{"id":1981,"date":"2009-12-05T05:57:35","date_gmt":"2009-12-05T11:57:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/?p=1981"},"modified":"2009-12-05T06:03:22","modified_gmt":"2009-12-05T12:03:22","slug":"paris-museums-close","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/paris-museums-close\/","title":{"rendered":"Paris museums close doors"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Tourists caught in middle of strike battle between French workers and government.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/12\/paris-museum.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-1982\" title=\"Paris museums close doors\" src=\"http:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/12\/paris-museum-280x168.jpg\" alt=\"Paris museums close doors\" width=\"280\" height=\"168\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/12\/paris-museum-280x168.jpg 280w, https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/12\/paris-museum.jpg 460w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 280px) 100vw, 280px\" \/><\/a>Peering through the glass into the darkened hall of the Pompidou Centre, Linda Lawson and her son, Daniel, didn&#8217;t like what they saw. Instead of the bustle they had expected from Europe&#8217;s largest modern art collection, they were greeted with silence, switched-off lights and letters running diagonally across the window that spelled out G-R-E-V-E.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;This is the first museum we&#8217;ve come to and it&#8217;s shut,&#8221; said Lawson, in Paris on an extended summer holiday from Brisbane, Australia. &#8220;It&#8217;s such a wonderful collection and I wanted Daniel to see it. But I&#8217;ve lived in France before and I know it&#8217;s a part of life.&#8221; Her 16-year-old travelling companion, however, was rather less accepting. &#8220;I&#8217;m really pissed off,&#8221; he admitted, turning to look again through the window. A pop-art picture of former president Georges Pompidou stared sternly down at him; the centre was, read the poster, &#8220;on strike&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>It may be the most visited city in the world, with a justified reputation for its cultural gems, but this week Paris was no place to be an art lover or a tourist. Furious at plans by French president Nicolas Sarkozy to cut jobs in state-run institutions, the staff at many of the capital&#8217;s leading venues stayed at home and left tourists out in the cold.<\/p>\n<p>Yesterday six of the country&#8217;s national museums were shut, along with a host of other sites including the Arc de Triomphe, the Gothic chapel Sainte Chapelle and the towers of Notre Dame. When told that her other gallery of choice, the Mus\u00e9e d&#8217;Orsay, was also closed to the public, Lawson could not hide her disappointment \u2013 or her frustration. &#8220;Well, that&#8217;s it then,&#8221; she said. &#8220;Everything we want to see is shut.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>For many tourists, the sense of dejection was particularly acute because Paris, arguably more than any other European city, touts its virtues as a holiday destination on the basis of its magnificent museums.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tourists caught in middle of strike battle between French workers and government.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[80,63,17,6,118,117],"tags":[1485,709,2963,2966,2960,2954,2952,2958,2965,2959,2962,2956,2957],"class_list":["post-1981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-breaking-news","category-daily","category-europe","category-family","category-hot","category-travel","tag-french-nicolas-sarkozy","tag-french-president-nicolas-sarkozy","tag-nicolas-sarkozy","tag-nicolas-sarkozy-paris","tag-notre-dame-paris","tag-paris-museum","tag-paris-museums","tag-paris-museums-close","tag-paris-nicolas-sarkozy","tag-paris-notre-dame","tag-sainte-chapelle","tag-tourist-paris-museums","tag-tourists-paris-museums"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1981","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1981"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1981\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}