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.