today's parisianness, in bullet points

• Ran.  Running is very unParisian.  Running slowly and with great effort is even more so.  Strike against me.
• Still feeling, well, morning-ish, went for a cup of coffee.  Have discovered that, counter to Rick Steve's strong implication that cafe au lait is nonexistent here, it is perfectly well understood and results in exactly what you would expect.  It's odd that coffee here is expensive - 2.60 euros for a small (4 ounces, maybe 6) cafe au lait - and pastries so cheap - a plain croissant is 0.90-1.10 euros, depending on the niceness of the bakery and (if applicable) whether you sit there or take it to go; a pain au chocolate is around 10 euro-cents more; a much fancier pastry might be closer to 2 euros.  I did not have any pastry today.
• Returned to the creperie (via hour-long walk, including Oberkampf and wholesale jewelry neighborhood) to try a different crepe: this one had scrambled egg (rather than fried with a soft yolk as in the complete), a bit of cheese, and cooked tomato.  I don't usually like tomato, but I thought they did a good job with it.  On the whole it was not as tasty as the crepe complete, but it was light and pleasant - much lighter than any other French meal I've had.
• Walked some more.  Stopped at a bakery and bought a meringue, which I'd read simply MUST be tried.  This is true.
• Walked walked walked.  Went very far south (creperie is very far north).  Saw wholesale clothing neighborhood.  Many bookstore neighborhoods.  Bookstore window displays in Paris feature the actual books, unadorned.  Wonder if people read a lot more and/or a lot more serious stuff here.  Walk walk walk.  Tried on jackets.  Debated buying cute fake-leather jacket; debated blazer.  Neither was perfect and I wasn't positive I'd wear either.  I have enough clothes that are just a little bit wrong.  
• Eventually, went home.  Had a frozen "tarte" for dinner; this was basically a quiche with no top crust.
• Short walk in my neighborhood with another cafe au lait and observance of passersby.
• Gelato!  I have been eyeing the gelato from this place near my apartment for weeks and finally went in. They have a zillion flavors, and you get to pick two even for the smallest size (which, granted, costs $4.50 and is not all that small).  It was VERY good.
• At some point I hit 50,000 words.  

Executive summary: Walked a lot.  Ate yummy Parisian food.  Plan to repeat tomorrow for (sob!) my last full day in Paris.

Trompings

In which I walk home from La Defense and acquire bad karma

So my intention was to wake up this morning and run, but that did not happen.  What happened was, I spent a little bit of time failing to wake up, and when I did rouse myself around eight it was very clear that running was not within my capacity.  So I had some coffee and did some writing... unfortunately that petered out after about 2500 words, but by then I was feeling much more equal to miscellaneous trompings.

First I headed over to the Marais, where after a bit of tromping I went to the Musee Cognac-Jay.  This is fairly typical of Parisian municipal museums in that it is the former home of someone semi-famous, tricked out with his art collection and/or art he might have liked.  In this case, that meant a lot of Romantic portraits and marquetried furniture.  After that, I tromped around until I ended up at Bastille, and then tromped over to Ile de St. Louis.  I looked in a few stores under cover of even-more-touristy tourists, and also bought something called a Tuile Amande, which was an ambiguous-looking almond item so bizarre that I took a picture of it... it did not really taste like much of anything, and I was disappointed, but it turned out to be a good thing that I ate it because it was very filling and I had several hours of tromping ahead of me.

After a brief detour to the Left Bank, and another brief detour home, I set off spontaneously for La Defense.  This is where the keep all the skyscrapers.  I got there around 4:45 and walked around; it was pretty, but surprisingly empty, even when office workers started heading to the subway.  I walked along the esplanade (pictures coming soon) to the next metro station, but when I got there, I said to myself, "maybe I will just walk all the way back!"  This is because I am an idiot.

So I walked.  And walked.  It turns out, once you leave La Defense, you are  not in Paris, but in a town called Neuilly.  I wasn't lost at all because you just follow the road all the way to the Arc de Triomphe, and it was interesting.  I got to the arc and walked down the Champs Elysees.

Then I got fancy.  At the bottom of the Champs Elysees is a garden section, and after that is Place de la Concorde, and then the Tuileries, and then the Louvre.  In other words, a bunch of big, long, boring places, some with lots of traffic and all with lots of tourists, that I've walked through many times.  I decided to go another way, which would also, if done optimally, shorten the distance a bit.

So, la la la, after two hours of walking I turned away from the well-delineated road that I knew exactly how to follow and set off in a different direction.  Which was interesting.  I saw many interesting buildings and fancy stores.  I also saw an alarming number of military people.  I'd been getting worried all afternoon, since seeing soldiers with their guns out at the La Defense metro, that something was going on, and seeing the words Pakistan and avion (plane) and toues (killed) on a big TV screen didn't help much.  Now I was seeing soldiers and cops everywhere, and I couldn't tell if it was normal (there are cops everywhere here, and I was in a part of town I don't go to all that much, which might be where they keep things like consulates) or something really worrisome.  I didn't see anything else alarming - there was a normal mix of people out, and no sirens going off - so I figured it was probably fine, but I was still unbalanced.

And then I became lost.  Well, turned around.  And upon looking for my map I discovered that I'd taken it out of my bag at home to find the proper metro route to La Defense and then not put it back.  And there are maps on the street, but none in my vicinity.  I'd been navigating by the sun, but that only takes you so far, and at the moment I was on a street where the sun was fully shaded.

This was the moment a woman chose to ask me for directions.  People ask me for directions a lot, here as well as in New York, and at home I'm happy to oblige them.  But here it's not so easy since (a) I usually have absolutely no idea, (b) I often can't express the ideas I do have in comprehensible French, and most importantly in this case (c) most of the people who speak on the street are not asking for directions.  In addition to obvious beggars and solicitors and unsavory men, there are a large contingent of female beggars, often very young women, who try to draw you into conversation before asking for money.  This is very trying, and at that time - having been walking for three hours, and somewhat lost, and worried about soldiers and possible terrorist attacks - I was not really in a position to deal with such things.  So I walked past the woman without even looking at her.

I immediately felt bad.  I realized, once she'd disappeared into the crowd, that I wasn't in a very touristy area of town (where the worst beggars hang out) and she was speaking in French (the young-lady beggars speak English, some with almost no accent) and she was, from what I saw in my peripheral vision, very well-dressed and carrying shopping bags.  She was a lost French visitor to Paris is all, and for some reason she thought I was someone who would know something, and I treated her like she didn't exist.

Fortunately, half a block later in the direction we were both walking, there was a big map.  So she is probably just fine without me, especially because Paris is full of actual Parisians who speak French.  Still, the whole experience drove home the foreignness of the city to me.  It's easy, at times, to forget exactly how other Paris is, or rather how other I am in being here.  It's Western Europe; people dress and comport themselves similarly to in the US, to zeroth order, the food is not completely bizarre, they name their streets in large part after people I've heard of.  I know enough of the language to navigate, order food, talk about money, ask directions in a pinch, and be occasionally amused at the conversations of strangers.  It's easy to feel like I'm in the Paris I imagined in French class when I was nine years old, the Paris in textbooks, the Paris of an American's imagination.  Toy Paris, a place with great museums and great food and lots of nice clothes.  And then a day like today happens - a day that was in many ways pleasant and interesting and entertaining - and I realize that I'm in a totally foreign country, that I am concerned that there has been a terrorist attack on this or my own country and have no way to immediately verify, that I don't know if the men with weapons that I'm seeing on the streets are there to protect me or to protect someone from me, that I'm instinctively treating other people as if they are threats because once they get past greetings there is a very good chance I will not understand anything they say and, worse, the instincts that in I can trust in New York to tell me whether a person is too creepy to talk to are largely useless here.

It was a humbling moment.  Fortunately, it happened during broad daylight and on a well-traveled street, and twenty minutes later I was home.

Today's Accomplishments

1. Wrote 8,000+ words of my novel.  All perfectly good words, although not necessarily well-arranged.
2. Viewed visual arts exhibit at Petit Palais.  As is typical for Parisian museums of any size, they were arranged chronologically, from Antiquity to Present-Day, with rooms numbered starting at about 20.
3. Purchased and consumed some delightful food, including an almond croissant, an interestingly-shaped small bread, and some raw-milk Camembert.
4. Read a substantial portion of Persuasion.  Still not 100% sure if I've read it already, not that it matters.
5. Browsed in yet another bookstore.  Read and thought about the process of novel-writing.  Thought about differences among Austen novels; to me it seems like one of the biggest differences between her popular and unpopular novels is authorial distance, but this may be more a function of my own familiarity with the popular stories through repeated reading, viewing of adaptations, etc.  Does Elizabeth Bennett seem like a much better-fleshed character because she was written differently, or because I've nearly memorized the book?  But, actually, Eliza is the least-described character in the whole book; everything is in relation to her but nothing is actually about her.  She doesn't even have an opinion of Mr. Darcy, really, until he has one of her.  This is perhaps Austen's trick, writing in such a way that everything she says is implicitly the main character's opinion and yet the voice remains ostensibly third-person omniscient.
6. Thought about other Important Life Issues and made judicious notes in my moleskine.  Gave nasty looks to hideous Parisian men attracted by moleskine. 

That's it.  No other accomplishments... Tomorrow's stated goals are (1) possibly go for a run, and (2) walk about and eat things.

This morning - very late in the morning, actually, after I'd gone for a run and done some writing (with, apparently, a bit of foresight to realize how disrupted the evening would be) I set off for the Marche aux Puces - the flea market.  This is located at the far northern end of the subway line.

Between the subway and the flea market is a sort of auxiliary flea market, in which vendors in booths sell every type of crap - clothes, souvenirs, food.  Each booth has a very specific focus: sunglasses, or t-shirts that say security or purses of a particular style.  The men (always men) in charge of the booths keep up a constant patter in the general direction of any passers by.

The flea market itself consisted of several smaller markets, as well as many free-standing stores.  About 60% of them were closed, which was surprising because, although it is Monday, the market is supposed to be open only three days a week, Saturday thru Monday.  The stalls that were open were quite interesting to look at; most of the items for sale were antiques, and quite expensive; the rest were new pieces obviously being sold by the artist's dealer.  There was a good deal of furniture as well as jewelry and china.  The most amusing thing was watching the vendors, who were generally sitting around on their antiques, smoking and eating their lunch.

After this and a brief, ill-fated attempt to go to a nice boulangerie (the less-nice ones I frequent were closed for the holiday known as Monday) I took a long walk on the islands and the left bank.  I had some chocolate ice cream which was very, very chocolatey, not very sweet, and had little pieces of cocoa bean in it.  I saw a sculpture garden.  I stopped at a store on the way home, and accidentally deleted all my pictures from the last three days.  Then I spent two hours trying to run around Paris to re-take them all.  Now, I am very glad I still have some frozen food... hopefully tomorrow I will be able to buy cheese and bread (these places can't stay closed forever... right?) but at least I have something to eat tonight.

Ill-fated photos

The amount of time I have in Paris is interesting. It's not long enough that I can really consider myself to be living here, particularly since I don't have a job here, and that's just as well, since my living situation, while reasonable for a short stay, would be pretty dreary long-term (of course, if I were here long-term, I'd probably spruce up the place a bit, and buy lamps and things but it would still be small and old).  But it's too long to be just a tourist trip.  At this point I've run out of major touristy things to do, and grown somewhat tired of museums (if you can believe that).  Plus there's the fact that tromping around turns out to be exhausting.  Fortunately, a big part of the reason I came to Paris was to write, which at home I seem to always find so many distractions from (even if most of those distractions, i.e. the internet and books are available here, I was correct in thinking that by comign to a different place I'd give myself new habits), so when I'm not touristing I can be doing that.

Today I didn't even make an effort to tourist; in fact, I didn't exert myself physically at all.  First thing in the morning I went to Starbucks (on Sunday it's really the only thing open before ten or eleven).  My goal for the morning was to outline the novel I've been working on, which I did... I didn't so much outline what each future chapter will be about as outline what past chapters have included, which got me thinking about the different elements of the plot and how I think the should develop.  So hopefully this has helped me get a bit more organized.

In the afternoon, I went for a walk; my intention was maybe to find a coffee shop at which to sit and watch the passersby, but there was absolutely nothing open and almost no passersby.  It was actually quite desolate, more so than I've ever seen it.  Usually on Sunday a few things are open, restaurants and a few food stores and the occasional touristy outlet, and there are plenty of people walking.  It could have been partly the neighborhood I was in, which was less touristy than some, but I remember walking in that neighborhood on another Sunday and it being much more populated.  It was actually very spooky.  Every single storefront was locked down, and while there were enough other people walking that I didn't feel like I was really in danger, it was not nice having homeless people hiss and yell at me.  I did find a boulangerie open and bought some bread; I would have liked cheese, but all the fromageries were closed.  After an hour I returned home and haven't been back out.

So, today was not the greatest success in the exploring-Paris department.  I wonder where everyone is?  Perhaps things are closed because the Tour de France is finishing today, or maybe I've just gotten lucky on other Sundays.  It seems like even weekdays have a weekend atmosphere, with people sitting over breakfast at cafes until eleven in the morning, but this was beyond anything I've ever seen.  I think New York would have been more lively on Christmas Day.  Paris seems like a wonderful place to visit - especially after the touristing is done and it's just walking and eating - but I can't imagine living here.

In addition to the outlining, though, I've written 4,000 words today.  I'm now up to about 38,000 words, not counting another project I started in the first week of the trip but abandoned.  Not that they are necessarily good words...

And now the sun is setting behind the house with the flowerpots on all the sills, and I can see a woman setting her dinner table and lighting candles.  Nobody ever said Paris wasn't beautiful.

On not hating academia

I should be going to bed, but I really needed to respond to Megan McArdle's semi-recent comments on tenure.  This is one of her (many) pet topics, and while as usual I find her arguments reasonable, I don't agree with her position .  (Caveats: she seems to be talking mostly about liberal arts and humanities fields; the sciences are often ignored in such discussions, perhaps because there's a better outlet to non-academic fields.  Also, I have no statistics and I know of many people who are actually very bitter and feel academia has ruined their life, including myself on occasion.)  I think it's important for me, as I switch from a decade devoted to academia to an entirely new phase of my life, to make sense of this for myself.

Of course tenure itself doesn't involve me directly, but McArdle's comments are about the entire structure of academic work, which she assumes (I'm not sure how correctly) arises from and only because of tenure.  She also has the (important if true) belief that many tenured professors have long periods of doing almost no work; I've never seen or heard good evidence of such a thing happening in my field.  She is, however, correct that there is a pyramidal structure in which the majority of aspirants fail to attain tenured positions, and in which they sacrifice things many people spend the early part of their careers striving for: good income, stability, freedom (as an early-career scientist you are generally both tied-down and unstable).  As a person who fits the description of someone how has been victimized by the system, I am fully acquainted with the unpleasantness of interviewing for entry-level jobs at the age of thirty, and while I don't usually feel that my life has been "ripped up" (her terminology), it's certainly the case that my early adulthood - where I lived, who I was friends with, my relationships - was very much influenced by my academic career.

But I think McArdle has missed something very important.  I don't think many people enter graduate school with the idea of making it to a cushy tenured position and then resting on their laurels; I imagine that any who do quickly drop out.  It is simply not worth it, and this is obvious from the beginning.  If your primary desire is money or status or comfort, there are ways that are much less uncertain, or require less sacrifice in the short term, or lead to greater potential rewards.  The only way that struggling through a career in academia is at all sensible is if you really enjoy the work you are doing, and I think that she completely ignores that payoff - or rather, she seems to assume it is entirely deferred to the future, post-tenure period that for many academics never arrives. (I also think she conveniently ignores the fact that in all fields, most people never make it to the top... most people who go to business school don't become CEO's of Fortune 500 companies, instead spending their careers in middle-management positions.  Does that make them failures, which is what she seems to think adjunct professors are?)

It is true that there are problems in academia; I've certainly witnessed my share of them.  There are also politics and strong personal rivalries that shape the system more than they ideally should, and some scientists receive recognition beyond their due, while others fail to advance as far as they perhaps should - but how is that different from any other field?  There are also frustrations entailed in the long training period - but in the sciences, most of the length of that training period arises out of necessity; recent college graduates are not generally capable of conducting a meaningful independent research program.  Certainly, I think there are adjustments that should be made - supports that could be added to help people through the early parts of their career, provisions for reviewing how faculty treat their research assistants, ways to reward self-promotion and sucking-up-to-important-people less and good research more.

But, even as one of the "victims" of academia, I find it hard to really hate the system.  It's true that I did not earn as much as a grad student or postdoc as I would almost certainly have earned in most other likely jobs; it's also true that I experienced plenty of stress and disruption, particularly on a per-dollar basis.  But, I got to spend several years doing original scientific research with some of the leading experts in their fields.  I got to think about the way the world works on the most basic level and try to understand things that are not yet understood by anybody, and that was my job.  I got to participate in the development and publication of new theories that helped shape the discourse on a (very small and specialized) topic in physics.  I got to attend conferences where I heard about brand-new research from the people who were doing it, asked questions, and argued.  And I got to do all this while wearing jeans and never worrying that my division wasn't profitable enough and I might get laid off.  It's true that I didn't take home a substantial paycheck, and that I will never attain the position of tenured professor.  But I learned a lot - which is its own payoff - and had some pretty cool experiences, and while perhaps in retrospect I should have gotten out a couple years earlier, it was a pretty interesting ride.

Today was devoted mostly to recovering, and I am still not fully recovered... fun and bizarre as this trip has been, it has been a bit exhausting, at least for my legs and my (limited) extroversion.

In the morning, I dragged myself out of bed for a run... this may not have been the best idea, since I felt pretty bad when I woke up and it was an extremely pathetic run - my legs were so leaden that I could barely keep up a non-walking gait for half an hour.  But it did wake me up and (more or less) gave me the energy to petition a coffee shop for some breakfast.  I spent my morning wandering between coffee shops and eating pastries and drinking coffee (this makes it sound like there was a lot more pastry, coffee, and shops than there actually were).  One of the things I'd been meaning to do more of was loiter in cafes, but it is a bit less glamorous than it appears, especially when the weather is imperfect (it was cold) and I am not actually very French.  But, it was a good experience to have, and I tried some new foods.

In the afternoon I walked around the left bank, window shopping, stumbling upon churches, and looking in bookstores.  I've finally figured out how to get English-language books at a reasonable price (rifle through bins outside left-bank shops, where all the "foreign-language books" are shuffled together); the quality is mixed, but there are a few decent things to be found, and I bought one book (Noel Streatfield's Ballet Shoes, a children's book set in England) solely on the strength of a movie character's recommendation (the Meg Ryan character in You've Got Mail... in my defense, I just read Pride and Prejudice - the Ryan character is supposed to be based on Elizabeth Bennet - and finished Northanger Abbey and am halfway through Emma, so I'm having a bit of a British phase).

I also went to a Canadian bookshop, which was pretty excellent.  It's called the Abbey Bookshop, and it is just piled high with books, and the bookshelves slide over each other to hold more books, and there are books on the floor and on tables (I saw a store like this is in Reykjavik, too, but this one was smaller and tidier) and there is a basement with stone walls and more books.  The proprietor was a nice Canadian gentleman who offered me coffee (real coffee!) when I came in, and he had a sort of hanger-on who spent the whole time I was there chattering away about the evils of America (very popular topic among Americans here).  Of course I wanted to buy all the books, but that wasn't possible; I bought a Penelope Lively novel (more Britishness) for five euros, which I justify even if I don't get to it on this trip by the fact that her books are out of print (or were never in print?) in the US.

Around the middle of the afternoon, I started to run out of steam, so I came home for a rest.  I went back out in the early evening and walked around the Louvre des Antiquaires (not related to the museum except by being near it... it's a sort of antique mall... obviously I wasn't doing actual shopping, just walking around looking at the pretty furniture and paintings and jewelry).  I then walked around Paris Plage for the second time but it was much too crowded to stay long.  In fact the whole city seemed to be more mobbed than I'd ever seen it; I don't know if this was my poor timing or if something is going on.  (I just learned that the Tour de France is ending tomorrow on the Champs Elysees... I will be sure to avoid that area of town, not that I am generally in the habit of wandering to the most boring and touristy street in Paris.)

Aside from the physical exhaustion, I've also been having a hard time writing, meaning I haven't done any today, and only did a bit yesterday.  I'm not sure if this is a side effect of being tired (and therefore will be gone by tomorrow, because we all know my legs will be magically recovered by then) or I'm just running out of steam.  It's clear that if I want to be able to keep writing in any sort of consistent fashion I'm going to need to find a meaningful framework; on the other hand, getting one's writing published (the most obvious framework) is generally about as time-consuming as writing in the first place, so doesn't seem worth it; realistically, also, my writing is not that good, particularly since I haven't been practicing, taking classes, etc. in the last several years.  Quandary.

Today after my morning writing session, I set off in the direction of Montmartre.  I had already gone to that neighborhood, on the first full day I was in Paris, but only cursorily, and after hearing a couple other people talk about how much they love it I thought I should visit again.  I went by a less direct route than last time, bypassing most of the tourist mess associated with Sacre Coeur, and although the walk was just as long as I remembered, today was much less hot than the last time I made it, so it was far more pleasant.  I walked through the residential neighborhood, which seemed perfectly pleasant, although not very remarkable, and made another visit to the basilica, which I got to examine in a slightly different light after having seen so many other churches in the last few weeks.

My plan was then to walk east to the 11th arrondisement, another area I'd explored once, not gotten the hang of, but had been told repeatedly was too cool to miss.  I thought it would be interesting to see what was between the two well-known neighborhoods of Montmartre and the Oberkampf; there are some parks and churches on the map, but they are further out than I made it. (Think of Paris like a clock face, although somewhat squashed in the vertical direction; Montmarte is at 12:00 and the Oberkampf is at 2:00.  To see the parks and churches, I would have had to go around the circumference of the clock.  Instead, I cut across a bit closer to the center, in large part because there seemed to be a lot of unpleasantness between where I was and the edge.)  I did see, however, some ethnic neighborhoods, some traditional-seeming and others more rough; I had the lovely experience of being followed(?) for ten minutes by a gentleman who (a) was singing quite loudly, in some non-French language, and (b) adjusted his pace to mine.  I also saw several train stations (Paris seems to have many of them) and many squares, cafes, and fabric shops (a big industry in that part of Paris).  Finally I reached the canals on the east side of Paris, which is supposedly a wonderful neighborhood, although on later reflection I think the people who love it so much are the type of people who think that Williamsburg has been ruined by excessive gentrification.  The canal is pretty and there are some attractive storefronts right on the canal, but in general the area seems more gritty, and less attractive, than a lot of other areas.

My reward for all this walking (over three hours, at this point) was lunch at the West Country Girl creperie.  I'd seen something about it online and then it was recommended fervently by one of the people i met yesterday, an older man who had the look of permanent travel about him.  I like crepes and have had a couple of street crepes and one crepe at a creperie which was perfectly nice, so I expected to enjoy this meal.  I was not expecting it to be as absolutely incredible as it was.  For nine euros (that's around $12) I got a glass of apple cider (which I think was mildly alcoholic), a "crepe complete" with andouille sausage (sort of stringy, mild smoked ham), cheese, and egg, and a crepe caramel.  It was all so delicious.  The difference between the crepes themselves and any other crepes I've had is like night and day; these were thin, light, crispy, and buttery, while the others (which were perfectly nice before I had these to compare them to) were much doughier and not as flavorful.  And the caramel... I have not thought of myself as a person who particularly loved caramel, but I had no idea that it could taste like this.  It was amazing.  This was without question the best meal I have had on this trip.

After lunch, I had a long walk home; I was in no particular rush and misdirected myself several times (due to not paying much attention to where I was going relative to where I should be going), walked through some artsiness, and only really got a move on nearly two hours later when it started to rain.

That was pretty much it for me today.  I went out for a bit this evening and walked around Paris Plage, the pseudo-boardwalk they've set up.  Of course, my legs are ridiculously sore and basically any motion at all is tiring.  I'm hoping I will (magically) be fully recovered by tomorrow so I can go for a decent run, which I haven't done since Wednesday... it is a bit frustrating that my body, specifically my legs, does not comply with all my schemes, but I suppose I should be thankful that I haven't had any injuries or illnesses or anything while I've been here.

Mostly sunset pictures

This morning began inauspiciously, as I woke up late, sore in several places, and with a bit of a cold.  However, I quickly realized that this was not a sign of the universe's evilness or my oncoming death but simply the likely result of a lot of tromping around over the past few days.  I packed up my netbook and adjourned to Starbucks, where I spent the morning writing and produced three thousand (not necessarily very good) words, as well as finishing Northanger Abbey, my second Jane Austen novel of the trip (I read Pride and Prejudice before that; I am now reading Emma, which I haven't read in years due to the necessity of rereading Pride and Prejudice with such frequency; after that I will read Persuasion, which it is possible is the I have not already read, or maybe there isn't one).

In the afternoon, I cooked up my potatoes (half of which had already gone bad due to my delaying) and string beans in a big pan with some pre-cut bacon I found at the grocery store (here bacon comes with chunks, not strips).  It was a bit odd at first, since I was worried the potatoes would never soften, and then there was a lot of liquid in the pan (from the bacon?  or the beans?) that I had to pour off.  But in the end it turned out all right; most of the volume is beans with just a bit of potato, and a healthy amount of bacon.  I have decided this is probably similar to what French people eat for vegetables (actually, from what I've seen, it is not, because I did not have it with a cream sauce).  After my bout of domesticity, I took a walk in the Marais, eventually making my way to a bookstore I hadn't been to.  This was a tiny and actually friendly bookstore, and I had an interesting conversation with some of the expatriates hanging out there, most of which was about how American is evil because we are too attuned to convenience and not attuned enough to the liberal sensibilities of recent college graduates, but some of which was about places I should explore in the city.  After leaving the bookstore, I went to Picard, a specialty food store recommended by the expatriates, which carries only frozen things, and bought more frozen food than I probably need for a week, but now hopefully I will get to try lots of interesting things without all the bother of constantly being in a restaurant.

In the evening, I bestirred myself to go out again, and wandered the left bank window-shopping, then hung out on a bridge and took pictures while the sun was setting.  So, all in all, a pleasant and varied day.

Chartres, Louvre, and everything in between

The Chocolate Tour

I am supposed to be captioning my photos, but while I wait for them to upload (there are 350+ of them because I have not been proactive about this) and also for my clothes to dry (this load of laundry has been going, on and off, for eight hours... clearly I will at some point have to give up for the night), I may as well do my blogging for the day.

Today was planned to be an uneventful day, although that wasn't really how it worked out.  I started the morning by going for a run, since both my running buddy and I were too wiped out to run last night.  As it turns out, I was still pretty wiped out this morning (perhaps from walking a lot, perhaps from the strength-building exercises I am doing in an effort not to turn into a ball of wimpitude in the absence of lifting) and, while I did a decent-length run, it was not exactly brisk.

The first event of the day was my chocolate tour... people have been telling me what a waste of money this was, and I suppose I can see their point, in that perhaps the value of the tour guide's spiel and the value of the chocolate I tasted did not add up to the 25 euros I paid.  But, it is likely that if I had not gone on the tour I would have eaten no fancy chocolate at all in Paris, because these places are extremely intimidating (even when you're in them with a tour group!) and that would have been sad.  The tour guide was reasonably informative about both chocolate and the Parisian sights we passed (it was by no means geographically comprehensive, but I learned some interesting tidbits), and the amount of chocolate was just right - one small cup of hot chocolate (not at all sweet, but very good) and six pieces (dark chocolate ganache, fennel ganache - my 2nd-favorite, a dark-chocolate wafer with candied nuts and fruits, a choolate-coated orange bit, a chocolate-coated sugar-nut past - my favorite, and another dark ganache from a bean that has a cherry arome) over the course of two hours at three different locations.  It was definitely a lot of chocolate, but I didn't feel sick, as I've heard many people do after longer tours involving more food.  So, I was pleased.

I was planning on coming home immediately after that, but I ended up wandering into the Fragonard perfume museum, where I spent a few minutes looking at old perfume vials.  I did not buy any perfume.  I also did a bit more shopping in the neighborhood, including going into a store the tour guide had mentioned, Uniqlo (a Japanese clothing store), where I ended up buying a sweater for 5 euros (yeah, I know, I do not need any more clothes...).  I also went into Au Printemps, which is far, far more upscale and scarier than Galaries Lafayette.

Back at home, I started my laundry and etcetera.

After my brief siesta, I headed out to the Louvre.  It is open late on Wednesdays on Fridays, when it is also less expensive.  My guidebook says it is less crowded at this time as well; I don't see how this state of affairs can continue after guidebooks start mentioning it, but it wasn't particularly bad, so that must be the case.  There was basically no line to get in, and only mild crowding in some places.  Having already been to the Louvre on my first visit to Paris and having utterly not-enjoyed it, I decided to not worry about seeing the red-letter sights, or about being thorough or comprehensive, and just wander; moreover, I intentionally started in the wing with the least amount of super-famous stuff.  This strategy worked extremely well; in the 3.5 hours I was there before they started kicking people out, I saw (cursorily, of course, a significant fraction of the museum), passed through some part of most of the major sections, and visited both the Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo (the two red-letter attractions that I was interested in seeing).  I even got someone to take my picture with Venus, after five or ten minutes standing around and being a sissy because I don't like asking people for things and didn't know the French colloquialism for taking a picture (it turns out to be the literal translation, 'prendre un photo', but I thought it might use "faire" and also am not really comfortable using "pourriez" and don't know any other way to ask nicely) and therefore wanted to find someone who obviously spoke English and who wasn't overly busy.

On my way home from the museum, I stopped (on a populated street) at an ATM.  While I was using it, a man started talking to me.  It seemed, from the tone of his voice (I couldn't understand him, and wasn't really trying to) that he was asking me for something, presumably money or food.  I was not happy with this situation, because while there are a large number of beggars in Paris (about the same number as homeless people in NYC, but they are far more aggressive here) and I have been approached by numerous slightly-less-marginal men for no good reason (that is just what they do here, for fun, apparently), being accosted at the ATM, however nonviolently, is threatening.  However, I was very Parisienne about it.  I did not even look at my interlocuter.  I simply said, in a tone of annoyed resignation, "laisse-moi, s'il-vous-plait" (this means, "leave me, please", with bad grammar because the imperative is familiar, which it should not be but I wasn't exactly planning this exchange, and the please is formal; I have heard this is how you tell someone to alone) and he did.

Now, it is time to becaption my photos.

no news is weird news (a very long-winded post, not at all about Paris)

While traveling, I haven't been reading the internets nearly as much.  This is largely intentional, since I wanted to be doing different things on my trip than I do at home, including doing different things when I'm sitting in my Parisian apartment than I do when sitting in my New York apartment.  However, I've still been more or less keeping up with certain of my favorite blogs, which means I have a very very basic knowledge of recent world news (I'm aware that oil has stopped gushing forth from the ocean and the economy continues in a state of mild-to-medium suckiness, if you average out the reports ranging from "full recovery!" to "disaster!" and that many people are very offended about issues that are in no way new, and I assume by my not having heard of it that there have been no major wars declared involving the United States and that New York City is still more or less standing and not entirely bankrupt) but a much more detailed knowledge of various friends' and acquaintances' children, dogs, and various friendship/ career/ romance/ general happiness quests.

My feed reader is divided up into several categories (there used to be more, including two different categories for academic journal feeds; I culled it substantially before coming to Paris): Friends (people I actually know, very often in real life), People (personal blogs of people I don't know, generally grad students or twenty-first-century hippies who write about the homemade cheese they are making from the milk of their very own goats), Comics, New York Events, Articles (at this point, this section only includes Slate, which I have been reading with probably-absurd dedication for about eight years, although I expect it to flesh out again in time), Econ blogs (a revolving bunch, heavily tilted toward self-professed libertarians, whom proper libertarians tell me are actually not such), and Science Blogs.  (Just so you know, it's not that I don't read the news at all.  I make it through much of the paper New York Times on weekends, and I use the NYT skimmer when I'm at home, and variously check for updates on the slatest, cnn.com, and washingtonpost.com.  I am feeling very defensive, now that I'm in Europe, about my total unfamiliarity with BBC news.  I am not a stupid American!)

Anyway, Science Blogs.  This is a group that has fluctuated a lot in size and may be on the verge of winking out or being incorporated elsewhere; I only include in this category blogs that are about science (i.e. Carl Zimmer's) or about the doing of science, and the latter has recently become a lot less interesting to me.  Many of the science blogs I follow are, or have been affiliated with ScienceBlogs.com, and others are interested in the current kerfluffle there, so I have been reading (or, usually, skimming) a lot about it.

Here is the issue, as I understand it: ScienceBlogs.com is run by Seed Media Group, which was the parent company of the recently-defunct Seed Magazine.  The parent company has some other concerns as well, but ScienceBlogs.com is its chief web outlet.  The site is exactly what it sounds like - a family of blogs.  It is more, I am informed, than a simple indexing; there is a lot of cross-talk and cross-posting among blogs, and the bloggers feel a sense of community.  While they do get paid, the amount is probably not huge (they all have other jobs as scientists or science writers), and most of them do it simply because they are devoted to science and like blogging.  Now, recently, Seed Media Group invited a blog sponsored by Pepsi to join ScienceBlogs.  Supposedly, the blog would be a real scientific exploration of nutrition and whatnot (apparently no posts ever appeared), although still sponsored by Pepsi.  There was a vast outpouring of rage, in response to which - over the course of a few days - Seed first decided to label Pepsi's blog an "advertorial" and then decided to pull it entirely.

So, win for the little guy, right?  Evil corporate behemoth slain by valiant science bloggers?  Um, no.  The science bloggerati are still inflamed, and they are still leaving ScienceBlogs in bunches.  They are also predicting the site's demise and a new age of science blogging.  Moreover they are saying that at the height of its power, Seed Media Group lost its sense of ethics, and its editorial objectivity has been called into question.

Yawn.  I know that bloggers are self-important, because apparently I am one, but this is ridiculous.  Perhaps Seed Media Group will be driven into the ground, but I suspect that if so, this will be merely one strike among many, two others being the demise of the magazine (its original focus) and the general troubles of ad-supported internet media.  Losing a few science bloggers is not going to materially hurt ScienceBlogs.com, in my opinion, because so far the human race has not produced a paucity of people with a great deal to say (um, myself included) so it is not like it is going to be impossible to replace them.  

Mostly I am amused by the Great Revelation that a company wishes to make money, and that sometimes its actions are influenced by that  We saw something similar when we learned that the banks who had been making or selling troubled mortgages sometimes also bet against them, although perhaps this is worse because people have more idealism about the media than about banks (?).  But every publication has a bias; most don't state them outright, although a reasonably-informed reader can usually tell.  That doesn't make them bad publications.  Magazines like Seed, which are much more features than news, naturally must have a bias - they have to choose what out of all the zillions of possible articles to publish, and that will be informed by a worldview.  As will who their advertisers are.  Ideally, the worldview and the articles shape who advertises in the magazine, but of course it goes the other way around as well.  There's a reason why Cosmo has never (to my knowledge) published an article called You Are Fine As You Are Now Stop Wasting Your Money on Endless Different Shades of Eyeshadow, instead publishing endless articles called, more or less, You Are Fine As You Are But Will Be So Much Better With This Brand-New Eyeshadow... is this because every woman's eyeshadow needs change every month?  Is it because they are a slave of their advertisers?  No, it's because they know that they are beholden to their advertisers, who give them the money that keeps them afloat, and therefore must keep their worldview sympathetic to their cause.  

Moreover, the people at Seed probably didn't add the Pepsi blog for fun or out of evilness.  They probably did it because it offered a reliable profit stream that they very much needed.  In other words, the Pepsi blog would (in my conjecture) have subsidized the infrastructure that the other blogs run on.

Perhaps if I were a member of ScienceBlogs, I would now be offended enough to leave because somebody in my domain was selling something, and I would presumably feel greater pride in being on Science Blogs than I do in being on Blogspot.  But I hope I would not be naive enough to think that my employer was anything other than a corporation, with perhaps a social mission (spreading science knowledge to the masses, etc.) but definitely a desire (and need) to turn a profit.  

Much time has passed since my last post.  Or, anyway, three days.

On the first of those days, Sunday, I did very little.  I was so exhausted from my long day at Versailles that it took me until about eleven a.m. to bestir myself far enough from my apartment to fetch coffee (however, the rest of Paris seems to be similarly slow to get moving on weekends; this is a constant surprise to me because in New York, at least in my neighborhood, nine a.m. is the height of brunch-and-dog-walking-and-visiting-with-neighbors time).  After experimenting with the Parisian way of coffee-drinking (slowly, while doing nothing else except watching passersby) I went for a small bout of shopping, to the boulangerie and the fromagerie.  Then I went home to sample my purchase, nap, and work on my fiction.  Later on, I went for another walk, this time to the Royal Palais and its environs.  Still later, I went for a jog; this was perhaps the most notable accomplishment of the day because my running buddy and I ran all the way from Pont Neuf to the Eiffel Tower and back, a five-mile round-trip.

Yesterday I was more active.  I spent several hours walking around the Left Bank in the vicinity of the Latin Quarter and did some shopping at Monoprix; I managed to find a few things I liked at good prices but am not as besotted with the store as some people seem to be.  The discount clothes are good prices, but they have the trouble of being poorly-organized and unreliable (i.e. they don't have everything in every size); the non-discounted clothes are not particularly good prices (i.e. typically 30 euros for a plain top; Gap here is about the same) but are still the quality you expect of clothes bought in the equivalent of Target.  Perhaps my indisposition to these clothes arises from my desire for efficiency; I would like to have a nice wardrobe more than I would like to shop, so if I am buying a blazer or a coat or nice pants or a dress, I would rather spend twice as much and have it be twice as useful or last twice as long (or look twice as good and just not have as many clothes).  It seems that this is not the opinion of everybody, though.  I also found a used bookstore with a few English-language books and bought one; it looks to be mediocre science fiction, but that is generally better than bad regular fiction, and it is small enough that if I carry it with  me it will not totally destroy my packing-lighter goal.  Later, I went for a walk to the islands in the evening; their touristyness was undiminished, but fewer things were open.  I also bought some creme brulee ice cream, and discovered that I am not terribly fond of this flavor.

Today I took a trip to Chartres.  The journey was handicapped by several concerns: it was hot, it was extremely sunny (made worse for me by the fact that I do not have prescription sunglasses), and I was cranky due to waking up early and having no coffee.  However, despite all that the trip was mostly hitch-free.  I managed to purchase my ticket without incident, in French.  In Chartres, it was easy to find the Cathedral by the fact that it dwarfs everything else in the town, and also by following the very loud construction noises, as the Cathedral is apparently under renovation.  This could not help but hamper my enjoyment of the Cathedral since (a) most of its front, both inside and out, was invisible due to the scaffolding, and (b) the incessant whining of drills, banging of hammers, and shouts and laughter of workmen do not exactly create an atmosphere of cathedral-like quiet contemplation.  However, I did spend a good hour and a half examining the architecture, inside and out, and was particularly impressed by the choir screen and the well-decorated arches (eventually I will upload the many pictures I took).  Then I took a walk around the town.  It is a very cute place, with old buildings and stairs down to a winding stream, but I was by then a bit grouchy from the heat and from the poor descriptions of my guidebook; eventually, on the way to the train station, I bought a coffee (I am always laughed at when I ask for a noisette, either because I'm mispronouncing it because wanting my coffee to have a little, but not a ton, of milk is so very American... sugar, on the other hand, is freely available) and a sandwich.

After downing my noisette immediately and eating my sandwich on the first half of the train ride back, I felt much less grumpy (funny, that...) and spontaneously disembarked the train at a small town called Epernon which I had seen on the way out and which looked cute. (On non-reserved trains, your ticket is good on any train on the stated route until the end of the next day, so this was totally legitimate.)  I spent a pleasant hour walking around the village, which was far, far cuter than Chartres, although I did not take any pictures (because (a) it doesn't feel right to be pulling out a camera and taking pictures of people's houses when they are not trying to attract tourists to their town, and (b) that would have rather sullied my pleasant ramblings).  There was a very old church, and uneven streets barely wide enough for a car, and many houses of plaster and stone.  It was really exceptionally darling.  I also walked a bit outside the town limits and saw some newer houses in a modern version of the style, which sort of shades over into southern-California-hacienda.

I thought I got lucky on the train I caught in Epernon, because it was air-conditioned, but then there was a forty-minute delay while we stopped in a series of rail yards.  My French is not great, but I'm pretty sure it was not explained; the announcements were very much in the "The train has stopped.  We will be moving shortly.  Thank you for your patience." vein.  At Versailles, many people got on.  I had been sitting alone in a family grouping (this is apparently what two sets of two seats facing each other is called) and an older woman sat across from me, then a man sat next to me, then a woman sat across from him.  When she started talking to him, I thought they knew each other, but it quickly became apparent they did not.  He was young - no more than twenty-five - and quite attractive; she was definitely middle-aged (fifty, maybe?) and average-looking; she had the look of someone who spends a lot of time making sure that not one of her hairs will ever move from its ordained place, without much attention to whether stiffness is the desired quality in hair.  I tell you this because their large age difference made the fact that she was pretty clearly flirting with him a bit odd to my American ear.. granted, I may not know what French rules are, but I do know what a woman looks like when she is being coquettish and trying to impress a man by how awesome she thinks he is, and I am guessing it doesn't change on different continents or as people age.  I was particularly struck by how he seemed to not mind her flirtation and was perfectly friendly to her.  I cannot imagine seeing such an interchange in the states; even the whole "cougar" business, to whatever extent such people exist, is supposedly about sex more than innocent flirting on trains.

On reaching Paris, I decided that obviously I should walk home from the train station.  I had taken the metro there in the morning, but this would be a bit of a hassle with the transfer and the crowdedness of trains, and I wasn't pressed for time.  Of course, outside it was a bit hot and extremely sunny, so this may not have been the best idea... by the time I got home, my headache, which had come on in Chartres and come and gone all day, was quite bad.  Water, a nap, dinner (dinner!  and i had lunch!  and breakfast!  a whole day of regular meals... what is becoming of me?), and a shower all helped a bit, although I'm still feeling the effects of a day outside in quite a lot of sun.

One final anecdote that I almost forgot: On my way home, a man called out to me, Bonjour, mademoiselle.  I ignored him, assuming he was either selling me something or hitting on me, as strange men who call out to one generally are doing one of those things.  In New York, this is what you do when people are trying to talk to you against your wishes: keep walking, don't make eye contact, don't respond.  They don't usually try again.  But here, this method does not work.  As usual, the man assumed (apparently) that I hadn't heard him, and called out to me again: Bonjour, mademoiselle!  Mademoiselle?  Attends!  For a moment, I worried (as I always do at this point) that he was someone I knew (I could only barely see him in my peripheral vision and might not have recognized the voice of someone I didn't know well, although one would think any such person would use my name and/or speak in English) or that I had dropped something important.  Then he made the farty-mouth noise of disgust and annoyance that men here make when you won't talk to them (Oh, you rude, snotty American, refusing to entertain my unwanted solicitations to relieve you of your money), so I knew he was not anybody I needed to concern myself with.  Then he called out, to another woman: Bonjour, Madam.  Her response - immediate and forceful, which ended his conversation with her - was simply, Non.

So, basically, French women get to unabashedly flirt with men half their age and rudely brush off unwanted accosters.  This might be worth a little bit of caffeine deprivation.

Things I did not get pictures of

• Yesterday I went to the Marmottan Monet Museum, where picture-taking was not allowed.  The temporary exhibit was "Monet and Abstraction"... it was interesting to see how Monet's later works became gradually less impressionistic and more abstract, but I thought they were reaching a bit in comparing his works to, e.g. Jackson Pollack.  But I'm no art historian.  I enjoyed seeing the many Monets, and perhaps even more the two rooms of paintings by Berthe Morisot, another Impressionist.  The upstairs was, quite annoyingly, devoted mostly to perfectly-good-but-not-monetish illuminatins and other Medieval art.
• I walked back from the museum, seeing some interesting outer-Paris neighborhoods as well as the Trocadero square north of the Eiffel tower (a rather stark contrast between normal-nontouristiness and crazy-touristiness).
• Last night was another evening of "outdoor wine-related activities".  We didn't get anything thrown at us this time, but we also didn't have cheese.  When I came home, I was quite hungry (due to running right before, and due to having had tea - my customary I've-been-out-until-late-afternoon-without-lunch major meal of the day - but no dinner) and warmed up the pain au chocolate I'd been planning to eat for breakfast today.  It was extremely much better warm than the other one I've had (granted, from a different boulangerie) was cold.
• This morning I went to Versailles.  I got a not-super-early start, but the trip out was devoid of major hassles.
• After my camera's revolutionary outburt, there were several more rooms of the Kings and Queen's Chambers (which is most of what the pictures of the Chateau are of... you can't tell b/c all the original furniture was removed in the Revolution, and instead of restoring it to how it used to look, they just filled all the rooms with paintings and/or tourists).  Then I went through the Dauphin and Dauphine's rooms and the Mesdames Rooms.  These were actually some of the best rooms in the palace, and I was sad that my camera had died.  There was a table organ with real pipes, and a library with a dropped ceiling and beautifully lacquered cabinets, and several rooms that were truly delightful in their decoration and/or furnishings (these had been restored to some facsimile of the original style and configuration).  Rick Steve, in one of his many displays of opinionation-that-I-really-don't-agree-with, says this is not worth seeing.
• On fountain days, the last thing that happens before the Jardins close is the Neptune fountain runs for ten minutes while music plays, and everyone sits in front of it and watches.  But it's not a dancing fountain like the one I took so many pictures of earlier; it's just tons of water coming out of giant metal fixtures and spraying really high, continuously, for ten minutes.  It reminded me of the Chateau itself: all pomp and bombast and demonstration of power (these are the original pipes still being used), at the expense of actual visual beauty.
• After leaving the palace grounds, I walked a bit in the town of Versailles.  It's a cute town, with an interesting combination of real-lifeiness (large outdoor market) and tourism (right by the palace exit, a whole row of shoe-and-purse stores with higher-than-Paris prices).  
• On leaving Versailles, I had to wait in line to buy a ticket back.  This annoyed me, because (a) a sensible person would have bought a return ticket in the first place, but that would have required having use of a sensible ticket machine that would allow such a thing, which I did not, (b) many tourists seemed genuinely confused that the machines only accepted coins and French credit cards, despite the fact that this is true of all transport machines, and in particular of whatever machine they had used to buy their ticket on the way out, and (c) French people do not seem to queue by the same rules as Americans, i.e. the FIFO protocol; instead, they just enter the queue wherever they feel like it, i.e. as near the front as possible.  However, due to my last couple years' of Aggressiveness Lessons (otherwise known as living in New York) I managed to get my ticket and get on a train in a reasonable amount of time.
• And now, I have done pretty much all the major touristy things I wanted to do.  As a reward, I get to spend tomorrow pretending to be French.  Until 8 p.m., when I am supposed to run from Pont Neuf to the Eiffel Tower and back, which I'm pretty sure will disqualify me from all possible types of Frenchness.

In which my camera stages a coup

Art and Darkness

Today's Adventure

It is very hard to argue with all the people who think Americans are stupid when I am so very dumb myself.  Even as a fully-grown, college-educated, passport-carrying American, I still have trouble with the concept of "lunch".  Here is my tale of (semi-)woe:

This morning I had a somewhat late breakfast at a coffee shop after the obligatory checking-of-the-internet and after writing 1000 words of fiction (yay!).  After I finished my coffee and pastry, I was feeling quite full (French pastries are two-thirds composed of butter).  I said to myself, in my first display of stupidity today, "Well!  I am so full, I'm not going to be hungry for hours and hours!"  Then I merrily went to the Carrousel du Louvre, which is a small (for Parisian royal objects, meaning "huge") arch that divides the Louvre and Tuileries grounds, to meet my Paris Greeter for my Paris Greeter Stroll.  The greeter was a software developer married to an American academic, and the only other person on the tour was a Swedish woman, so it was interesting.  We walked around the touristy bits and I learned some things I hadn't known, and eventually made our way to the Eiffel tower (which is not close even if you walk directly, which we did not).  On the way we saw the American Library, several universities, and were introduced to the guide's neighborhood.

After bidding farewell to the tour guide, I looked at my watch: 12:30.  "Well!"  I said to myself in a very self-satisfied manner.  "It looks like I was correct.  Here it is lunchtime and I am not the least bit hungry."  Here I made one explicit and one implicit error.  The first is that when one eats breakfast at 9:30, lunchtime more reasonably falls at 1:30 or even later (especially in Paris).  The second is that the tone of my (silent; I'm not that crazy,  yet) commentary very clearly suggested that I would not become hungry anytime soon and in fact would likely not need lunch at all.

So, I set off in a southesterly direction.  I walked to Les Invalides and then along Rue Varenne, which in the 18th century was a fashionable neighborhood and is now populated largely by ministries and consulates (in the same buildings that used to be mansions); each building had at least one guard stationed in front.  Eventually I arrived at the Rodin Museum.  I think this wins the award for Most Overrated Museum in Paris (so far), as several guidebooks raved about it but it was not actually all that impressive.  This was partly because the price-to-content ratio was somewhat out of line (relative to other museums here), partly my personal taste, and partly the many many tourists who had clearly read the rave reviews in their guidebooks.  My favorite part of the museum was actually the building it was housed in, this glorious old mansion with high, decorated ceilings and huge fireplaces and mirrors.  (In case you're wondering, my vote for the most underrated museum so far goes to the Musee des Arts Decoratifs, which is phenomenal and often skipped over in guidebooks (yes, I have acquired even more guidebooks... my apartment came with several.  A big part of getting ready to leave the apartment is selecting the optimal one for the days' activities).  I would have taken and posted quite literally three hundred pictures of it, but picture-taking wasn't allowed.)

When I left the Rodin Museum it was around 2:30 p.m.  Now, an intelligent person might have taken a survey of herself to check for signs of hunger.  She might even have said to herself, "Self, give that you have a history of forgetting to be hungry until it is far too late, I have decided that it is time to eat."  What I actually did, however, was set off in a continued Easterly progression, taking Rue Varennes to Rue St. Germaine, which links up to the Latin Quarter.  My goal was to visit a particular English-language bookstore, although I expected (and I was right) that it would be just as expensive and inhospitable as all the others.  But it was an excuse to wander in a semi-directed way.  This was quite pleasant, and I saw much Frenchness.  However, I soon found myself unconsciously seeking out restaurants.

Here is where I ran into trouble.  I was far too hungry to make intelligent decisions about food.  I didn't want to go to a proper restaurant, because they are intimidating and I was too hungry to deal with it.  There were occasional crepe stands, but nowhere to sit while eating one's crepe, and I was very thirsty and running low on water.  I wanted to sit down at a little sandwich shop type place, but those were rare and crowded.  Basically, I have no good excuse, I just suddenly became too hungry to procure myself food.  (In my defense, I'd been walking for basically the entire five hours since finishing breakfast, which was not exactly a feast.)

Eventually, I exhausted myself wandering the western half of the Latin Quarter and made my way to the Tuileries, where I knew I could get water.  Then I headed home.  But instead of going the most direct route, I was sort of locked into a wandering pace and ended up taking quite possibly the least direct route.  I saw passages (covered streetlets with extremely fussy stores and art galleries), the Royal Palais, which I'd been reading about in a memoir all week but hadn't ever stumbled into, and a stately avenue with the Opera at one end and a massive hotel at the other.

Eventually, I ended up at home.  My feet hurt in several places, the back of my legs were more or less numb, and my hair was downright schizophrenic.  I was barely competent to fry myself a pair of eggs.  However, it is hard to rue my stupidity, because when I am not completely exhausted, I am frequently too goal-directed to notice or take such interesting detours.

Bastilling

I will be honest, I have been a bad traveller the last two days, having spent a lot of it holed up in my apartment.  My excuses for this are threefold: (1) It rained for roughly six hours this morning, mostly very hard, making any outdoor activity impossible and any activity involving a significant walk far less desirable.  (2) Today is Bastille Day.  This means most things are closed or opened late (even relative to usual), although there is very little predictability here (and some of the closures may have been due to rain... this is the kind of place where restaurants close when it rains).  For example, most museums are closed, although the Louvre is open (with lines of tour buses waiting to get into the parking lot and empty their hordes of underexercised Americans, you can imagine how excited I am about gong myself right now).  I noticed that the nicer the restaurant, the more likely it was to be open - so, coffee shops where one (although perhaps not me) could sit with a coffee and sneer at passers-by are closed, while stylish, fancy restaurants where patrons are expected to consume a full meal are open.  Also, nearly all Parisians are off work today and many were off yesterday, which means more people vying to attend the fewer available diversions.  And, my final excuse: (3) Being a tourist is extremely tiring.

However, that is okay.  I needed a good rest to energize myself, because in the next couple weeks I am going to be day-tripping like mad.  Plus there are many other Parisian museums to see, and I have somehow neglected to eat any Parisian chocolate and have done a grossly insufficient amount of Parisian shopping.  So I will be quite busy starting tomorrow.  For now I will record what I have done in the last two days.

One of the things I did was get coffee for my apartment, finally.  I was on my way back from my post-rain walk to check the status of Paris (answer: mobbed with tourists emerging from their hotel rooms for the first time all day, and still drizzling) and noticed, to my pleased surprise, that the grocery store was open.  There was much coffee, but I could find no good way to distinguish the instant from the non-instant (in the states, I do not buy instant coffee, obviously, and I'm not one hundred percent sure what it looks like).  Finally I found some Nescafe single-serving envelopes which had instructions about stirring the powder into water.  So, I brought it home to try it.  Instant coffee... how easy!  Had I been missing out on some amazing new revelation all this time?

No.  It was gross.  Weak and bitter.  It did not even smell like coffee, but like instant coffee, which it turns out is a totally different smell.  I added some of the dreaded demi-ecreme (half-skimmed, i.e. 2%) milk and that improved it substantially; the noxiousness of the two substances seemed to cancel out.  But it is still not proper coffee, and I think I would need to use two envelopes (and therefore twice as much demi-ecreme) in order to create any kind of reasonable facsimile.

A slightly more exciting cultural-contact event was meeting two French women.  I was sitting on one of the benches on Pont Neuf (a bridge), writing.  They were sharing a bottle of red wine that they were storing with an equal-sized bottle of water in a gift bag.  One seemed very stereotypically Parisian (she wore off-white pant and an off-white floaty top that looked quite good on her, and had the almost-no-makeup-or-hair-fussing look (perhaps achieved by quiet a lot of makeup and fussing for all I know) that is favored here) while the other did  not (she wore clothes unsuited to her, that made her seem both gangly and chubby even though I think she was neither and her stringy, too-long hair looked bad even by American standards); it turned out that while they are both Paris natives, the non-Parisian-seeming one had lived several other places, apparently diluting her Frenchness.  As I was scribbling in my obligatory-for-this-type-of-trip moleskin, the one in white asked me, in French, whether I was writing about them.  While I was trying to work out what this question was and how to reply (both linguistically and given that I was, in fact, commenting on them) her friend said, in English, "You don't speak French, do you?".  A pleasant conversation than ensued.  They were very excited when they learned I was from New York; the girl in white, whose English was not all that great, kept saying "Sex and the City!  Sex and the City!" (clearly she had not see my shoes, which would send Carrie Bradshaw into paroxysms just to look at).  We discussed non-touristy things to do in the city (Musee d'Orsay, according to them, which is one of the most tourist-saturated sites I've been to) and why you can't get coffee before 9 a.m. (it would be "abusive to the workers" if there were more jobs available, apparently).  The girl in white got hit on by a man who asked her whether she spoke Arabic (not anymore) and asked the other girl to take a picture of them together; they seemed to consider this an entirely normal and inoffensive event.  They also, in the course of the twenty minutes I talked to them, isolated an attractive male specimen, got his phone number, and called him to get him to round up his friends to take them out... so apparently that's how things are done in Paris.  Interesting.

I saw an airshow.  I was on the fence about the parade (military parade + mobs of French people + me with poor French = ?) and the rain made my decision for me; I would have watched it on TV but my TV appears not to work.  But then, around 11 a.m., during a brief pause in the Day of Downpour, a tricolor of cloud appeared in front of my window, jetted by six planes!  I watched for about twenty minutes as groups of planes flew across Paris from West to East, joined by several others on my street leaning out of their window, most in their pajamas and/or eating bowls of cereal.  (not early risers here)

Last night, for pre-Bastille Day, apparently the thing to do is party in the streets - this appears to be far more popular in Paris than in New York, perhaps even rivaling bars, probably because most of the bars seem to be also restaurants.  Partying in general seems to be more continuous here... in New York, it seems like most of the late-evening options are either very tame (go to a movie, sit in a coffee shop) or very party-y (go to a bar or club).  Here, perhaps because it is common to not start dinner until 9:30 or 10 and to linger for hours, and yet bars close between 12 and 2, there is much more of a continuum; there are more different things to do and, I think, less craziness.  I like it better.

Anyway, what I did was met up with my British friend and a German friend of hers, and we sat by the Seine on the Ile de la City and had wine and cheese and crisps (potato chips appear to be unchanged by crossing the Atlantic) and chatted and had cheese puffs thrown at us by idiot drunken boys (also unchanged by crossing the Atlantic).  I feel like this would have been much harder to do in New York.

I have also seen two small museums: the Carnavalet museum of the history of Paris, which was quite unusual: not a lot of commentary, and nothing whatsoever in English, just paintings and all sorts of artefacts - medallions, furniture, street signs - jumbled together.  Also the Crypte de Parvis, the archelogical dig revealing the well-preserved Roman city under Ile de la Cite.

Finally, I am going to have to learn to cook, because I bought some serious Parisian groceries.  In addition to massive amounts of cheese, these include (1) eggs (which I know how to deal with), (2) new potatoes (really not sure about these, but they are just potatoes, right?  I'm thinking I can cut them in pieces and plunk them in a frying pan with some Parisian butter), and (3) haricots vert, stringy green beans.  I got the ready-to-use kind without end bits, but I'm not sure they can be eaten raw... maybe the fry-with-butter trick will work on them too?  I was sort of seduced into these purchases by how good the produce looked in the Palais de Fruit, although as I quickly discovered by trying an apple, looks can be deceptive. Still, there's not much that can be wrong with a potato, right?

My picture-taking rate has slackened...

A Series of Small Adventures

• Last night I met my new British friend in the Latin Quarter for a coffee.  Her French is better than mine, and of course her Europeaness is far superior, so she had no trouble finding us seats at a cafe and, even though it was an hour when most people were drinking wine, ordering a cafe creme.  Then we walked around the Louvre's gardens, which are even more beautiful at sunset than ordinarily.
• When I woke up this morning it was raining.  Not gentle rain, but serious, thunder-and-lightening, an-umbrella-will-do-you-no-good rain.  I decided that this fact, combined with it being Monday (when nearly all museums and many other things are closed), meant I should not wake up quite so early.  However, when it stopped raining, I ventured out to buy an umbrella.  After a couple detours into clothing stores too cool for umbrellas (but selling many scarves and fake-leather purses), I found one at H&M.  I realize this is inauthentic, but authentic French umbrellas tend to be quite large (uncollapsible) and wouldn't fit nicely into my bag.
• Because I am being eaten alive on a nightly basis (I am told that I am imagining these bites into existence because there are no mosquitos in Paris... but examining things more closely, I'm pretty sure it's spiders, which most people seem not to be bothered by) I wanted to get some Benadryl.  I went to a pharmacy and determined that the woman there had no idea what Benadryl was (my British friend doesn't either, so I guess it is US-specific).  I said something in French about mosquitos, and she showed me "mosquito kits" (suggesting they are not totally nonexistent here).  Then I clarified that I wanted something for after the mosquitos, and she went behind the counter for anti-itch cream.  Later I discovered that it is apparently quite strong stuff; there are many pages of warnings (in both French and English) about my skin falling off and unwanted hair growing out of my blood vessels if I use it more than twice a day.  But hopefully it will keep me from waking up in the middle of the night wanting to die of itching, so that will be worth it.
• Those adventures under my belt, I convinced someone at Starbucks to sell me a large amount of coffee, which I increasingly feel is not nearly as caffeinated as the American stuff (at home, I can't get through a grande without getting jitters; here it barely affects me) and stationed myself in a corner to observe and write.  There were times that I felt I could have been at a Starbucks in New York, and times when it was very obvious I was somewhere else.  In Paris, people eat more at coffee shops - in New York, it's more about beverages - and the standard person alone with a muffin or sandwich eats it, often with a knife and fork, without doing anything else, while in New York they will pick at it while reading or working on a laptop.  I have seen very few laptops here.
• After lunch, I went for a walk.  I passed Notre Dame and crossed the bridge to Ile St. Louis, where I walked past all the little stores and saw many people eating ice cream, some while biking or roller-blading.  I crossed to Rive Gauche east of the Latin Quarter and walked past the University of Paris.  I saw many bookstores, some with signs in both French and Arabic.  One bookstore sold only scientific books for university courses; the physics books were all in English (I recognized quite a few; in the US they'd be considered graduate level or higher... while normal books are expensive in France, these struck me as reasonable or even underpriced) and the biology books were in French.  I did a brief circuit of the Jardin des Plantes, where there is a formal gardin and a museum of zoology.  
• On the way back, I saw a church with a sign outside in multiple languages instructing visitors to dress modestly.  It wasn't Sunday and I saw a couple people exit the church who were clearly tourists, so I figured it was okay to peek in... inside, the chuch was simple a long arch-topped tube.  Hundreds of chairs were lined up in rows.  At the back, near the entry, was the sort of welcome desk that all churches here seem to have, and near the front a dozen people were scattered in chairs.  They were making uneven, semi-musical sounds and it took me a few minutes to realize I'd walked into a service.  
• I went for a run with my British friend.  I've gone for a few runs here; except on weekend mornings, it's quite tricky.  Running seems to be just not done here; even in the Tuileries, where we saw several other runners, several people gave us blank scowls, as if we were somehow violating the purpose of the park (which, I suppose, is idleness and decadence, so we were).
• I had cheese as part of both lunch (chevre left over from Rue Cler) and dinner (packaged Comte, a raw milk cheese).  I cannot get over how delicious and inexpensive it is here.

Napoleon's Arch and Tomb. Also, drinking of coffee and champagne.

The Pig's Foot

My friend J has been staying with me the last two days.  As I mentioned in my last post, my plan for this weekend was basically to follow her around and eat things, which is more or less what I did.  

J has one of those enviable jobs in which she is frequently required to jet off to places like Belgium and Shanghai to be wined and dined (and have ideas that lead to profits); on this occasion, she was staying in a castle in the French countryside being given multicourse French meals and swag.  On Friday evening she and her coworker arrived in Paris and we all met up for dinner. Before we could make a decision about a restaurant, however, we walked past a wine bar ansd decided that we should have a drink first.  The three of us shared a bottle of (real) Champagne which was quite a lot better than the sparkling wine I've had and resulted in none of us being entirely sober.  We then went to a bistro called "Epi d'Or" (something along the line of "Golden Wheat").  I had quite a good meal there, of escargots (they taste like the butter and garlic they sit in.  Amazingly, in France it is apparently considered acceptable to mop up your extra butter and garlic with your bread.), followed by roasted duck (yummy, rich) and green beans (crisp) and tarte tatin (like apple pie but better).  I also tried a bite of the foi gras that J and her coworker ordered, which is basically super-refined, super-fatty chopped liver (in a good way).  After this, J and I went back to my apartment and chatted for a long time to let our food digest.

Yesterday morning we went for a run, despite the weather gearing up to be very hot and unpleasant.  After all, when you are going to eat all day, it is important to start out hungry.  For breakfast we went to a little cafe and had coffees and croissants like real Parisians (it took us a while to find a cafe that was open, as either waking up at a reasonable hour, or eating shortly after waking, or both, are unParisian).  Then we headed to Rue Cler, a street known for its lovely food.  This was rather a long walk, particularly at tourist gawking-everywhere pace, and by the time we reached our destination it was time for lunch.  We found a cafe with sidewalk seating, where J had fish and I had a mushroom omelette (and we both had more coffee).  My omelette was  prepared quite differently from American omelettes - brown on the outside, runny on the inside, and somehow infused with butter.  I was impressed at coexistence of such a broad menu and such good quality, particularly in such a modest-sized restaurant at reasonable prices.  

After lunch, we shopped in the Rue Cler fromagerie and then walked over to Les Invalides.  There were attractive parks and jardins to see, as well as the tomb of Napoleon and a museum of arms and armaments.  This took up the midafternoon, followed by our return walk through Tuileries.  We returned to my apartment for afternoon tea (fresh bread and our Rue Cler cheese, which included two yummy goat cheeses and a truly amazing soft white cheese called Saint-Felicien) and a nap.  Then it was time to head out for dinner...  

We decided to stick close to home and went to a restaurant I'd seen near my apartment called "Au Pied de Cochon" (The Pig's Foot).  They had wine in many sizes (small and large glasses, small and large carafes, small and large bottles), which was particularly nice for two people with different tastes in wine.  I ordered French onion soup to start (you have to have it once in Paris, I figure, even if it is summer), which was basically a giant bowl half-full of cheese with some onion soup on the bottom.  For my main course (being, as I'd expected, largely satisfied by the soup) I decided to be adventurous and order the restaurant's namesake, the Trottoir, i.e. the pig's foot.  This turned out to be... alarming.  I had expected some sort of confit of pig foot but instead I received, well, a pig's foot.  And half its leg, I think.  On a plate, with french fries.  I did not bring a camera to the meal, so I cannot show you a picture, but i can assure you that the image is quite clearly imprinted in my mind.  

After consuming some wine and a few french fries, I became emboldened to encounter Wilbur (the name I gave him) at the point furthest away from his actual foot.  It turns out that he had a skin, and quite a lot of fat, and bones - I stopped here, took a few deep breaths, and told myself that I have no problem eating chicken legs, under which was a small amount of dark-pink meat.  The meat tasted good, a bit like duck meat but lighter and less sweet in flavor.  However, there was much  more fat, bone, and gristle than meat, and after a few bites I decided I had experienced the Trottoir and was satisfied.

J thought there was probably much more meat to be had and suggested that I turn Wilbur over to get to his possibly meatier aspect.  I started to do this (with my fork), but she quickly told me to stop - it turns out, Wilbur still had toes, and also a thumb-toe.  She then removed the bottom half of Wilbur to her plate and, using her fingers (according to her, this is how it is supposed to be done, as evidenced by the bone plate and finger bowl they gave me) quickly turned him from a part of somebody's body into a mess of gristle.  She gave me a few pieces of meat to eat, and - after I refused to try it - demonstrated the correct way to consume the Trottoir, which involves sucking meat and fat off its bones.

For dessert, I had "soft chocolate cake" - this is chocolate cake that is uncooked inside, and the uncooked cake becomes a pudding or sauce - with vanilla ice cream.  Rather a boring anticlimax, I suppose, but very good, and with no disconcerting features. 

 

Today we went to Ile de St. Louis.  Actually, first we spent some time looking for an open cafe at which to acquire coffee; this turns out to be somewhat problematic even at 10 a.m. on a Sunday.  On Ile de St. Louis, we checked out the church, the old houses, and the stores selling jewelry and offbeat souvenirs; we also checked out the Berthillion ice cream shop, supposedly the best in the city.  We tried the "salted butter caramel" (actually salty, and with caramel bits) and the "nougat au miel" (rich and honey flavored).  For lunch we went to a creperie we'd been eyeing, where we had savory crepes.  J headed home, and I bought produce from the market in preparation for a renewal of my simple, pigfootless eating habits.

Amazingly, I am actually starting to get hungry again, and I am probably going to at some point require dinner.

A friend of mine is coming to stay with me for the weekend (yes, in my teensy Parisian apartment).  She is familiar with Paris, so I don't think she'll want to do a lot of standard sightseeing stuff, which is just fine with me.  She is also a big foodie, so my plan for the next two days is to follow her around and eat things.

Hopefully before she arrives there is time for a quick update.

Last night I went to the Jardin du Luxembourg to run with a British girl I met through a meetup.  We didn't do a lot of running because of the heat, but we had a nice conversation.  So, yay, I have someone to hang out with in Paris!  And, I took a bit of a running detour on the way home and still got a half-decent workout in.

Today I covered a lot of ground very cursorily.  I went to the Musee de la Vie Romantique, in George Sand's house, which was not terribly interesting.  However, the neighborhood was nice - lots of shopping but neither super-trendy nor touristy.  I went into the Lafayette department store; clearly all American department stores are a pale imitation of places like this.  Seriously, it was like a Palais du Mode.  Amazingly, normal Parisian people (and some tourists) were shopping there.  Also amazing were the prices - ridiculously high even to my NYC-trained eye.  Seriously, the standard price for a top (delicate, feminine, and clearly not machine-washable) - and this was including a discount of 30-50% for the summer sale season - was 100 euros or more.  There were a few cheaper things; of course they were much less nice.

Then I went and looked at the Palais Garnier, the older of the two opera houses.  I tried to muster some desire to spend 9 euros to see the interior but could not.  Then I walked to the Champs-Elysees, which was frankly not that impressive - like Madison Avenue but with wider sidewalks.  I walked to the Arc de Triomphe and looked at it.  Very big.  I walked back to my apartment by a different route, which took me by many big palaces.  Apparently building palaces is what they did for fun for a few hundred years before television was invented.

So this sounds like I did not have any fun, but I did.  I walked around some interesting areas.  The department stores has an amazing view at its top.  I saw many Parisian people and things.

However, I am just about burnt out on sightseeing, which is not so bad since I have seen most of the red-letter sites.  Next week I think I will start being a little more serious about my writing and a little less serious about sights.  Maybe I will try the Paris Walks book again.

Exhausted from my busy day yesterday, I decided I would be Parisian this morning, by which I meant sleeping late and eating fresh baguette with butter and jelly for breakfast while working on my novel.  This meant, of course, tromping to the boulangerie first thing in the morning chill (possibly people here would complain about the heat less if they would take advantage of the hours before noon).  But it was well worth the six flights of stairs, because the baguette I bought was much fresher than the baguettes I've been buying in the afternoon and evening at the same boulangerie have been (I have been able to preserve the freshness so far, more or less, by wrapping the bread in paper and plastic... I wonder if they are left out all day at the boulangerie?).

I headed out shortly after ten, by which time it was starting to heat up.  Also, after two cups of coffee yesterday, my body had decided to ignore the stories I had been telling it about caffeine being a rare commodity in Europe, and I felt groggy and out of sorts.  So I went into one of the less-intimidating cafes I was passing and ordered a "noisette".  I'm not sure entirely what this translates to, but it resulted in a small cup of espresso with a modest amount of milk or cream; between the cup's to-go lid and the giant tube of sugar they gave me (which I saved for some future exigency since I don't take sugar in my coffee) it was really quite cute.

The museum I was planning to go to was not scheduled to open for a few minutes (which meant it would not actually open for half an hour), so I went to an American bookstore.  I got lucky and found the exact book I had been wishing I'd brought along on my trip, Almost French.  Books are quite expensive here; basically they are the dollar cover price in Euros, which means they are about 30% more than the cover price (I, like most Americans, am used to paying around 30% less than the cover price by buying through Amazon or getting other discounts).  I've been craving memoirs about American women in Paris, which I suppose is sensible considering that's what I am.

Let me sidetrack here for a minute and say that, for possibly the first time ever, I decidedly underpacked.  I think part of this was due to the diversion of packing for Iceland and concern about my bag being above the European weight limit (which it turns, out, it is 16 pounds shy of, although I am guessing it will have somehow gotten heavier on the way home).  The only things I've brought and not used so far - still in the first half of my trip - are the dress, the skirt, and the nice sandals - all of which I think I am likely to use at some point, and which weren't really optional - and the bathing suit, which I brought in case I went to a hot spring in Iceland and will probably not use.  I did not bring an umbrella (on the grounds that all my umbrellas suck and I could buy an equally bad one in any city I was in) or my extremely versatile black windbreaker (basically out of stupidity) or sufficient reading material (again on the grounds that I could find English-language books in Paris) or all the shampoo and etc. that I knew I would need (yet again, on the grounds of such things being available in Paris).  What I was not counting on was that these things might not be available, or might not be to my taste, or might be extremely expensive.  My memory of picking up inexpensive, used English-language books in several countries as I traveled Europe a decade ago is either outdated or doesn't translate to Paris; here, English-language bookstores are few, expensive, and generally seem to have the attitude that foreigners are beneath them (even the ones staffed by foreigners); the selection is poor (mostly British books that have been out in the States for at least a decade); and the atmosphere is frequently unbookish.  Umbrellas are available for the usual gougey prices at tourist shops, but these places tend to (bizarrely) close when it rains, so I have not bought one yet due to a lack of desire to carry one around (and the same sort of irrational belief in persistence of the current state that leads me to always head out for the day, here or in New York, with every belief that at no point before evening will I become hungry).  As for toiletries, I have bought outrageously expensive French products; I was hoping they would be very good, in keeping with their prices and the general French penchant for quality, but in fact they are awful.  I have just found some not-too-expensive hair goop that seems not entirely inappropriate for my hair, so hopefully that will work out better.

In one area (besides food ), shopping has gone well for me.  I came on this trip with roughly five times as many bags as a normal person might need... i.e. backpack, large shoulder daybag, string backpack, large purse, and small purse, and found all of them lacking in some way and the combination not quite sufficient for all my needs.  However, for 10 Euros I have purchased a shoulder bag that is somewhat larger than a purse in size (although smaller than the purses many New Yorkers carry) and holds everything I need for a day without making me look like a tourist.  Although I haven't used it for this, it will even it my netbook (without the case).  The downside is that I tend to pack it full - a guidebook, a novel, a bottle of water, camera, wallet, various other things - and then my back and shoulders get sore.  Sadly, I do not think they sell stronger muscles in Paris.

The museum I went to today was the Musee des Arts Decoratifs.  This is housed in a wing of the Louvre but is separate, and it is quite huge (the Louvre, somehow, is much bigger, although I haven't been yet this trip.  It houses a truly monumental collection of artifacts - a few paintings, but mostly furniture, vases, and the like - arranged chronologically starting with the Middle Ages.  The amazing audioguide (included with admission, which was especially nice since the placards were in French only) really illuminated the significance of the various works, both sociologically and artistically.  And some of the pieces were really incredible - 20-foot masonry freizes from the 15th century, dozens of examples of marquetry and parquetry.  This continues over two very large floors through the Art Deco movement, and then there are smaller areas covering the following 80 years.  I thought these last bits were nowhere near as good: they were less thorough and, in the most modern sections, kind of silly.  In the "80's and 90's" exhibit, I had assumed I would see styles that looked familiar, but instead it was all avant-garde stuff that I'm pretty sure nobody (or almost nobody) ever owned.  This made me question the earlier exhibits... I had assumed that the 18th-century furniture, for example, was representative of what 18th-century people (at least, rich people in Europe) kept in their houses, and the rooms recreated from individuals' homes suggested this as well.  But that didn't seem consistent with the modern visits being portrayed... so, while the museum on the whole was great, it ended on a down note, and I wish I hadn't seen the more modern exhibits.

Because of its enormous size and later opening, the Musee took basically all day, and afterward I returned home to take refuge from the heat and have tea (that is what I am calling the meal one has at 5 p.m.).  Tonight, I am supposed to be meeting someone to go running in the Jardin du Luxembourg, with which there are two problems: (1) this Jardin appears to be 1.5 miles away from my home, which means I could get lost on the way, and also I will have a substantial pre-run (or walk, because at 7:30 p.m. the streets are likely to be much too crowded to run on) and (2) it doesn't even start getting cool here until 10 p.m., so it will be a cumbersomely hot run.  But!  I am brave and I will survive.  And probably I will carry water.