day 23: musée du quai branly

Date: Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

We walked past this nifty looking museum while trudging home from fireworks on Bastille Day (it looks cooler at night and this isn't a good picture of the main entrance.) It's a museum that features art from Africa, Oceania, Asia, and the Americas. There's an impressive collection, and the architecture and overall design of the interior is really nifty. But I will admit that it was difficult for me to enjoy at first because of the lighting inside. Granted, everything looked really cool in the low lighting and artistic glass cases (and the seemingly messy yet ultimately teleological floor plan) but it gave me quite a headache, as each exhibit was lit by several small lights, and those lights would reflect off the glass panes from adjacent exhibits, and yet most of the museum was not well light. (It was mostly dark and only the exhibits were lit with those small lights.) After I toughened up a bit, it got easier. I was a little confused because I wasn't sure what I was looking at (I should've invested in one of those audio guides! They weren't as cool as the touchscreen-GPS ones at the Louvre though.) but it was interesting. There were some interactive exhibits that gave information in English, which was helpful.

What was rather exciting though, was seeing the Crystal Skull. (One of the many out there.) We weren't supposed to take pictures inside the museum, but I really couldn't resist...

We finished walking through the main floor exhibits rather quickly as we weren't sure what we were looking at (except general African, Asian, American, and Oceanic art) so we explored their temporary exhibits (very interesting section and again, very artistically designed) as well as the nifty multimedia area. There was a cool interactive television screen where we think we saw Onka from Papua New Guinea. (He's the main character in an MMW1 video we all had to watch.)

We took the C on the RER to get to the Museum and it was really nice. The trains on the C are double decker and most of it isn't underground. Thanks to the RER-C, I've discovered that I still have lots left to discover--more importantly, I have somewhere to start. Hopefully this weekend I can explore the area around the RER stop Javel and make a trip to the wonderful Georges Pompidou Center, too.