We had another early morning and went to our tour company at 830a to head off to Versailles for a half day. Versailles is about 45 min from Paris and is the castle where most royalty of Paris in the 17-1800s lived and ruled. Some people stay the night here, but we thought a half day was perfect. We got to walk through the castle or royal palace, hall of mirrors, apartment of the princesses and various halls. We did not walk through the gardens, and that might have been pretty neat. The castle started out as a hunting lodge, that was built on to, remodeled, etc to become the colossal behemoth that it is. Most of the artwork was moved to the Louvre during the French Revolution and it was turned into a museum. Some interesting takeaways from this place
- The history doesn't go back past 1700s, and makes this stuff fairly recent (compared to the duration of the human)
- The self centered, narcissistic nature of the royal class is kind of sickening, these people lived in excess, fattening themselves, gorging on food, mistresses, unnecessary rooms, employees, etc, while hard working people were out there struggling, makes you understand how revolution happen, why these a--holes get beheaded and how this happens over and over in our history
- The room of "wars" had 80 something battles depicted in paintings, basically during the duration of this royal family, France was in constant battle to grab colonies, fight the Brits, etc. Another wtf moment, why is the initial human condition to dominate, cause war and colonize rather then befriend and be a decent human being / race. Why? Why is it like that, considering the average human being you meet doesn't have those tendencies. The greed centered at the top is a machine that operates on behalf of the people, but doesn't seem to represent their interests of being a loving human being. How can we change this? Joe Rogan proposes giving them mushrooms to open their sense of understanding. Hmm.
- Another religious aha moment. During one of the battles King Louis said, when things got hairy, as they are out there murdering people on behalf of god, if I win this battle and we don't die, Ill convert from a protestant to Catholicism. He won the battle (of course god had nothing to do with this) but the dude ended up converting to Catholicism and with that the entire region converted over the course of years to come. another interesting bout with religion. Do the kids and subsequently kids of the kids understand how a pretty arbitrary event changed their religion? Do they see the nonsense in it? 200 years later, do we? These are random events that shaped human history and I think this isfascinating.
When we got back, we set out to explore the land of hashish, prostitution, brothels and churches on the hill. This is the Mont Mart, Pigalle area of Paris. We were going to go for a bike ride, but I needed a nap, we took some time off, then headed out. Dmitriy researched a neighborhood called Strausberg / St Dennis, which was on the way to Pigalle. Strausberg was shady, you are bombarded for advertisements for weave shops, KFC and shady alleys and it wasnt even 6pm. We strolled down the streets and cut down a really shady, covered alley that was littered with Middle Eastern food and shops. We made it out of there alive to go down another street. A few beers later we scored a money falafel (which was impressive)
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