Our plan this morning was to go and see the Picasso exhibition that is currently on display at the Granet Museum. We made enquiries of our hosts on how to get there, and we were told it was far to far to walk. But as is our want, we decided to ignore this advice and give it a go. 25 minutes later we were there. It continues to amaze us how unwilling the locals are to walk anywhere in this part of the world, or perhaps it is the visitors that are the unwilling ones, and they try to accommodate that.
On our way there we discovered that the Lotto Jackpot had been struck this weekend. The lucky winner walked away with 100 million Euro!!! What would you, or could you, do with that? It’s rather scary really.
Anyway, there we were at the Granet Museum, all rearing to be wowed by Picasso. We walked up to the entrance to buy a ticket and we were told No! We don’t sell the tickets here, you need to go down the road, around the corner, up the hill, second corner on the left, fourth door on the right, up the ramp, join the queue, buy the ticket, come back, join the queue, wait for the next intake of visitors and hope that you make it in that intake, as they only allow X amount of people in the door every 30 minutes. Excuse me, can you say that again slowly? What happened to the Kiss principle? In France it seems that the MICAP principle (Make it as complicated as possible) is the default position. The evidence of this is seen every day, where simple tasks are made complicated and require three or four times more manpower than you would expect. Yesterday we passed some Road Works and saw several teams of workers installing a series of traffic islands. They were creating the curbing by hand with concrete and trowels! It was just curbing, it didn’t need to be a work of art. Perhaps it is their way of dealing with the unemployment problem, but as a consequence everything costs twice as much.
I got distracted again didn’t I?
The Picasso exhibition. This was amazing. What was really impressive about this was that it displayed his work alongside that of Cezanne, whom Picasso greatly admired and who also spent quite a bit of time in this area. What they also displayed very well was the chronology of his work against world events and the context in which he was producing his work. Picasso referred to Cezanne as ‘the father of us all’. It showed how the experimentation with perspective that Cezanne started, Picasso picked up and took to the extreme, resulting in the cubism for which he is famous. Having not really had an understanding of the majority of Picasso’s work, this museum really put it into perspective and you could see where his ideas and inspiration came from and a small understanding of what it was all about. On one of the walls there was a quote that I liked by Picasso referring to his children, “When I was their age I drew like Raphael and it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them”.
From here we went and did our customary church time, going to the La Cathedral St Sauveur, which provides examples of every architectural style from the 5th to the 17th century, starting with the Roman foundations. The annoying note of this experience was the beggar at the front door (yes, we are back in the land of the beggars). There she was looking up with mournful eyes and an appeal for money that was more of a whimper. And then mid beg, her cell phone started ringing and she ducked inside the church to answer it, talking in a very animated fashion to whoever was on the other end, ending after 20 minutes with a very cheerful “Au revoir”. It makes you wonder what she said to her caller, “Sorry I can’t talk right now, I’m at work”. “And what do you do for work?” “Oh I work for charity. I’m working at the church today”. Then she was back outside the door, with her whimpering tone asking us for money again on the way out. Hang on a minute, she says that she’s starving and that she needs money to feed her kids and her dog, but she has a cell phone. That’s more than what we have. Perhaps she should give us some money.
The other thing that is a bit of a concern over here, is the number of older men with younger girls (a lot younger) that we just hope are their daughters (but it doesn’t seem that way). It seems kinda … weird and kinda wrong.
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