Today we visited the Pompidou centre, after a major delay in departure from hotel due to my not being able to find my passport, but finally it appeared in a highly original place. The Pompidou centre is a building with the services on the outside, it is a truly dreadful, already showing its age with grimy pipes and services. Each service pipe is colour coded; Green for water, Blue for Air, Yellow for electricity and Red for lifts.
The centre houses a library, which opens at 12.00 a.m and had students queuing an hour beforehand. As well as the library, there is a restaurant on the sixth floor, with a good view of Paris and tables on the roof each decorated with a rose. Alas the restaurant priced itself out of our reach, although not quite as expensive as the Jules Verne restaurant on the Eiffel tower.
The building also houses modern art, three floors of it. Starting on the sixth floor were a couple of exhibitions. We spent rather too long on Samuel Beckett and the Airs De Paris. Moving on then to the fourth floor of modern art, the type of art which is represented by the pile of bricks on the Tate Modern. Again spent far too long in that area.
Back on the fifth floor was the type of modern art which did have some originality and graphical excellence. Here there were pictures by Picasso, Leger, Jean Dubuffet, Matisse and Salvidor Dali.
Getting late, we went and ate in a nearby café, both of us opting for the Spaghetti Bolognese, far better and far cheaper than the night before.
Off to see La Defense du Temps, a special clock in the Clock Quarter; disappointingly it was being worked on and hence not showing the correct time.
Back to the hotel to pick up the bags, then through the Metro in the rush hour and onto the RER to the airport. Terminal 3 at Charles de Gaulle airport is not nice having very few amenities, no good food, no reasonable bars, and an extremely bad announcement system which is impossible to understand with all the echoes.
