Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Ahh...Paris in the Morning

"It was a date."



How does she look, pop?

(This would be the first time I ever embedded a Youtube video on any Blogger blog I was involved with.)

Here's the route Claude took:


Pretty sweet...

3 comments:

  1. What was he doing? I'm sure we would all love to film ourselves speeding... but I can't read French.

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  2. The French at the beginning just means "this film was made without using any time-lapse or sped-up photography."

    A couple of thoughts: Pat, in response to your question, the woman at the end looks fine (insert smiling emoticon here). In the more general case, I think this video is damn cool. I'm going to send my brother Mark the link, and he'll like it on a couple of levels. He liked Paris pretty well, I think, and he's an avid motorcyclist.

    Probably my favorite aspect of this video is actually recognizing a couple of streets I was on in Paris. Midway through, there is a church that I walked in front of. And of course, he finishes his adventure by climbing the hill in the Montmartre neighborhood to the Sacre Coeur cathedral. If you walk about 40 feet to the right of where the rider ends up, you'll be where I was when I snapped the pic of the Eiffel Tower in the previous post. Also, you can see how Paris streets are laid out - they're not at right angles, and you have to go through a series of plazas where streets intersect at all sorts of acute angles. So it seems like that map of his route is a little misleading.

    And you know, a red light means the same thing in France as it does here. How many does this guy run, anyway? I saw some questionable driving in Paris, but nothing quite so hazardous as this.

    Thanks, Pat, this was a real treat for me, and it will be even moreso for Mark.

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  3. I did a little research on the video. Claude Lelouch, a French filmmaker attached the camera the bumper of his Benz and sped through Paris at about 5:30 in the morning. In post production he dubbed in the sounds of a revving Ferrari to make it sound cooler. He was arrested after he first showed the movie publicly, because plenty of laws were broken. He said he would have stopped the project had any real dangers arisen.

    The Arc de Triompge, Champs-Elysees, Place de la Concorde, Sacre Coeur, the big Opera house...places tourists shouldn't miss, and he speeds by them all. You've got to love the organic way those old cities developed roads.

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