written two full posts about the trip shows my fascination with and enjoyment of Paris. With the account of my first trip now complete, my next few posts will be about spring break, beginning with Cinque Terre, Pisa, and Florence in Northern Italy. Those stories should be up soon.

Until then,

Joel

Paris, Part I: City of Lights

I have been debating how to go about writing this post. My first thought was that I should relate my trip to Paris as a narrative in a sparse, Hemingway-like prose, but I quickly decided that to do so would be a particularly self-indulgent act. Consequently, I will just write it in a manner and style similar to what I have been doing all semester. That being said, I do hope that the Eiffel Tower picture at the beginning piques your interest in the rest of the post.

After a short night of sleep, Michelle Letourneau, Amanda Koziel, and I met in the courtyard below the flats at four on Friday morning. There, we also ran into Amanda’s flat mate Anna O’Meara, who was travelling to Paris alone to explore the city ahead of a weeklong stay during spring break.

Rather than fly, we booked tickets on the Eurostar train through the Chunnel, the cheaper of the two options at the time that we made our reservation. Fortunately, this meant that, rather than venturing out to one of the airports, we only needed to walk up to St. Pancras Station, located directly between Kings Cross Station, which I will be using for a trip up to Edinburgh later in the semester, and The British Library, where I have been researching for my independent study.

The entrance to St. Pancras consists of a giant, Victorian façade with red brick walls and steeple like towers on either end, the grandeur of which embodies the heyday of the railroad system. Inside, the international terminal is a much more recent addition, with clean lines and glass barriers creating the security checkpoint – which reminded me of pre-9/11 airport security – and immigration stations. Officers from the French border agency worked the stations and granted us entry before boarding the train for France (we encountered the same system in reverse in France on our return). We arrived with plenty of time and waited, passports stamped, in the international terminal before they began boarding our train, at which time we followed ramps up to the massive St. Pancras Station, which houses about a dozen tracks of trains, some as long as eighteen large cars, as ours was. Without delay, we found our car and our seats, in which we promptly fell asleep after our 5:25 AM departure.

I slept most of the way through the UK and only awoke when we exited the Chunnel. (For those of you who are curious, it is really nothing more than a standard, dark tunnel, as I learned on the way back. Not that I expected it, but there are no portholes to the sea, and the train does not travel through the water.) At first, all that I could see were some green fields covered by fog. In the hour or so worth of travel between the end of the tunnel and Paris, the sun broke the horizon and began to burn off the fog, revealing idyllic, rolling fields with periodic bunches of trees similar to some of the less flat parts of the Midwest.

We arrived at Gare du Nord station around 9:30 AM local time, where we walked straight from the platform, past the heavily armed military patrol (insert “I didn’t realize that France had an army with guns” joke here), and onto the street in front of the station for our first real glimpse of the city. There were a couple of cafes in the area, and the train station – constructed out of the cities ubiquitous yellow-white brick – towered over most of the rest of the buildings. When I saw the traffic on the street, I found it comforting to realize that the cars drive on the right side of the road in France.

After our early morning, we were all ready for some food, so we found the café closest to the station – just across the street to the west – and tentatively went inside. Unsure what to do, we seated ourselves at a table, picked up a breakfast menu, and waited, hoping that we hadn’t offended anyone. Fortunately, a waiter came to our table after a couple of minutes and greeted us very politely. It was certainly disconcerting to hear his “Bonjour” as he greeted us. This was my first time travelling to a country where I did not speak the language. By pointing to objects on the breakfast menu, though, we did manage to order successfully. Our waiter did not seem too frustrated when we asked him to repeat our options a couple of times, and we eventually figured out what he was trying to communicate to us. I suppose that he probably sees plenty of people who do not speak any French in a café so close to the international terminal.

Satisfied for the time being, we set out in search of our hotel, which we found quite easily. Only a block south and east of Gare du Nord, the Hotel D’Amiens is a small hotel on a street of similar small hotels. Relieved to find it so easily, but unsure of the check in time, we went into the lobby. The woman working at the desk greeted me very politely, and I returned her “Bonjour” before pausing for a moment and then, embarrassingly, adding, “I’m sorry but I don’t…”, and she finished, “…speak French”. She smiled and laughed with a hint of a sigh as she said this, and I was relieved to see that neither my inability to speak French nor my lack of an attempt at doing so had offended her.

Surprisingly, our room was open, so we went upstairs to drop our bags off. Online reviews described the rooms as “outdated”, and that is certainly an appropriate characterization. There was little more in the room than the bathroom and the three twin beds, but the room was cheap and private, so it served its purpose well. The only major negative aspect of the room, as we would learn the next morning, was the bathing apparatus, which consisted of a tub and a water hose with a nozzle. Unfortunately, there was no shower curtain or place on the wall to affix the hose, which contributed to a strange bathing experience in the tub.

Lightened of our loads, we returned to the train station where, after making our way through all of the people asking for money, we found the correct line to purchase two, day long unlimited subway passes, a very worthwhile investment. The Paris Metro system seems to fit in between the two extremes of the London and Washington, DC subway systems. Like London, the system feels old in the sense that the distances between the lines within the stations suggest that the lines developed over time rather than appearing together as part of a cohesive, city wide plan. At the same time, the method of communicating the direction of the travel on the trains and on the maps feels straightforward, using the terminus point in either direction like the DC metro system.

Our first trip on the Metro consisted of a quest in search of the Loree Oboe Company, the point of origin for Michelle’s oboe. Although our preliminary research gave us the correct neighborhood, none of us had bothered to write down the address and, expecting a store with a showroom at ground level, we felt like we were on the right track when we saw that every other store in the area sold some type of musical instrument. However, only after searching up and down the block and with the help of the clerks in one of the other music shops did we finally find the correct building. Unlike what we expected, though, we found a giant blue door and a buzzer marked “Loree”.

We rang the doorbell and entered through the subsequently unlocked door, where we found another gate, like in an apartment foyer, and a gloomy room with only natural lighting. Once again, we rang the ‘Loree’ bell and ventured in through an unlocked door. At the top of the stairs, we found a closed door marked ‘Loree’. While we paused to decide whether or not to go in, a gentleman came up the stairs and walked into the ‘Loree’ room, so we followed him in. Inside, the darkness gave way to a brightly lit office. A young woman met the man and asked us to wait a moment for her to return. When she returned, she welcomed us to the store, showed us a small room with merchandise, and gave us a short tour. In our short visit, Michelle successfully saw the home of her oboe while the three of us once again experienced warm hospitality from the French family that ran the company, a sentiment that we encountered again and again throughout the weekend.

After completing this personal quest for Michelle, our pursuit of the tourist attractions began in earnest across the city at the Arc de Triomphe. At the center of a large roundabout, we found the massive arch as soon as we walked up the stairs from the subway station. Rather than pay to cross under the traffic to the base of the arch, we decided to just cross the streets around the circle to see it from every possible angle.

At the Arc de Triomphe

The Arc de Triomphe sits atop a hill at the western end of a key east/west axis that runs to the Louvre in the east and farther west to the newer financial district. A famous, wide boulevard, the Champs-Élysées, runs along this axis immediately to the east of the Arc de Triomphe. Although today expensive retail outlets line both sides of the street, the walk to Franklin D. Roosevelt Circle calls to mind the generations of history that have marched along the same path. Napoleon commissioned the Arc de Triomphe to commemorate major French military victories and to provide a spectacular location for triumphant marches by victorious French troops. In the two centuries since his reign, the Champs-Élysées and the Arc have provided the backdrop for victorious marches by Prussia, Nazi, and American troops upon capturing the city. Sometimes the French even get to use it, although the most common images depict conquering Nazi’s and liberating Americans along the boulevard during World War II.

At Franklin D. Roosevelt Circle – a name that surprised me much less so than Michelle and Amanda – we turned south to, finally, walk along the river Seine, where we saw Gran Palais before returning to the axis of the Champs-Élysées to walk through the Jardin des Tuileries. Smaller in scale than a modern park, the garden gave us our best reminder yet of the fact that we were visiting a country once governed by the most extreme of absolute monarchs. Filled with fountains and lined by large hedges and bushes, it was not difficult to picture a few nobles strolling quietly in the now public gardens. As in much of the rest of Paris, the sky felt wide open due to the expansive nature of the open space in the garden. We stopped for lunch – I had a chocolate crepe with almonds – in sight of the Louvre at the end of the garden.

Once we figured out how to pay for lunch – we did not expect the waiter to be carrying change – we walked over to the courtyard of the Louvre, with its traditional grand palace and modern glass and steel pyramid. Having seen the many pictures of the pyramid at the old palace already, the presence of the incongruous structure did not surprise me. Thinking about it after the fact, I realize that I have never really known the Louvre without the pyramid, so, although it certainly does not match the palace building, it did not necessarily feel out of place to me.

Between the Old and the New at the Louvre

Rather than join the long line waiting to enter the museum, we decided to come back later in the evening to take advantage of the extended Friday night hours in order to avoid the crowd. Continuing on from the courtyard, we looked for a gelato shop near the museum, but, unable to find one, we returned to the Seine and decided to cross the south bank of the river. As we crossed, we saw thousands of locks clasped to the steel mesh on either railing of the bridge, each with two names and often a date. While most of the love-locks looked relatively new, we also saw many that had begun to rust after years exposed to the elements. Altogether, the bridge covered in locks made for a subtle reminder of Paris’ reputation as the city of love.

We soon came across the island in the middle of the Seine, home, on its east side, to the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Before finding the Cathedral, though, we had an experience at a café that many people may have characterized as French arrogance and prejudice against Americans but which, in reality, clearly represented a mistake on our part. It began when Michelle and Amanda stopped to buy ice cream from the street service counter of a café in the corner of a building. Many people – writers, in particular – often romanticize the café culture in Paris, and the concept of a Parisian café – blending indoor with outdoor in an open air establishment with chairs lined up in rows, occasionally broken by tables, facing the street – is unlike any other version of a café that an inexperienced American can imagine.

Excited to finally enjoy on of these cafes, we sat down at a table adjacent to the stand where they bought their ice cream. It was unsettling to, essentially, sit at a table on the sidewalk while pedestrian traffic passed by, but, at the same time, I could also easily imagine the opportunity for social engagement among city residents who know which cafes their friends and acquaintances’ tend to frequent. After we had been sitting for a few minutes, though, a waiter came up with menus for us to consider. When we pointed to the ice cream to imply that we had been served, he immediately and slightly brusquely asked us to leave. As we walked away, we realized that, not only had they purchased the ice cream as a takeaway and, therefore, not paid to use a table but also that we had sat down on the side of the building with a different café than the one that sold them the ice cream.

As I suggested, where many people many have interpreted the brusque waiter as throwing the Americans out of the café, we immediately recognized that we were in the wrong and that, therefore, the waiter acted reasonably in asking us to leave. Slightly confused but thoughtful, rather than indignant, we walked east along the island in search of the Cathedral of Notre Dame while they finished their ice cream. Clearly visible on the south side of the island, we only spent a brief time at the cathedral – once again planning on returning later, in this case, the Saturday night mass – before finding a train station to take us to Luxembourg Gardens directly south of the cathedral. Following a minor mix up in a confusing station that saw us get on the wrong train, initially, we eventually reached the garden.

Like the other royal garden that we walked through earlier in the day, the now public Luxembourg Garden sits on a former private estate. Similar to the cafes, chairs and benches line the paths and central areas of the park. By the time that we walked through in the late afternoon, all of these seats were full of silent people watching the foot traffic in the garden, making the sound of feet crunching on the pervasive gravel, rather than grass, seem loud in the reflective park.

We wandered the park for a while before catching a subway train back to the Louvre, where we met up with Anna once again and, at her suggestion, departed for dinner in Montmartre. After exploring the area for a short time, we eventually found a restaurant offering a well-priced, set menu along a side street a few blocks from the Sacré-Coeur, near the top of the hill. Compared to our interactions with the wait staff in the morning and at lunch, it was a relief to have Anna along, since, unlike the rest of us, she speaks French.

Following a leisurely meal, we caught a train back to the Louvre, where our student ID cards were good for free admission. Visitors access the museum through passageways branching off from the central entrance beneath the pyramid, and it is inside this atrium that the pyramid makes more logical sense than it does on the exterior. Rather than feeling cramped and like the underground room that it is, the pyramid creates the feeling of a large, open space, artificial as it may be. I can imagine that, on a crowded afternoon, this makes the entrance feel much less claustrophobic than it would if they had simply added an underground chamber.

We went into the museum with the intention of seeing the Mona Lisa since, as we expected, there were very few people in the museum late at night. After initially heading to the wrong wing of the building, where we saw the state apartments of Napoleon III, we rushed back through the atrium beneath the pyramid and into the wing with most of the paintings. It was odd to know that many of the works that we were rushing past were beautiful productions by equally famous artists, but we had our goal in mind and hurried, afraid that they may close of access, as the museum was closing down for the evening.

Finally, we came to a room about the size of a small gymnasium. A large wall stood in the center of the room and, through the throng of fellow tourists, we could see the Mona Lisa, the only painting on that particular wall. Two guards, a rope, and a thick pane of glass protected the painting. I have heard it said that the small size of the portrait surprises many people and that the crowds waiting to see it can be unbearable, at times, so I had expected a small, cramped room with heavy security requiring visitors to file by almost single file. In reality, it not feel particularly small for a portrait – although it did feel small relative to the massive wall space allotted to it – and it surprised me just how accessible it was for viewing. We guessed correctly that the crowd would be relatively small late at night, and we quickly made our way to the front of the pack for a closer look and a chance to take pictures. Our main goal accomplished, we continued through the galleries of paintings until the museum closed. Although our stay was far too short for such a massive collection, we were glad to see the biggest attraction.

To finish the first day of our whirlwind tour of the city, we took the metro to the Eiffel Tower, which we had heard we absolutely needed to see at night. There are no stations directly adjacent to the tower, so we chose to get off at a stop just across the river to the north of the tower, and, as we turned the first corner after exiting the station, we came upon the lit tower down the hill in the distance. Rather than go any closer, we decided to just enjoy the view with the other tourists and the souvenir vendors from a plaza overlooking the tower. We concluded the day on a high note, taking pictures, including one from the beginning of this post, and enjoying the view of the golden tower in the distance.

At this point, I will split the post and share part of the weekend while I finish writing about Saturday in the city. I am sorry that I did not get this up sooner (the trip was two weeks ago, now), but I was only in London for four days after the trip before leaving again for a ten-day spring break. Over the course of the next two weeks, I will finish the Paris post and then include posts on Northern Italy, Germany, and Ireland.

Until then,

Joel

A Short Post Between Papers

Where did February go? I am utterly shocked that it is already March.

I am quite sorry that it has been nearly two weeks since I published my last post. In the week ending this Thursday, I have approximately seven thousand words worth of assignments to submit for various classes. That amounts to just over forty percent of the length of the current collected posts for this blog. As a result, I have had less time for exploring the city than in previous weeks and, as a result, less material to write about. However, there are a few things that I would like to be sure to share, with highlights including a tour of the Theatre Royale Drury Lane, a Saturday morning visit to Borough Market, and a trip to Lloyds of London with my economics class this past Monday.

On the weekend immediately after my last post, I did not take a Saturday trip out to an idyllic town with a castle. Instead, I kicked off a quiet weekend of working days and social nights, such as yet another Saturday night cooking dinner. My Mexican lasagna has become very popular.

Tuesday afternoon brought a second theater tour in as many weeks, this time at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in Covent Garden. Although the current building only dates to the early nineteenth century, it is the fourth theatre at the location since Charles II permitted the construction of a new theatre on the site in the years after the fall of Cromwell’s strict protectorate. The theaters on the site have hosted every conceivable type of entertainment and have a strong history of Shakespearean theater, although today the theater produces major musicals.

Two staff members led our class around the theatre, trading off throughout the tour to disappear and change costumes, allowing them to appear as several different ‘characters’. Despite these unnecessary theatrics, they did provide a thorough tour. Following a short introduction in the lobby, we walked upstairs and into the royal box, which, though decked in gold, did not live up to the extravagance of royal residences such as Windsor Castle. In particular, I thought that the painted marble columns seemed unusual in a royal box. We next moved into the balcony inside the theater itself. On either side of the room, the four levels of ornate boxes seemed as prominent as the stage itself, recalling a time when the aristocracy gathered in those boxes to perform as much as the actors on the stage. From the theater, we made our way through the prince’s box – a significantly less extravagant room built after a major fight between King George III and his son, the prince, in the lobby of the theater – and into the basement of the building, where we saw the massive steel beams and the combined hydraulic and electric systems used to move the stage from below ground. Backstage, we saw the standard work area behind the very deep stage as well as the door cut into the back wall to allow an elephant to enter the stage before concluding in the lobby where we began.

That evening, I attended yet another performance, this time south of the river at The Young Vic Theatre. From the exterior, the building seems more like a restaurant and bar than a theater, as a two-story restaurant with big glass windows looks onto the street, hiding the smaller theater in the back of the building. Their prices were fairly reasonable, so I bought a drink before the show, a very popular satire called Vernon God Little, which tells the story of the media circus surrounding a young man accused of aiding a school shooting perpetrated by his closest friend. At the time, I did not particularly enjoy the show – the acting was disappointing, as everyone seemed more interested in perfecting a Texas accent than in acting the part – although in retrospect it did certainly succeed at satirizing the media frenzy surrounding tragic event of that nature.

With my first paper due on Thursday, my week quieted down after that busy Tuesday. On Thursday night I cooked yet again, attempting to make hamburger stroganoff. Unfortunately the sauce never thickened (I realized too late that I should have just added more flour, which I did not think to do at the time), although it did, somehow, taste right.

Friday featured a full day of work and research at the British Library, so I rewarded myself on Saturday morning by finally visiting Borough market. Known for the quality and character of its shops, it lived up to much of the hype despite the fact that it was raining. Located next to Southwark Cathedral just south of the Thames, Borough Market consists of groupings of stalls underneath a railway bridge. The owner of each stall sells his or her particular specialty item, creating an environment where people are selling high quality breads, cheeses, jams, and sauces, among a wide variety of other items. Even better than the presence of all of this food, though, is the fact that every stall offers free samples – the ultimate draw for college students living on a tight budget.

When I had finished making the rounds on free samples, I bought a brownie that was really more fudge than brownie and then took the Tube over to the London Centre, where I spent the rest of the afternoon working. Late in the afternoon, some friends happened to stop in the library while I was working, so, content with my output for the day, I joined them for happy hour at Tiger-Tiger, a bar between Trafalgar and Piccadilly Circus, where we shared a Long Island Iced Tea pitcher five ways. Afterwards, they had tickets to a show, so I returned to the flats, and, later in the evening, finished a little bit more work.

I followed a Sunday full of yet more work, this time on a paper about Keynesian economics, with a Monday afternoon visit to the Lloyd’s of London insurance market with my economics class. Although I still cannot adequately explain what they do, in general, Lloyd’s provides a building and organizational structure in which brokers representing clients seeking insurance policies can meet with underwriters willing to accept such risks in exchange for premiums. As a result of this flexibility, an extremely high percentage of the total volume of insurance deals worldwide use Lloyd’s. In practice, this means that, as our guide told us, the saying goes that you can have (almost) anything – ranging form your oil tanker to your water skiing elephant but not including your government – at Lloyd’s. Arriving in small groups, we met a guide in the reception area. He took us upstairs to a conference room where he explained the history of Lloyd’s and the work that Lloyd’s does before giving us a tour of the building. In addition to seeing the underwriting floors, we also saw some of the major historic artifacts in the building, such as the Loss Book – which harkens back Lloyd’s origins as a market for marine insurance and records all total losses at sea – and the rostrum bell – once used as a signal of information about late arriving ships, now used to indicate major world events, such as the 9/11 attacks.

In addition to the remarkable business that goes on at Lloyd’s, the building is like few others in the world. Designed during the late 1970’s and built in the 1980’s, the building feels more like a building from the past decade than from either of those eras. Lloyd’s desired a building with wide open spaces for the vast underwriting desks and simple floor plans that easily convert between open floor and offices. Consequently, the architect chose to place many of the traditional internal systems – elevators, plumbing, air conditioning, etc. – on the exterior, leaving the building wide open on the inside. Concrete pillars form the core of the building, running all the way from the third floor up to the great glass windows at the roof, creating an enormous central atrium. Natural light floods this core of the building and runs across the wide-open underwriting floors. With nothing but floors, furniture, and light fixtures on the inside, the building feels incredibly open in its simplicity. Although the aesthetic of this interior simplicity does not carry through to the outside – with its bulging pipes and the building systems – the building nevertheless feels incredibly futuristic. We concluded our visit with a ride in the class elevators, which took us above the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral just down the road and gave us a beautiful, if short, view of the whole south side of London.

That, too, is where I will conclude this post. I have one more paper and one CORE band application to finish, and then I get to reward myself by going to Paris for the weekend.

I think it’s a good trade off, and I look forward to sharing the stories and pictures from that trip in my next post.

Until then,

Joel