Day 11: Montmartre is French for "Mountain of Tourists"

At least I think it is. My French isn't very good. We were going to start with the famed catacombs of Paris, but quelle surprise, they were closed. So we went on to Montmartre. At the dawn of the 20th century, this was an artist's colony. Men like Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Vincent Van Gogh came here to get shitfaced on absinthe at cafes and cabarets and occasionally paint the other people doing the same thing. Unfortunately for the artists colony, society deemed the pictures made by these guys during their benders as masterpieces of Post-Impressionist painting, and the city of Paris built a big fancy church at the top of the mountain, and so the tourists came in droves (including us).

Our first stop was the Espace Dali Museum. As some of you may know, Salvador Dali is my favorite artist, so I was initially excited to see over 300 of his works in one museum. However, I got to doing some math last night (you gotta do something when the beer is €5 during happy hour), and began to get a bit worried. The museum in St. Petersburg, FL has a bunch of his great masterpieces, and must hold like 25% of his art by itself. Ditto for the big collections at Cadaques and Pubol in Catalonia, and the Reina Sofia in Madrid. The Persistence of Memory is in MOMA, Metamorphosis of Narcissus is in the Tate Modern, there's scads of other art museums who must have a few of his works, private collectors hold some, the point I'm trying to make here is what do they have? I got the answer today, and just as I'd feared, it's bupkus. Espace Dali has a few of his watercolors, a bunch of lithographs and engraved prints (of which many aren't even hand signed), and some casts of statues made by other people from little models he made. It's as if somebody went to Florida, dropped a hundred stacks at the Dali Museum shop, and then set it all up in a basement in Montmartre and started charging €11.50 a head for admission. Do yourself a favor and eskip the espace. Espend your money on esomething else. Since this is Montmartre, that something could be half a painting from one of the artists at place Tertre (some of them are quite good, and they will haggle), or some Paris souvenirs (you will see people hawking stuff all over the city, but Montmartre has the cheapest keychains and fake Hermes scarves and whatnot).

After we bought one art, please, it was time to go have a look at Sacre Coeur (that's the big church at the top). If you go, there will be aggressive dudes trying to sell you a string bracelet, claiming you need it for the church. You need no such thing, and it is illegal under French law to punch them in the head even if they grab your arm (though I wish it weren't). The views from the top of the hill are spectacular, and the inside of the church is very nice too. After that, we went back to the apartment, where my mom packed for home, and I packed for Bruges. Those of you who have enjoyed my beer reviews, take heart, because there will be one tomorrow (or not, if you get my drift).