Journées Européenes du Patrimoine

I know it's normal for a blog to hype current or future events, but I'm having a hard time staying ahead of the curve, so you'll have to be satisfied with finding out about things you should have gone to after the fact. For example, last weekend you would have been granted access to various buildings, free of charge, in an event called "European Days of Cultural Heritage" (loose translation). I first heard about the event through Invisible Paris, but even if I hadn't known about it we couldn't have avoided the masses of people waiting in line just across the street from the David Lynch window displays last Sunday afternoon.

Or the line wrapping all around the Opéra Garnier, or the band taking advantage of the captive audience to promote themselves:

Instead of waiting at the Opéra for hours, we hopped into a much shorter line in front of a much less famous site: the headquarters of Société Générale, a French bank. We had no idea how awesome it would be.

The glass ceiling you see towards the beginning of the sideshow is 50 square meters (huge!) and is protected by another glass ceiling above it, which also helps to keep the heat in. The building was one of the first in France (or maybe the world?) to be constructed with reinforced concrete. There are five basements, the first four of which contain safe-deposit boxes, all secured by the massive double safe you see in the slideshow. The fifth basement produces heat which rises up through the rest of the building through grates in the floors of each level - another innovation in its time. These trivia items and more did we learn on the 30-minute tour we took through an officially-certified historic monument we never would have known to visit, if not for the Journées Européenes de Patrimoine!