The Blue Period

 Tucked away in a quieter part of the Paris and a significant walk away from the nearest train station, the Picasso Museum is by comparison to other attractions in Paris, quite reserved......it seems like a quaint 3-story building where people could live.......but inside is perhaps one of the best exhibits dedicated to the life of one Pablo Picasso, a titan of 20th century art. Befoe a year ago, Picasso didn't mean anything to mean other than a famous painter whose art work could sell for 7 digits at art auctions; I didn't even know what he looked like! And unlike the masters of classical European art like Michaelango, Da Vinici, Rembrandt, etc., Picasso was of the age of the modern age, living until the 1970's..... I was almost born early enough to have my life coincide with Picasso's! The Blue Period was one of Picasso's most famous series of art work between 1900 and 1904 where he just went through a phase; he must have been in one of his moods and mental states that I'm too familiar with......there are stretches of my life that I feel just distinctly different than other times of my life until one day, I just snap out of it and move on to something completely different.......I wish one day someone will look back at Robert Yan's "Dodgeball Period" of 4-5 years or give out fancy names like "the Pandemic Sitting at Home Years." I WON'T have a list like Picasso did of "Picasso's women" and all the wives and relationships he was in. I guess an artist might think differently or have different standards of relationships with people, so it's hard to be judgmental, but Picasso sure did milk something many other famous artists didn't have: fame during his lifetime, success and ability to attract women to his side. 

I'd say MJ and I enjoyed the Picasso and Rodin museums the most, museums dedicated specifically to one artist's life and displaying how he dedicated his life to art, his workshops, the subjects that he picked, etc. As one can imagine, lots of statues in Rodin's museum to peruse, although one fellow visitor memorably walked up to a statue and started rubbing her hand on it to enjoy the work! I'd think it's pretty universally understood not to touch the artwork at art museums, but maybe there's some Paris corollary to that rule we didn't know about? MJ was shocked. I found it funny. I also found it memorable to see the "Thinker" and "Burgers of Calais" statues outside in the garden, especially since it was a rainy day and the misery of the prisoners depicted in "Burgers" seemed even more evident as if they had to add rain to their list of troubles, like being imprisoned and sacrificed to the enemy forces. As "Midnight in Paris" the movie described in, Paris can be beautiful in the rain as well. The Thinker might be able to concentrate better in the rain. 

No matter how many "Rick Steves" guidebooks or "Paris in 3 days" itineraries you consult, I always find that actually making the trip allows for underrated places to pop up that don't get the "3 stars" or "3 diamonds" or whatever the tour books say are the best attractions. MJ and I got a tip from a local not to get too crazy at the Louvre just standing in line for hours to get a picture, but instead enjoy the absolutely free Petit Palais (Little Palace) which had almost no line and displayed some of the best artwork of the trip. It's a good lesson for wherever we end up next time: don't be afraid to take a chance on something that others haven't rated as highly. 

On the Covid front, I suspect we got a little lucky with timing as we went just ahead of the Omicron variant and new waves of Covid, but there's a pretty strict system of QR codes tracking one's Covid status at every establishment that we went to, with the establishment scanning in the code instead of just the flippant glance at restaurants in New York when we went in October. Getting in and out of the country seemed like much more of a breeze than advertised.......Paris welcomed us in, and the US didn't really ask too many questions when we came back.... neither checked our vaccine cards at all or negative Covid tests that we went out of our way to get at a Paris pharmacie (they're making quite a pretty penny from charging tourists for converting their Covid cards there PLUS the negative covid tests, a double hit for each tourist in a big city for tourism) where I got my first Covid up-the-nose test: Let's just say I'm happy I didn't have to do too many of those all throughout Covid. It made me be in a different type of "Blue Period" for a half hour afterwards.