Rouen and the Impressionists

6th July Rouen and beyond.

Checked out of the Hostel by 8.30 and headed off to the rail station for the trip to Rouen. The train was full of tourists heading to Giverny to walk through Monet’s garden and home and pay homage to the Impressionists and to gaze on the scenes that dominated the paintings of his later years. A very vocal Tour Guide, Australian judging from his accent, was organising a group of youthful art students into some sort of order for when they arrived at the station and the walk to the gardens. His loud explanations and descriptions kept our interest until they all spilled out of the carriage at Vernon.

We booked into the very new hostel on the out-skirts of town for three nights. The hostel has a strict no entry between 12.00 pm and 5.00pm policy so we ended up exploring the historic city and relaxing over tea and a beer at a cafe.

Rouen has preserved its medieval architecture which gives the city an atmosphere that has all but disappeared in bigger, more bustling centres.

We wandered the streets and poked around the Cathedral Notre Dame and the environs. The Cathedral was bombed during W.W II and has required extensive renovations in order to restore the building to its former glory. There are still areas around the Cathedral environs being restored today.

The streets are full of timbered 16th century houses, their street levels now shops and restaurants, with window boxes and fretwork decorating the frontages.
The main street is dominated by the Gros-Horloge, a gilded, ornate, large, one handed town clock that juts out over the bustling cobbled street that leads to the Cathedral.
The Cathedral holds the bones of Richard the Lionheart, the Cardinals of Amboise and Louis de Breze ,the husband of Henri II’s mistress Diane De Poiters as well as chapels devoted to local saints who include, among their illustrious group, Joan d’Arc who was tried, convicted and executed here in 1431.

Wednesday 7th July:
The Art Gallery has an exhibition of Impressionist paintings as well as works by Carrivagio and other earlier painters which we went to see on Wednesday as we reasoned we’d not get the opportunity to experience such an exhibition back home in N.Z.

What was noticeable was the number of people, of all ages and backgrounds, who were avidly reading the information boards, exploring each painting, pointing out places they knew and identified and having animated conversations about the works as they moved through the gallery. Perhaps it might have something to do with the accessibility of the exhibition - admission was 9 Euros with reductions available for students and job-seekers as well as local residents. To see such an exhibition in N.Z. would mean an admission price well over $50.00 and probably only exhibited in one city under intense security.

Anyway, the Art Gallery had collected 130 paintings by the Impressionists, sourced from around the world, as an exhibition to celebrate the importance of Rouen in artistic history. On show were paintings by Monet, Gauguin, Pissarro, Corot,Turner, Pinchon and others who had all, at some time, settled and painted scenes of the city and its environs.

We joined the queue and made our way into the already thronged gallery where we were greeted by three enormous canvases that I had only ever read about. The most famous being that of the members of the French Academy of Arts which has portraits of over 100 of the Academy’s members all engaged in animated discussion about Arts. Once past these epic pieces we entered the exhibition itself. We were guided through the development of the Impressionist school from Paul Huet and Corot who had begun to experiment with the effects of light on the motif of the scene to works by Turner and eventually Monet and Pissarro with their canvases exploring the effects of light on the buildings of the city.

Pride of place was given to the series of studies of the facade of the Cathedral that Monet had executed over his time in Rouen. The studies reduced the facade to a vague form with its structure being suggested by the interplay of light and shade depending on the season or time of day Monet had chosen to paint the scene. One could sense the effect such paintings would have had on the classicist school of art more favoured by society at the time when one could see the paintings across a complete wall of the gallery and thus understand what Monet was trying to do.

Joy was particularly taken by a series of paintings of people on the bridges of Rouen on a wet and windy evening in which the mood of the day was shown in the light, shade and reflections the artist had captured on his canvases.

From the Gallery we headed off to explore more of the history of the city. Joy found the execution spot of Joan d’Arc in the square where the Church in Joan’s name has been built. The buildings around the site probably look much as they did when the crowds gathered to watch her execution at the stake in 1431.

From there we poked around the streets, peered into magnificent examples of gothic architecture to marvel at the way the builders had pushed the boundaries of stone masonry to create such tall, airy and light buildings using the most basic of machinery. Nearly all the gothic churches in Rouen are in the process of restoration and reconstruction as the city repairs the ravages of War, of time and nature as the sandstone the churches are built of has weathered and eroded badly over the centuries.

Versailles Lock-out

Monday 5th July:

This was the day to satisfy one of Joy’s dreams - a visit to Versailles and a tour of the rooms. We headed off early so we could get to Versailles and avoid the queues which proved to be pointless as the Palace was closed to the public on Mondays although we were free to wander through the 800 hectares of gardens if we wished. So we missed out on touring the 700 rooms, walking up and down the 67 staircases and gazing at the 6300 paintings, 2100 sculptures and statues, 15000 engravings and 5000 objet d’art that make up the interior. Instead we were offered the chance to count the 2153 windows, 352 chimneys, the 50 fountains and 620 fountain nozzles if we had continued to walk through the gardens.

After gazing at the buildings through the golden gates and acknowledging that we were one of the 2.6 million visitors who wouldn’t make it inside the Palace this year and cursing the fact that 4.3 million others would we walked into the village beside the Palace in search of a coffee only to find that it was closed in sympathy with the Palace.

Back in Paris Joy lost no time in mounting an exploratory assault on Galleries Lafayette while I headed off to explore the streets around the Opera. I stumbled upon the Pinacotheque de Paris and an exhibition of works by Evard Munch so took the opportunity to check out the works of a painter whose reputation seems to have been based on “The Scream” alone.

The exhibition quickly dis-spelled the belief that the tortured work that is “The Scream” was typical of the artist for his work was finely executed and obviously done by a skillful master of the pen.

Tomorrow we will head off to Rouen with the idea of staying there for several days and doing day trips out to the places Joy has ticked off as her “must sees” this trip.

The Louvre and Moulin Rouge

Sunday 4th July:

The day dawned fine and sunny which lifted our spirits considerably after Saturday’s rain so we set off early for central Paris with twin objectives.. taking the Hop On Off bus for a tour of the city’s major sights and a visit to the Louvre. The Louvre, and all of Paris’ museums and Art Galleries, was free being the first Sunday of the month which made the effort more worthwhile.

We hopped on the Tour Bus at The Opera and headed off to see the sights of Paris. The last time Joy and I were here the city was consumed by the Diana & Dodi car crash so the tunnel under the Seine had become a place of pilgrimage with flowers and graffiti decorating the entrance. Now, there is no mention, no sign indicating that the tragedy had happened. History is such a hard mistress!

The Bus took us along the Champs Elysees, which was being dressed for the July 14th parades, to the Arc d’Triumph, past the Grand Palace then through the streets to the Trocadero and the Eiffel Tower. Here we posed for the obligatory photographs for family.

We swept past the Military College and the Army museum and the National Assembly to the Louvre. Here we queued for two hours to get into the building then we mingled with the swarms of people turning, swirling and questing their ways around the museum. Joy & I headed for the second floor and the German, French, Dutch and Flemish paintings then made our way through the Richelieu wing and the exhibition of works from the July Monarchy, Restoration and Renaissance periods and pieces from the Napoleonic era to the the halls of objet d’art from the 5th to 19th century and out into the sunlight under the Pyramid and into the late afternoon Paris traffic.

On board the tour bus again we drove to the Ile de la Cite and stopped outside the Notre Dame Cathedral where the queues stretched across the courtyards and down alley ways as every tourist and Parisienne took advantage of the first Sunday of the month free access to museums and historic places. Joy & I opted for a coffee in a street cafe to watch the streams of tourists swirl by as we had spent several hours in the cathedral when we first visited Paris in 1997. I have a firm resolve to scan my older pictures and mix them into my new album of our trip when we get back to New Zealand and a more settled life again.

Back to the Place d’Opera and the Hostel for a brief rest before meeting up with Noeline and Durhan in Mont Marte for a drink and a late evening show at the Moulin Rouge.

We made our way to Blanche metro to emerge at 8.30 into the bustling red light area that is Pigalle. The streets were already busy with disco goers and hopeful voyeurs all responding to the constant flicker of neon and the blandishments of the door keepers. We, finding that food was more important, headed up the hill towards Mont Marte in search of a restaurant before heading back to Moulin Rouge to meet up with our friends.

We’d reserved tickets for the 11.00pm revue show but, even so, we had to join a queue that stretched along the street, blocking shop fronts, for almost two blocks, waiting for the 9.00pm show to finish and the admission of we punters for the last show of the night.

Once seated at our table, which was so close to the stage that we were constantly whacked with feathers or other costume pieces as the dancers pranced their way onto the stage, we were in a scene reminiscent of a Toulouse Lautrec painting of the interior of the music hall. Here were people seated around tables, clutching glasses of wine, lit by dim red lamps all waiting for the curtains to open and the show to begin.

The show started with an energetic song & dance number which introduced the cast and hinted at the style of costumes and the potential exposure of skin we’d see as the evening progressed.

Seated as close as we were to the stage the illusion of nudity, the element of titillation that such shows are built on, was quickly knocked into subdued reality as every dancer was wearing flesh coloured stockings under every seemingly skimpy outfit. Never the less the show ran through at a fast clip with no let up for the full two hours. The dancers coming on in briefer and, yet more concealing, costumes in a series of items that became tableaux of 19th - 20th century male fantasies - of Eastern princesses in exotic costume, their breasts exposed, being fought over by both Indian Rajahs and English Officer, of Amazonian pirates, their breasts exposed, fighting off and eventually succumbing to the strong, gallant crew of the English / French vessels and of an exotic woman, her breasts exposed, opting to escape the dastardly male throwing herself into a tank full of snakes where she wrestled them into freudian submission to emerge into the welcoming arms of the only honorable man present. This act was followed by a circus of women, their breasts exposed, presented themselves acrobatically to the audience before the grand finale of the be-feathered cast singing and can-canning a farewell to the audience and the illusion of the dance-hall.

The tableaux were interspersed with acts from a juggler, a strong man team in which the man supported the woman in a combination of physical strength and balancing and a ventriloquist whose routine, which Joy reckoned was the high light of the evening, evoked a great deal of laughter.

We parted ways with our friends, who were heading off to explore northern France, and got back to the hostel around 2.00am.

Paris - France 2-12th July 2010

FRANCE - July 2-12th 2010.

With the end of the Qatar contract the staff spread themselves across the world - from Japan to Malaysia to Europe to Africa to Turkey and returns to Australia and New Zealand our friends have packed up a left Qatar.

For some the lack of commitment from Qatar to a further year of the contract has meant a decision to go back to N.Z. For others, like us, it has meant sending out CVs to different employers seeking work on their contracts in other parts of the Middle East. I’ve got an application and the possibility of a job in Oman as a Teacher Trainer and applications out for positions in Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia as well as the fall back position of work in the U.K. All of which will resolve itself mid August as the companies assess their needs and our CVs in the quest to create efficient teams.

In the meantime we are making the most of living in the Middle East to go travelling, something we’d nearly all have to do several years of heavy saving to do so that we could be away from home for an extended period to make the journey worthwhile.

This year Joy and I have headed to France before returning to New Zealand to celebrate, belatedly, Joy’s birthday with family and friends.

On Friday we flew out of Doha with Lynne and Brian Thomas who were on their way to Italy and on to Paris in what seemed to be an endless trip across North Africa and across Italy and Germany. Seven and a bit hours and yet it felt longer than our more regular 23 hour jaunts to and from N.Z.!!

We were last in France in 1997-98 when we did our first OE. Our trip, this time, is meant to take us to explore Northern France after seeing some of the sights of Paris we didn’t get to in our first visit.

We arrived, tired and jaded, early evening but had to wait for some time until our pre-hired shuttle arrived to take us to the D’Artagnan Youth Hostel and our first night in Paris. Once booked in we flaked out in what felt to be a hotter night than any we’d experienced in Doha.

Saturday 3rd July:
The next day Joy and I headed off to take in the sights of Paris. This proved to be optimistic as when we emerged from the Metro Paris was under water as the clouds burst to welcome us desert dwellers to the more temperate climate of Europe. This put a dampener on our plans to tour Paris by open topped bus and led us to Joy’s favourite fall back position - visit a shopping mall. Thus we ended up in the La Fayette Department Store by the Opera House.

After poking around the different floors of this huge souq for three hours or more we ventured out into the rain soaked streets with the semi-formed idea of going towards the Seine and the Louvre area on a window shopping punctuated stroll only to put that idea on the instant back burner when we met up with two of our Cognition colleagues, Noeline and Dhuran, who were ambling through the bargain hunting crowds outside the store looking for an electronics store to solve their iphone roaming access problems.

As Dhuran exclaimed the odds on us meeting up in Paris without any pre-arranged decision must be incredibly long as we’re staying in different parts of the city and had no indication of each other’s plans on the day.

We ended up having coffee in a sidewalk cafe and, because I was having the same i phone issue, heading off together to seek a solution to our problems which a visit to the Apple store by the Opera very soon resolved for us.

We parted ways with the understanding that we’d meet up on Sunday near the Louvre and plan a night out at the Moulin Rouge or Folle Berges before we all moved on to tour different parts of France.

While Joy darted in and out of shops all decorated with huge SALE signs I sat on the steps of the Opera House or leaned against walls taking photographs of tourists doing touristy things like photographing each other against monuments or hunting for bargains.

We still have to plan how we fit in visits to Versailles and Fountainbleu before heading to Northern France and back to Paris by the 11th.

End of Contract Dinner - Cognition 2010 Doha

The end of the contract and the return of the Doha Darlings & the Dudes in a musical review of the contract from induction to the job and the end of the contract. Complete in the regulation corporate uniform designed just for the night.

End of Contract Blog

The End of the Contract Draws Near

There has been a long break in my blogging about life in Doha. This has happened because this end of the contract has been quite demanding with long, hot, tiring days (4.30am-2.30pm plus some evening catch up sessions with temperatures fluctuating between 49C and 38C each day) which reduces one’s inclination to blog.

Since my last entry we did experience the celebration of a Qatari wedding with its separate male and female parties which culminate in the introduction of the groom to his bride by his immediate family support group. The difference between the European and Arabic societies was clearly shown in the wedding celebrations.

The male wedding party would be best described as “anticipatory waiting” with the groom and his male celebrators spending the evening talking, eating and dancing until the call from the women’s party for the groom to be bought to his bride.

The women’s wedding party apparently was a chance for the women to admire the bride who was ushered into the function by her retinue whose purpose was to hold her dress out from her feet so that she could walk the length of the walkway to the pergola and the throne where she was to sit until the groom was ushered into her presence.

Our European wedding celebrations with the intermingling of guests, the raucous commentary and the visible public ceremony certainly high-lighted the different social mores we have been living amongst these last 18 months.

I received a pleasant surprise a couple of weeks ago when the CSO English coordinator sent me an email congratulating me on being named as one of the three top ATs in the cohort 6 schools and telling me that the work I have done at Ahmed bin Hanbal has been valued by more than the staff of the school.

Joy has been busy with her painting and has sold a good many of her works – both Qatari and New Zealand scenes. With luck she won’t have to pack too many canvases to return to New Zealand in July.

She has also been rehearsing a group of 10 of us for the end of contract dinner show entitled “This is Cognition... Mr. John” which will go on stage for its once only performance this weekend. She has progressively racked up the length of each dinner show since the first appearance of the “Doha Darlings” at the end of the 2008-09 contract from 3 minutes to 7 minutes with “The Return of ABBA” to what will be a 25 minute comic revue style show which will celebrate our activities in Qatar.

We expect the audience to be convulsively laughing before the show has even fully swung into its first item as the outfits Joy has designed for this item should cause a preliminary giggle leading to laughter as soon as the first words are sung.

At this point we are all facing uncertainty as the Rfps that precede the contract have not been circulated which has meant that we cannot be assured of a contract for the next school year so our finale could signal an end or, with terribly long odds, a continuation to take us through till June 2011. I’ve investigated a possible contract in Oman as well as one in Abu Dhabi with CfBT as well as the possibility of work in the UK through Time-Plan so that we can do another year overseas with the opportunities and challenges we have come to enjoy and revel in.

We are now packing up for our holiday in France (Paris. Rouen, Normandy area) followed by a brief stop-over in Doha to pick up our final bits of luggage and a long flight home to arrive on the 15^th. The luggage we’re freighting home is considerably more than we took home last contract as I have invested in a magnificent carved and inlaid rosewood desk and chair as a substantial souvenir of our time in the Middle East and Joy has splurged heavily on the family with a couple of suitcases of clothes, nic-nacs and other mementoes of Qatar.

When we come home, even if it is for a brief time, the girls have arranged a belated birthday party for Joy in Auckland. We have a trip to make to Wanganui to discuss what we should do with Dad’s house now the renovations have finished and we wait for a sale. We also plan to rededicate the Bates family headstones and view the memorial plaque to Dad... projects that have been completed while we have been away. This last activity will give us the opportunity to go down to Wellington to catch up with Rebecca who has secured a job there. So it will be a busy time for us.

Our next blog will be pictures and a clip of the End of Contract show and, perhaps, our trip to France. Then..... who knows??

Quick Up Date

Athletics, Debating and Theatre... Doha Update

Since our last adventure in Turkey Joy and I have been enjoying life back in Doha.

Joy has been organising the End of Contract Dinner Show entitled "This is Cognition. Mr. John" and I 've been involved in the many projects the advisory role brings with it.

We did get to see the final night of the World Indoor Athletics Championships early in March. We managed to get there in time to see Valerie Vili receive her silver medal for the shot put and then to watch incredibly tall jumpers leap to record lengths and heights while other purpose trained athletes sprinted and hurdled the track at great speed.

Work seems to have consumed a great deal of time this month. I began pushing debating as a means of improving the students' language skills last semester and have succeeded in getting the Arabic Department to get involved with the Qatar Debate promotion of debating in Arabic.
The boys were selected to debate against a team of girls at the Doha Conference on Human Trafficking in front of the delegates and media. Much to the delight of the Department Head and our Principal the boys won the debate.

There is now rumours that the Personal Assistant Secretary to Sheika Mousa may be visiting our school to congratulate the boys and the teachers on their involvement. Needless to say we're all excited to see if the rumour becomes true.

This week we succeeded in running a three grade debate competition against Abu Bakr Aseedq Boys school. Grades 10, 11 and 12 debated That all students in Qatar should do an hours physical activity every day after school, That Women with school age children should not be allowed to work and That technology has made us lazy.

We were fortunate in that Qatar Debate provided us with adjudicators from their visiting trainers from the UK University Debating team so the boys were given the added fillup to their delivery.

The result: Ahmed Bin Hanbal won two debates and lost one which restored the balance after our first one level only debate loss.

On Wednesday I was at a workshop on Library resourcing at the W Hotel when the word went around that there was an enormous man in the foyer. At this everyone rushed to the entrance to see. Sure enough, there was a big man... the world's tallest man at over 7 feet. He was in town for a promotion associated with a local company but before he could leave the hotel he was mobbed by guests and school librarians alike.

Tonight Joy and I have been invited to the wedding of Faisal Al Shawi and his fiancee, Al-Anoud at the Sheraton. Faisal's father, Mohammed, is a teacher at Ahmed Bin Hanbal who has been very welcoming to Joy and me since we began the contract this academic year. The wedding will be a blog in itself.

This week we begin rehearsals for "This is Cognition, Mr. John" and Joy begins running her Water Colour painting classes for the Cognition teams so the final three months of this contract will be very full.