A Day in Paris - part 6

It was still Thursday.
We left the Arc de Triomphe to begin our walk down the Champs-Elysees. 

No trip to Paris is complete without a stroll down the Champs-Elysees. It was a bit of a walk. My wife didn't want to go into the fancy stores along the way. It was getting late, so we just wanted to enjoy the walk to the Louvre. Google tells me that the distance is 4.5 kilometers.

That's just short of 3 miles in real measurement. It wasn't a bad walk...it was a very nice walk...but there were complications. Now that we had left the monument with the free restroom, my companion informed me that she needed to use the bathroom--complication number 1. We were also getting thirsty. I bought another Orangina--the precursor to complication number 2. 

We made an attempt at addressing complication number 1 in the long park that runs along a portion of the thoroughfare. A sign indicted that use of the facility would be 2 euros. The place looked a little off-putting...so we were; off-put, that is. Wife said she could wait.

After we had entered the Tuileries, we were climbing a short set of stairs. At the top, two girls accosted us. One girl said, while holding a map, "You're from here, can you tell us where the nearest subway stop is." I was wondering why she thought I was "from here." Was it the dopey hat? Was it my debonair look and jaunty air of je ne sais quoi? (Who really knows what that is anyway?) When I didn't respond immediately, she whisked the map away and went down the stairs. I don't know if she suddenly realized that I was not in fact "from here." Or if she thought maybe that I was "from here" but didn't speak English. Either way, I was happy with her decision to seek an answer elsewhere. We continued on to the Louvre. 

I was surprised that there was no line at the entrance. My wife thought that it might be closed. I assured her that it was not. I had planned this out; we were arriving at the Louvre on one of the days that it stayed open late. We descended at the entrance beneath the glass pyramid (which wasn't even there the last time I had been to the Louvre). Below, I could see a line. I made some inquiries. That line was for a special exhibit. I didn't care. I wasn't interested in that exhibit...but I did want to see the rest of the great museum. 

The lady told me that the rest of the Louvre had already closed. Only this one special exhibit remained open. I knew that couldn't be true. I knew the museum stayed open till 9:00 or 10:00 p.m on Fridays. I had planned for this. So I told her that I thought the museum was open late on Fridays. She said that it was...but today was Thursday. That's when I remembered...I had originally scheduled our visit to the Louvre for Friday night. Then there had been some complications with the plane tickets, so the tickets we got had a Friday morning rather than a Saturday morning departure...and I had never revised my 22 step day in Paris schedule to account for the change from Friday to Thursday. It was another Maxwell Smart moment. The lady did let me me know that the Musee d'Orsay was still open. I told her that we had already been to that one that morning. Oh well.

On the bright side, the Louvre restrooms were still open. My wife met some nice people from Oregon in her line while resolving complication number 1. Shortly after that, the last bottle of Orangina kicked in. Without going into detail, let me just say that I became very familiar with the men's room in the bottom of the Louvre. It really was complication number 2, and the resolution thereof was not pleasant. I will say that it was one of the nicest restrooms that I was able to use during the trip, it ranked just below the restroom at the Frankfurt airport. While I did not get to see and cannot express my thoughts upon the overabundant oil paintings, or the great number of magnificent statues in bronze and in marble, I give the plain porcelain in the famous museum a plethora of plaudits. I felt much like Rodin's The Thinker--which isn't displayed in the Louvre. 

A Day in Paris - Part 2

It was still Thursday.
We had just left the souvenir shop near the Pantheon. We were on our way to the Luxembourg Gardens. The sidewalk was pretty wide, wide enough for some shops to have racks of goods out on it. There was also a youth sprawled on the sidewalk. He had two suitcases next to him. The suitcases were red. We gave him a wide berth; there was something hinky about the guy. 

I realized what the feeling was when my wife kicked the container, made from the bottom quarter of a clear plastic water bottle, which held a few coins, and which he had placed out in the center of the walk. The container was virtually invisible. She hit it solidly, like an opening kickoff. The bit of bottle went tumbling; the coins went skittering. Did I mention the grate across the sidewalk? Most of the coins went down the grate that was located about six or eight feet from the ambush site. 

I found two of his missing coins that the grate had not consumed, both one centime pieces. I could see that we had walked right into the trap. My wife was very apologetic. I thought about explaining to the guy that he should be more careful about where he puts his stuff. I'm not sure if he wasn't much of an actor, or if he was just saving the theatrics in case they were needed; he didn't seem very upset...and I was still packing about two pounds of change in my pocket. So...I asked how much he had had in the bottle bottom. He said, "Quatre." He didn't say whether it was euros or centimes. So I pulled out a handful of coins and gave to him...it was probably a little more than four euros worth. He seemed happy. We moved on, having fallen victim to a scam, but not feeling too badly about it.

Luxembourg Gardens welcomed us. In my memory, it had always been bright and sunny at Luxembourg Gardens; it was where I had spoken with an American writer all those years ago; if I remember correctly, he had told me that he had helped write the script for the movie version of An American in Paris. 

It was Thursday, and the sky had begun to take on a battleship hue. We were both hungry, having skipped step one (breakfast) of our planned 22 steps for the day. We bought ham and cheese crepes and ate them in the park, admiring the greenery, and getting lightly sprinkled with rain.

According to the daily sheet from the red book, our next step, number 7, was to take the metro to the catacombs; exploring the catacombs was step 8. Problem: step 9 involved leaving the catacombs via the M4 to the Musee d'Orsay. The M4 was nonfunctional; we would lose more time in circuitous travel. We scratched the catacombs from our list. I had been there: bones, lots and lots of bones, macabre. Besides, I had already decided to add another destination to our list. We skipped steps 7 through 10, substituting a new metro route to get us to step 11, the Musee d'Orsay.

There were two or three lines to get into the museum. I noticed that the shortest line was specifically labeled for British and Americans. We got in quickly (using our Paris Museum Pass)...after the usual frisk and bag examination, but no body cavity search. The museum was seriously awesome. Tons of stuff. We took our time, trying to enjoy the moment, examining lots of paintings and objets d'arts. Some of them are pictured below. We looked until we could look no more, to the point that the thought of gazing upon one more framed canvas, or one more likeness in clay, bronze, or stone caused our eyes to roll back in their sockets, our knees to collapse, and the bowels to loosen. So we were there a good twelve or thirteen minutes. No. Seriously, we were there for an hour or two. It's really a place to spend an entire day...but it was Thursday, and we had 22 steps to complete.

This one was sculpted after the model stepped on a LEGO.

 I'm pretty sure this one was entitled "Selfie with Dead Girl."

Aerobics can be so exhausting.

When we left the museum, we purchased drinks. My wife chose a bottle of water. I, remembering the sweet citrus bite of the drink from dinner the night before, chose an Orangina. And we were off to the destination that I had added to our schedule. A guy on a rickshaw bike offered to give us a ride there...but we already had plenty of metro tickets, which were much cheaper than the price of the ride...so we went under ground once more.

Next time: A Day in Paris - part 3.

Hamburger Surpise

This was on the wall of our room at the bureaucratic hotel:

It's not the exact picture; I found this one on the internet. In fact, I remembering the moon as being bigger.

Another thing we found in the room (along with the bottle of water and candy) was a menu.

I also found this one on the internet, as I did not consider the menu something of which I wanted a picture when we were there. This picture is too small for me to accurately read. The actual menu that we found in the room suffered from a similar problem--not legibility, but accuracy. We spent some time deciding what we would have. I forget now what we finally decided to have...but it sounded good.

When we arrived in the restaurant, we discovered a completely different menu. Apparently, the menu in the room was outdated; the selection upon which we had decided was not to be found on the new menu. We couldn't find anything on the new menu that interested us. Nevertheless, in our famished condition, not having eaten much of anything since our massive breakfast in Bayeux, we ordered something.

It was the kind of mistake that Americans probably make with frequency; we ordered hamburgers. They were one of the cheapest things on the menu. Our first meal at Versailles had been from McDonald's; in fact, our evening meal on the second night had been from McDonald's; both of those meals were fine. We failed to account for the fact that although the hamburgers were the cheapest things on the menu, they were way overpriced. Overpriced hamburgers are never good. We didn't account for the fact that a "chef" rather than a simple cook was preparing these burgers. A simple hamburger is beneath contempt for a "chef." A "chef" must expand, magnify, and supplement the plain ordinary hamburger. Rather than a simple but filling meal, the "chef" must concoct a masterpiece...and thereby completely ruin that acme of ordinary meat. 

They patties glistened like varnished mahogany...and were nearly as tasty. Seriously, they had been seasoned, not unpleasantly so. But they were thick. It was like trying to eat a doorjamb in a bun. I removed the lettuce; it was that single, thin, dry-but-green leaf from the outermost edge of the plant; it's the kind of lettuce that many restaurants use to hide the real food, the throw-away wrapper--it gives color to the plate but is completely unpalatable.

The burger wasn't awful; it was just thick and strange tasting. A burger should be fun to eat, with dripping condiments that complement the flavor of the beef, the bun, the tomato, and the onion. (I don't enjoy pickles on hamburgers--this one was on the side). The ground beef should be the star in this culinary play; the other performers should all be in love with the meat and cling to it longingly. Instead, this burger was a real ham, upstaging all the supporting cast, and stinking up the show. None of the other players could rescue the great ground round patty from itself. 

The fries were those thick, soggy pieces of lumber rejected by CostCo...but they were better than the burger.

The one redeeming aspect of the meal was Orangina. 

They served it in a short bottle just like that one in the picture above, with glasses in which to pour it. I remembered Orangina from my stay some 30 years earlier. I remembered it as a flat, watery, orange-pulpy drink in a blue can. In spite of my rather tepid recollection of the drink, I wanted to try it again for nostalgia's sake. 

The burger gave me a tremendous thirst. The drink hit my mouth like an artillery barrage, exploding with refreshing citrus flavor and carbonation. I fell in love with it. It was nothing like I remembered.

After we finished our meal--we had eaten most of the burgers because hunger had driven us to that extreme--we went back to the room. The aftermath of the meal is best described as extremely unpleasant in a gastrointestinal sense. I blamed the burger. I would later find out that the burger may have received a bad rap for that unpleasantness.


Next time: A Day in Paris