Today I woke up and it was raining, so it turned into a Semi-Homework Day, with my first stop being the Musee des Arts Decoratifs, with which we area already familiar, to pick out an object from an era relevant to one of our texts and describe it within the context of said text. I found a fantastic decorative mantelpiece-Thing that also doubled as a thermometer/barometer but was also Chinese but also had clockwork bits that moved, so that was cool, and spent more time after looking around some more, watching weird French commercials involving Neanderthals in the publicity bit of the museum. I came out, and it was not raining, but then it started to again, so I decided to go to the Musee de la Chasse et de la Nature [Hunting and Nature Museum], which our prof had mentioned, with the aside that it was 'bizarre,' which sounded good to me.
My magical fake student-for-the-year-in-France ID got me in for free, and it did not disappoint; it was organized mostly by animal [wolf, boar, bird, unicorn], with the addition of a few random rooms like the 'Blue Room' and one full of weapons, and it was pretty fun. Almost absolutely nothing was labelled, and it was not organized chronologically, and there were weird hollow glass babies and skulls everywhere and educational cabinets with fun drawers about different kinds of prey [like, each one explained where to find the animal, when, the best way to kill and skin it, and had examples of droppings and casts of paw prints and absolutely miscellaneous literature, fun], and the weapons room, the top half of a wall would be glass-fronted display cabinets, the bottom drawers that slid out and there were knives, ceramic guns, coins, arrowheads, swords, Things, and, of course, there were taxidermied animals also everywhere and contemporary Art about organs and photos of chimpanzees using forks at a dinner table and yep, it was fun.
That was kind-of long, but when I got out, it was only raining lightly, so I got my pastry for the day, and then was going to eat it Somewhere when it began raining harder, so I went to Chatlet and spent a happy few hours in a FNAC, which is like a Fandango-Best Buy-Barnes & Noble combo, and played with a double-touchsceen computer [like, in Notepad, the bottom half of the screen would turn into a keyboard and with the top you could choose where and how to edit the text, fun] and spent a while in the bookstore end of it, perusing ze frenshz literature, until it closed and it was Still Raining, aaaaaaaaaaaarghhhhh.
not sure why people dislike pigeons, these ones were super-cute:
the weapons room, do you see the glass baby??!! I know the photo is bad, sorry. Also worth mentioning, I didn't take a photo because I was being Watched, but I guess these were used in hunting? Owl feather hoods complete with beaks, which they put up on the ceiling [and also had one modelling on a fake head], but they put glass eyes where a person would look out and it was creeeepy, much creepier in person.
the bird and polar bear room ....
the trophy room:
just passing the Centre Pompidou:
a clafoutis cerise, a cherry custard-thing, pretty good, and the view looking into the courtyard of Les Halles:
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