Day 11- Sunday 6 June

Right, so I woke up with five blisters and did NOT do the Louvre, didn't actually really feel like moving but it was free museum day, so I had to, obviously, and instead tried to go to the Picasso-only museum, because that dude founded at least four mini-art movements and we are talking about RESPECT here. It is closed until 2012, who knew, so went instead to the Museum of Modern Art in the Centre [Georges] Pompidou, figured I'd do a bit of the Louvre afterwards since it was close enough. You'd probably recognize the Centre with a picture- it's the seven story building whose backside [though I thought it was the front and made a heartfelt attempt to get in through an emergency exit] is covered in red, yellow, green and blue pipes and you can imagine the hullabaloo that caused- the front has a cobblestone square and zigzag escalator deal going up the face. Yes, so in summery, the weirdest things I saw: Lord of the Rings stained glass; a dress made of meat [in the eighties, nicely dessicated now, impressively even stitching all things considered]; a video of women embroidering the safety net of some scaffolding; another video of a woman eating beans [and after two minutes, because my feet hurt and there was a bench in front of it; putting beans into her hair and down her dress]; a setup of a tiny cylindrical room, maybe seven feet across, black, dark, with a video projection in the middle of one of those tiny cameras going down someone's throat [very cool]; and a female tourist whose hair to the right of her part was maybe an inch long and to the left past her shoulders. Saw tons more, took photos [doi], but that's my pick of the lot, and that took over four hours, and after that I was so done. To hell with free museum day.

[Sorry I forgot to do yesterday's edition of] Weird Things About Paris: 1 and 2 cent pieces are functionally close to useless: The smaller stores that you go to for things, pharmacies, the markets, the copy store we got paper from, mark their prices in multiples of 10 [I've checked]. Vending machines don't accept them. If you get fruit from an epicerie or something, they do price by the kilo, but will willingly round down to the closest five to avoid the small change. If you go somewhere to get something big [clothing, hypothetically] you'll most likely use credit, because you don't want to get mugged on the metro carrying too much cash. You get 1 and 2 cent coins when you change money and go to the bigger places [for me, so far, the Fanprix grocery store], but how often does that happen? Might be able to start a thing, though, euro coin bracelets .... More weird stuff: I'd read about these two things while doing clothing research on Paris, neither of which I quite believed, but have seen: The first, more probable, is pointy shoes. Business-dressed guys I have seen fairly commonly wear point-toed work shoes, the shiny leather kind. Maybe this is a normal trend in the US, too, I don't know, but it was a bit of a shock for me. The second is drop-crotch pants [look it up, seriously]. It's a girl thing, and you have to be VERY cool to pull it off, but the people I have seen wearing them have done it well. And maybe this is normal, too.