The last 3 days in Paris

My petulant mood continued until I decided to have a "lazy American tourist on the tour bus" day. About half-way through my second bus, I realized that I had been genuinely physically exhausted from walking all day every day for 8 or 9 days. (Of course, frying my card reader didn't help.) And that I needed a dy of rest where the city came to me.

One of the touristy tidbits I picked up says that the Arc de Triomphe had an impossible project deadline, so the architect had a full-scale wooden model wrapped in cloth built rather than let Napoleon see it unfinished. That's one solution.

I saw some tourists wearing helmets go through the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel on Segways.

On Sunday, I went to the Musee d'Orsay, only because everyone who had been said that it's the one thing I had to do in Paris and my god were they right. I stood in line in the rain and it was worth it. The building is incredible. The renovation left many reveals between the existing and the inserted structure with views down 6 stories in some places. It smelled vaguely of Coco Puffs, too, which was endearing.

Check out this basically lifesize painting. Okay, so it's called L'ecole de Platon, but "Platon" is dressed in blue and looking fairly Jesus to me and he's got 12 "students" or apostles. Plato could be overtly homoerotic, I guess, but this would be shocking even today if they were to call it Jesus and the 12 Apostles.

That evening I visited Sacre-Coeur. Everything kept saying it was on a hill overlooking the city, but I didn't see how it was possible. Say this outloud slowly: It's on a really high hill with an 180 degree view of Paris. Convinced? Good.

I attended my first catholic service inside. A nun in habit led the crowd in song, an altar boy in soccer shoes swung incense on the priest, and the smoke from the incense made visible the light streaming in through the west stained glass. It was an effective light, sound, and smell show, but with a sense of more. Stepping outside to the an unreal view of Paris surely reassured many pilgrims of a largerexistencee.

Last night, Christine and I went out with the Notre-Dame rollerbladers she met yesterday. We went to a bar and had ridiculously expensivecocktailss, conversing in a mixture of French and English "pour Wendy, parce qu'elle ne parle pas le francais." I drank Marc's Mojito because he didn't know what he was ordering (I switched him my Sex On the Beach) and most of Christine's Pina Colada because it was too strong for her, but even without much of a dinner I didn't get tipsy, so they weren't very strong. I'm glad I got to be out in Paris at least once at night.

And today I rode the Metro to those places I wanted to see more of, like Montparnasse Cemetary. It's aminiaturee city made up of family row houses lining little streets, all for the living to visit the dead. It's beautiful that it's inhabitable and so dense as to make a full view of thecemeteryy impossible. It is nothing like our vast wastelands with dotted markers.