-Two prostitutes of indeterminate gender
-A rat
-A bunch of 5 or 6 young guys trying to pickpocket a sleeping homeless guy
All in the space of the three minute walk. That’s a pretty high density of sleaze. And the crazy didn’t stop when we got into the taxi. The streets were pretty much empty and the guy drove like the cops were on our tail. I started to count how many red lights the guy would run, but I stopped counting after reaching “all of them.” It was a quick trip, though. Unfortunately, all that efficiency meant we got to the airport 3 hours before our flight. A little excessive, but at least it meant we had time to write. And the airport had a cat, too, just hanging out. He liked attention.
Our flight was pretty normal, we got checked in, waited, and flew right up to paris with a whole bunch of Italian people. They applauded when we landed; I’m not sure if that’s normal. Then we took a bus into Paris proper. We navigated the metro to the Champs d’Elise, the area near which we were hoping to find a hotel. Our first several attempts got us nowhere, all the rooms were booked. We were starting to get nervous when we finally made it to one of the placed we had found on hostels.com that had spare rooms, or at least it did a few weeks ago when we checked. Lucky us, they did have a room available for us. Cheers! Plus, it was cheaper and the room much better than the other place we had been planning to stay. But more on that later. We ditched our heavy backpacks and strolled around Paris a little bit more. Our first stop was the Rodan Museum. We took the metro and when we exited we were in the middle of...something. We’re still not sure what. There were a whole bunch of African-Amer, uh, I mean African-french guys, all standing around while some people played rhythmic music and some other guys asked for donations. We walked along the street and eventually we got past the black guys and then past the Riot Cops. No idea what was going on, but if I had to guess, I suspect it was a planned demonstration for...uh...something. I doubt the riot cops really needed to be there except in case everything went bonkers. Everyone was way too laid back to riot.
What was the name of this statue again...?
Anyway, Rodan museum. It was a really neat place because of its focus. We got to see a lot of really neat statues, including the famous ‘thinker’ and ‘Portal to Hell’ as well as a bunch of other really interesting pieces and a lot of history. Especially after so much classical and neoclassical artwork it was sort of a relief to get to something more modern. There were a couple of other artists there, too. One of Rodan’s contemporaries who had done some really neat sculpture in a very similar style, and another guy who did crazy actual-modern stuff in steel. He had the Mr. Clean logo on a metal gate. He also put tattoos on pigs. That kind of modern. I remember him mostly for his brochure, which, summarized, said: “The artist is so cool, the artist is so out there. You can’t even begin to understand how smart the artist is.” Cool steel structures, though.
My celebrity look-alike.
After completely burning Jess out in the museum (though she did let me sit and read some stuff that I found intriguing) we got some lunch at the museum cafe. Real food. We had been subsisting off of cookies and other backpack-munchies for pretty much the entire morning. Getting some protein seemed like a good idea.
After that we went back to the Champs d’Elise for a bit. It’s a big, fancy street with L’Arc D’Triumph at one end (neat, but under construction) and a whole lot of stores along the way. If we had been into fashion we clearly would have *completely flipped out*. But we’re not, so we just window shopped, mostly. The one really neat thing, though, is that the street also houses car companies, at least showrooms where they show off prototype cars and all sorts of fancy vehicles. We took a lot of pictures. Matt would have been pleased. One of the highlights was a camera-and-TV system that would video you holding a card up to the screen and would then superimpose a 3-d car onto the video feed on the camera, like you were holding it in your hands. Neat effect.
I'd drive that.
Then back to our hotel, where we entered the *smallest elevator in all of europe.* Capacity: 3 people. Or two with backpacks. The room itself, though, was magnificent! We had a balcony that looked out onto the street, a TV that worked, our own bathroom, and even a *TUB*. Such luxury after three weeks in hostels! Jess went right to work taking a nice long back while I stared out the window for a while, wrote, and caught up on some world news. I had been pretty much cut off for the whole time we were over there.
How's that for a view?
We played some more rummy, talked for a while, and took a stroll out later in the evening when I wasn’t quite ready to go to bed yet. Most stores were closed, but we did find a market with some munchie-foods to take on the plane with us. And then Jess layed on my chest and we went to sleep.
-N
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