Today Katie and I spent a relaxing morning at home since the museum we wanted to go see didn’t open until 2pm. On the way to the museum, we stopped by the train station to pick up our tickets to Amsterdam for next week. I’m finally getting the hang of the stations (well sort of – considering our bad experience on the way to Normandy), and this time was able to book the tickets online, not worry about the whole being from Argentina thing, and even pick up the tickets ahead of time to avoid the last minute panic that plagued our Brussels trip. We have reserved seats, which should avoid the problems from Normandy, and all of this done four days in advance!
Tickets safely in hand we headed off to the museum and arrived just as it opened. The museum was an odd little museum tucked into the basement/dungeon of a residential building in the Marais section of Paris (about five blocks away from the Pompidou center). The official name of the museum is Musée de la Magie et des Automates, and it is certainly a strange place. It’s normally open only 3 days per week from 2pm to 7pm Wed, Sat and Sun. However, due to spring break, it is open every day this week.
The museum focuses on the history of magic and has a lot of strange pieces of magician’s equipment from the 1700s, 1800s and early 1900s. There were disappearing boxes, saw the lady in half equipment, a lot of optical illusions on the walls and some midway equipment, like fortune telling lady machines, and things you put your hand into to trigger some response. Katie was very reluctant to put her hand into any of these boxes even though she saw other kids doing it with delight. There were a bit creepy and generally your hand triggered something like a lion’s head popping out and fur brushing against your hand. It would startle you, put not hurt you. There were other boxes that used mirrors to trick your eyes. When you looked in you might see your head upside, or instead of seeing across the room you’d see at a 90 degree angle. There were also fun house mirrors.
The museum is very small with only three rooms and it goes very fast. You could see the entire museum in about 30 minutes. For an additional fee you can also see the museum of automans, which is a 3 room collection of a lot of mechanized figures. You could push a button and see these early robot like figures move around, dance, swing back and forth, or walk a dog. There were easily over a hundred different examples in materials from wood to metal and even paper. It was kind of interesting, but again went very fast. You could go through both sides of the museum in less than an hour.
Luckily our tickets also included a magic show. It was a small how, about 20 minutes with basic tricks done by a magician in his 60s, but it was enjoyable. We did card tricks, simple slight of hand tricks and the tricks with interlocking rings. Most interesting for me was that although the show was in French, I was actually able to understand most of what the magician was saying. It was the first time that my listening comprehension has been over 50%. I think it was a combination of him talking a bit more slowly and pronouncing things a bit more distinctly, as any of us do during a presentation, compared to a casual conversation. When I try to listen to people on the metro I end up hearing common words like if, but, always, never, but the nouns and verbs seem to go so fast that I can’t pick them up. This time I really could understand him doing his routine and it was really gratifying. I was able to translate a little for Katie, but it was tough to listen and translate simultaneously and still get it all. But I could hear his banter with the audience, with the kid he picked out of the audience and his little stories. Pretty cool!
After the museum, Katie and I walked around the Marias region of Paris looking for Nicholas Flamel of Harry potter alchemy fame. He was a real person that legends still surround. He lived in Paris in the late 1300s and early 1400s, and came into a lot of gold mysteriously. Claims were made that he had transformed common metals into gold, and the alchemy claims persist. We found Nicholas Flamel street and a house that he built for paupers. He was quite the philanthropist of his day, and the house that still stands is the oldest house in all of Paris, built in 1407. If you think about it, that was 85 years before Columbus set sail for the new world!!!
We should try a magic show with all the cousins sometime.
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