haven't left yet

France is an daunting country to travel in. The trouble starts even before you fly in. After comparing about a dozen thick guide books of France, both national and regional, you manage to pick one that has the nicest balance of style of description, usability of practical information, readability of the maps, and many other features, go home with it, sit down in a couch, and start reading. Soon, you realize that you need to use hundreds of postits and litters of fluorescent-yellow ink of markers, or even take notes in order to keep track of all the places and things that interest you. You are lucky if you can go to bed with a quarter of the thousand-plus pages read on that day. Several days later, you finish reading the guide book and in front of you is an a list (at least two pages long, twelve point, single spaced) of things you feel you have to see while you're in France lest you feel like a total idiot. An island burdened with a massive covenant, barely floating on the shallow sea. A primitive yet imagination-provoking set of twelve tapestries that have existed for more than a millenia. A cathedral painted by a big-name impressionist painter in many different ways as the light changed on it. Rooms after rooms of paintings and sculptures in Louvre. In Orsay. In Pompidou. A lethargic Provancal village where a herd of cattle slowly moves up a narrow, winding, stone-paved streets, ringing cowbells. A Roman aquaduct with beautiful double arches just outside of the cattle-raising village. A Mediterranean inn where Picasso stayed for months, paying for his bed and food with his paintings that still look down the dining room from its walls dark with soot. A huge, translucent tunnel of Alpine glacier (that you can walk in). An ancient cave with prehistoric drawings, drawn by our ancestors hundreds of thousands of years ago. There is absolutely no way to miss them.

But of course, the time is limited and so is budget. Some, if not most, have to be given up. You meet up with your partner, compare the two lists you have written up, and try to come up with a compromise plan that is doable in the 18 days you have for the vacation. The elimination process might take nearly a week, for not only do all the attractions seem too attractive to give up, but also there are other considerations at work, such as convenience of transportation, proximity to the other hard-to-give-up attractions, closing days of museums and so on. Christmas and New Year aren't a help here. Rational thought and irrational emotion guide you through the process. When (almost magically) you have a somewhat agreeable itinerary, you, your partner, and your relationship hopefully have survived, for if they haven't, they won't survive the real part of the trip, either. Having made the tentative itinerary, you feel you have completed a daunging task, and desperately need a break from the whole business of vacation planning. It's a good time to concentrate on catching up with your college study or backlog at work. A weekend out, just wandering around in the city aimlessly, inhaling crisp winter air, without a single mention of French place-names seems to be a priceless treat after days of planning and replanning in an apartment overheated by a diligent radiator.

erosion of cultural accumulation--even in Paris

Feb. 11, 2005

Well, this is not exactly a part of the travelogue--it deals with what happened after our trip. But since it concerns me as a photo-lover and a culture-lover in general, and it is about The Icon of France, I decided to post this here.

The issue is the copyright. Yes, that hedious trend of copyrighting virtually everything--from an iconic building to an entire park. So many have joined this narrow-minded bandwagon, but I was surprised to see Paris joining it. According to this post on boingboing, now that the image of the Tour Eiffel at night is copyrighted by the company that maintains the Tour, anyone who intends to photograph that image at night has to purchase a permit to do so. Otherwise, it'll violate the copyright. As you see in the boingboing article, they got around the limit of copyright by putting up flash lights all around the Tour so that the new, copyrightable image is different from the old, familiar image of the Tour Eiffel, which is not copyrightable any more. For me, being lax (or generous) about representation and interpretation of a particular cultural object provides a good way to measure the cultural maturity of the owner of the object, whether it is a city or an artist him/herself. The reason for this, I have argued on my main blog, so I will refrain from repeating it. But it is stunning and sad, to say the least, to see one of the biggest and most respected cultural city of the world expose its shallow understanding about how culture and ultimately our civilization functions based on the open pool of accumulated cultural heritage.

Will there be a day when this photo of my happy plush monkey has to be taken down because of the background image of the Tour? I really hope not. But I'm not positive. We (or they) need to come to senses...

monkey at the tour eiffel
Originally uploaded by uBookworm.