Paris Day 2: Modern Art And The Lights Of The City Of Lights

Listening: Always in pursuit of the perfect people. Oh, and I can see that it show. But there's just an innocence in you I wanna wring out. I know it could be beautiflul.

Day two in Paris begins with the sounds of doors opening and closing. Wait five minutes. Opening and closing. Wait two minutes. Opening and closing. It's the fucking snoring Korean dude. Wrash-wrash-wrash-wrash-wrash. It's the weird bag man. Fucking grocery store bags. They need to make them with stealth action on them.

I get up, shower and think about the tips that Jenny had given me on how to work some of the sights around Paris. She seemed like an intelligent girl, so I figured that I'd heed her warnings. At ten on the dot, I was out the door, much like to my day job. One fo the big things that I wanted to check out in Paris was the Georges Pompidou Centrem or Paris' museum of modern art.

I spent a whopping five hours in the Pompidou. It was amazing. I went into every room and saw every exhibit. There was one room with an invisible maze, where you had to wear this headset that would buzz you when you hit a wall. I couldn't get it.

They did have a number of cool inventions there though. First, Motorola had this musical digital graffiti wall. It was the coolest thing. I tried a couple of things and tried to e-mail them to people, but I don't think it worked, because none of my friends have e-mailed me telling me that they got it. Here's the best one that I came up with. The spray can was kind of hard to control, so it wasn't really as effective as real spray paint.



They had a number of other cool things in the display too, like a Technics turntable with a USB port on the headshell.





A strange body case was in another exhibit.





There was also, as Eugene and Lindsey saw, a dress of meat.





All in all, I loved the museum. I had so much fun walking around and looking at everything. There were still some things that made me think, "The fuck?!?"

By the time that I got out of there, it was around four o'clock. Jenny had told me that to see the sunset from the Eiffel Tower, I should try to start heading up at around five. So, I hurried my ass to the public transit and busted on over to the big ass pile of metal. Now this was not without incident. Though I had mastered the Metro, sometimes things weren't always as they seemed. First of all, Metro stations can be hard to find, because there is a lack of standardization in signs telling you that there is a station there. Let me show you four of the Metro signs that I took pics of.









Note how different they are. There were times that I knew that there was an underground Metro stop, but I couldn't for the life of me find the entrance. It was impossible.

This time, anyways, was one of the many times where I couldn't find the underground. I, instead, found a bus stop. So I took the bus towards the Eiffel Towerm but then it started veering away. Luckily, it ended up coming back to the Eiffel Tower, but it had taken me much longer than I anticipated. It was already a quarter to five when I got there and the lines were GIGANTIC. I couldn't believe it. And to make things worse, they were only operating two of the four lifts!

To add insult to injury, I was hungry as hell, since I hadn't eaten anything besides a pastry and a cafe creme in the morning. The prices at the Pompidou for food was nothing short of highway robbery, so I just stuck it out. But when I got to the Eiffel Tower, I needed something in the tank, so before I got in line to get to the lifts at the Eiffel Tower, I spent twenty minutes in line for a cheese sandwich (on a real baguette, mind you) when there were only a couple of people in front of me.

Here's something that I have learned about French culture... They are not service oriented. They don't know how to bang through a queue. Everything even remotely resembling service is done at a "ho-hum" kind of a pace, no matter when someone's train is leaving, when someone has theater tickets for or how bad they have to drop a deuce. If you're in line, you're stuck... for hours... upon hours.... I hope you've dropped your deuce before even thinking about a French queue.

I stand in line for about an hour before I get to the ticket booth. As luck would have it, the woman at the booth has to help some other guy get thirty something tickets. It wasn't too big of a deal. There was this cute little four year old girl playing in line behind me. It was cute as hell. She would run around the polls, bump into people and just smile at them as if it was the answer to everything. For this little girl, it really was.

When I finally got helped, I bought a ticket to the second tier. I didn't go all of the way up to the top. Jenny had told me that the view from the second tier was just as good and three euro cheaper, so I opted to go the cheaper route. By the time I got up to the second tier, the sun was beginning to set. There were some fantastic views of the city. As I waited for the sun to set, I wrote a postcard to my parents as the wind tried to carry it away.


Champs de Mars From The Eiffel Tower


Trocadero From The Eiffel Tower


Me At The Eiffel Tower Before Sunset


The Sun Setting Over Paris

I spent a good deal of time at the Eiffel Tower, probably a couple of hours up top. I checked out every view and just sort of breathed it all in. As soon as it got dark enough, they lit up the tower and at eight o'clock, they set it asparkle for about hour.


The Tower Lit From The Second Tier


The Sparkling Tower

After mt time at the Eiffel Tower, I decided to hunt down some food. As I have come to find out, in Paris, all of the best restaurants are closed on either Saturday, Sunday or both. I searched the entire area around the Eiffel Tower for a restaurant in the Michelin guide, but ended up having to walk all of the way over to Le Invalides to have dinner.

Dinner was good, but a little bit slow. I was seated outside, so as dinner dragged on, I got colder and colder. The restaurant was renound for its Provencal cooking. I wasn't planning on eating anything Provencal until I (big surprise) got to Provencem but it was late and I needed fuel in the tank.

I ordered three courses. The first was a tomato cake with celery sauce.



It was basically a very light tomato panna cotta with a mild, creamy celery sauce that was garnished with some outstandingly strong basil oil. I can totally see Chef Bob putting something like this on the menu next August. The texture was smooth and creamy. The creaminess of the celery sauce balanced out the acidity of the tomato really well.



The second dish was a fillet of breen with braised fennel. I have to say that there isn't much to say about this dish. It wasn't really remarkable in any way. It just was. I was hungry, so I ate it. I would have eaten it if I hadn't been hungry too, but it just wasn't all that exciting of a dish. The only reason that I ordered it was because they were out of the duck and the lamb.



For my third course, they moved me inside. They could tell that I was cold and the other couple who was seated behind me opted out of dessert, they claimed, because they had to get up early in the morning. My bet was that they were cold too. So, I had a quince crumble and a cafe creme for my dessert. It was yummy. I had never had quince before. My pastry chef described it as crossing the best apple I have ever had with the best pear that I had ever had. I have to say that the crumble was quite good. I think that I have an fixation with acidity, because I always keep thinking that the apple/appleque desserts that I have been eating have needed a bit of tartness in them.

Anyways, after dinner, I hauled ass back to the hostel, as I think I was about a half hour from when the Metro closed. I ended up not finding the Metro stop near Le Invalides, trucking my arse across the Seine and finding another Metro. As hard as these places are to find during the day, they're even harder to find at night.

Finally, back at the hostel, the snoring Korean dude was replaced by a French-canadian chick. I tripped over her bag a couple of times on my way to the bathroom and to bed. Little did I know that in two days I would be having dinner with her.