Day 10, at the Opera

Another morning of croissants… I’m going to miss their accessibility in the States (the quality too). We took the metro over to tour the Opera National de Paris at the Palais Garnier, which is the classic, old opera house, not the new one at the Bastille, though I’d like to tour that one as well. I’d looked up performance dates and prices earlier that morning, and saw that all the remaining dates for the current ballet at Garnier only had more expensive seats left (85 euro and up). So on the way in for the tour, we stopped by the box office just to see if they had anything more. Sure enough, they had two 10 euro tickets for that night’s show. Score! So we toured the building, the grand staircase, the library and museum, the grand foyer with a ridiculous number of chandeliers.

Walked back to the apartment to hang out and get ready for the show, I fixed some pasta and a salad for a quick dinner. I put on my infamous feather hat and we were ready to go. Here’s what we saw: http://www.operadeparis.fr/cns11/live/onp/site/saison/ballets/ballets_details.php?lang=en&event_id=88&CNSACTION=SELECT_EVENT

It was wonderful. It was so cool to just walk up the marble steps (a lot of them) to our seats, just to be in the theatre. That’s mostly what I wanted anyway was the experience of going, but the show was completely amazing. Our 10 euro tickets got us pretty far up to the top, on the 4^th loge, but there were still plenty seats higher up, and we could see most of the stage, which is massive. I read that the stage can hold a cast of 450 people. I loved that we were in a sort of mini box, four seats: two on a lower step and two on a higher step. There were partitions between each box of four seats on our level. In some ways it was nice to be higher up, getting to see into the orchestra pit and be closer to all the detail of the ceiling and the 6.5 ton chandelier. We bought a program of the show, which has more information on each scene, each piece of music. Pictures were strictly forbidden, which I followed up until the end, but I took some while the cast was doing their curtain call. All in all, it was a great day. I feel more cultured already.

-Steph