Chez M. le Président

Two weeks ago, we went on a visit to the president's house.

Admittedly, so did 20 000 other people, but it was still pretty cool.

It was the Journées du patrimoine, when important buildings all over France are open to the public. We had a friend of UFM's who had come all the way from Canada staying, which helped to motivate us to actually get out and do something. In previous years, we had visited the Assemblée Nationale and the Senate and survived the queues and the crowds (tip - visit at lunch time), so this time we decided to swing by the most popular building of all, the Elysée palace and see if we could face the experience.

We arrived at 10am and happily came across the priority queue for disabled people, pregnant women and people with small children. It didn't look too horrific, so we decided to take advantage of having SCB with us and make the effort.

Observing the crowds, a surprising number of heavily pregnant women seemed to have decided that seeing the president's official residence was an essential item on their "to do" list in the final weeks before the birth, along with the elderly and infirm and families like ours who were prepared to be optimistic about their toddlers' capacity for waiting patiently, and even in the "priority" queue, it took us two hours to reach the entrance to the garden.

Nevertheless, SCB was happy enough toddling up and down and smiling at elderly ladies, and we were pretty pleased with how things were gone as we passed through the final security check.

The view from the queue

...Only to discover that there was a further queue inside the garden where only those with actual medical needs were considered to be priority and escorted past the waiting hoards by the fire service. People like us who were only carrying 11 kilos of wriggly toddler on our backs (you had to leave buggies at the entrance, but I had luckily thought to pack the baby carrier ) had to wait patiently like everybody else.

That said, apart from one woman who kept harassing the poor junior fire service volunteers because she hadn't been allowed to skip ahead, everyone really was quite patient and the atmosphere was much nicer than you would expect among a bunch of Parisians who had been standing around for several hours.






Eventually, we shuffled our way in the door and the visit really began.

The first room was not at all what I was expecting:

Next to the giant swans, under a ceiling covered in what looked like geometric perspex icicles, was a beautifully set dining table. I can only imagine M. Macron eating here with a deeply ironic smile on his face, perhaps glancing across the table at Brigitte as if to say, "We've really made it now, haven't we, chérie?" 

The rest of the palace was more in keeping with my expectations, although it was interesting in many of the rooms to see modern art and furnishings juxtaposed with much older décor.

There were a lot of chandeliers.

 One of the fun parts was an exhibition of all the gifts Macron has received since becoming president:

 I also liked the section with all the place settings and cutlery used for presidential dinners.  UFM and I are quite proud of the cutlery set we received as a wedding present which has two different sizes of knives and forks, but we're still missing elements such as the grape scissors:

We all agreed afterwards that we were glad we had made the effort to do the visit ... and also very glad that it's ticked off the list and we will never have to stand in the 3 hour queue again!