Paris travel log 2006-12-17

The downside to jet lag is obvious: hours lying awake in a dark hotel room. But there’s also a huge upside that’s easy to miss: when you finally do take to the streets of Paris at 7:30am on a Sunday morning, the whole city is yours alone. And when the distant flap of pigeon wings is the only sound accompanying your own, private sunrise over Notre Dame, you’re happy to be alive. Here’s a representative shot of early-morning Paris, with not a car or person in sight:

And here’s a post-sunrise view of Notre Dame from just across the Seine:
A quick note on this last picture: literally five seconds after snapping this shot, while still gawking at the cathedral, I planted my foot in the largest pile of dog poop I’ve ever seen. “Merde!” I said. But the moment made a strong impression. I’m not sure that I’ve ever been so intensely aware of the transcendent and the mundane at exactly the same time. Beautiful cathedral across the river. Smelly glop all over my shoe. There was something profound in it, but I haven’t quite figured out what it was. At the very least, it’s a moment and a feeling that would be impossible to manufacture: if I’d planned to step in dog poop, I’m sure it would not have had the same effect.

After leaving Notre Dame, I bumped into some other early risers – Asian tourists who tried to ask me for some directions in (bad) English. I asked where they were from, and when they said “Taiwan,” my eyes lit up. I’m sure they didn’t expect the stream of Chinese that then came out of my mouth, and I’m really sure that they were a little confused as to just why I was so eager to speak Chinese. But they humored me, chatted for a while about this and that, and ended up complimenting my Chinese. Hooray!

So why was I dying to speak Chinese? It’s hard to explain, but ever since I’ve landed in France, a rather dim neuron has been firing in my brain that says, “I hear language, and it’s not English. Must be Chinese. Bombs away!” And when I don’t then speak Chinese, it’s left saying, “Umm, bombs away? Seriously, man, you can do this!” In other words, every time I say “Parlez-vous anglais?” I have to consciously avoid the impulse to instead say “ni hui bu hui shuo yingwen?” Dad reports a similar problem with his old German skills trying to take over.

After some more wandering around, it was time to return to the hotel to meet Mom and Dad for a lovely continental breakfast at 9am. Mom’s jetlag was expressing itself differently, meaning she wasn’t able to make breakfast. But Dad, being the rock that he is, showed up at 9am sharp. Breakfast included a free history lesson from Dad, who always astounds me with just how much he knows and how quickly he can skip between topics.

Mom finally showed up, and we were off to the Musee d’Orsay, which is best known for its collection of Impressionist paintings. While waiting in the short line outside the museum, Mom spotted TV and movie star Brendan Frasier step into line behind us. He was all alone, and looked taller and a bit older than we expected. He hung around the line for a minute before deciding to head elsewhere, and snapped a few photos on his way out. I gave myself a pat on the back for not yelling something stupid like, “You were awesome in ‘Scrubs!’”

The Musee d’Orsay was incredible. Monet, Manet, Renoit, Degas, Gaugin, and on and on. I figure that if I of all people recognized and remembered details about so many of the paintings there, then the exhibit must be world-class.

After leaving the museum, we stepped next door for lunch at Les Deux Musees (“The Two Museums,” presumably referring to the Orsay and to the Legion of Honor museum next door). My lunch of salad and beef with shallots was tasty but way too big.

From lunch, it was a hop across the Seine (it seems there’s a bridge every block around here) to the Musee de l’Orangerie. The only exhibit on the museum’s upper story is the two-room, circular display of Monet’s water lilies. The lower story contains mainly paintings from an early-20^th-century art dealer’s collection. He was apparently a big fan of Picasso, Matisse, and other amazing artists, which is great luck for modern museum-goers like us.

To close out the day, we took a long walk home parallel to the Seine, eventually cutting through some of the courtyards in the Louvre and snapping some nighttime photos there. Dinner was at a tasty brasserie called Lipp, which specialized in regional cuisine of some sort (all runs together for me).

Then finally, it was back to the hotel to try to sleep off the rest of the jetlag.