Day 42- Tuesday 19 July

Days like these are when being short are an evolutionary advantage; whereas previously when I said 'it rained all day' there were actually some breaks in between, today it actually did rain all day, until about nine at night .... I was thinking about this as I walked to the Musee d'Orsay this morning from a metro, dodging small rivers and lakes in the sidewalk that threatened to drown my socks the whole way, that umbrellas like mine would work a lot better if I were six inches shorter. Anyways, the line was too long, but I was very amused by the communal umbrella formation, so here is a vaguely representative photo:

But the mass was pretty big in the compact line, neat. This was after remembering the Louvre closed on Tuesdays by way of stopping by there. So then I walked on a bit to the Petit Palais, this is what Paris looks like in the rain:

and this is looking inside le Grand Palais across the street:

because it isn't as well known, and got in with my magic pass [heh] and the place turned out to be very, very eclectic, starting with a decent collection of 2.5 thousand year-old Greek pottery and in the middle was a Monet and Dutch landscapes and sculpture and the end was a special exhibit on Charlotte Perriand, a designer and photographer very active in the 30s-50s who collaborated with Leger and Le Corbusier [very famous people, people] [the best bit of which was a room at the end with a lot of the different modern [as in the movement] furniture she designed, or participated in the design of, that you could try out]. A lot of randomness that was definitely good for a few hours [and the building was beautiful, too:

but no photos allowed inside, and everything was wa-ay too overpatrolled] and when I left, it was raining, so I chilled in the Carousel food court for a fair while, mostly thinking [because it wasn't just rain, it was also umbrella-eating wind and freaking cold again, in July, man] until our class met up at the Musee de Montmartre. Today's pastry just before our field trip was called a 'moka' and was basically a fancy kind of Little Debbie thing, and delicioso:

Full of paraphernalia from the region, the museum had a lot of original posters from cabarets of area [because Montmartre is wickedly known as a(n) artist/poet/writer capital/haven/dream], paintings from different centuries of the area [showing gradually how it developed from windmill-swept countryside to a super-dense bit of Paris], images of the building of Sacre Coeur near the end of the nineteenth century, so on, in four storeys of a small house-ish building.

just the area, looking roughly north, you can't see it but Paris is all spread out:

bad photo of the view from the museum, with the same vineyard pictured, the only one left in Paris whose half-litre bottles sell for about 45 euro, I believe, for charity:

yup, walking, most of Paris is not like this, btdub:

When we left, it was raining. Some of us, led by our prof, tried to find Le Chat Noir, whose well-known poster had become synonymous with Paris, until we figured out that it no longer existed. From there, I went with Lauren to get Layne, and then we met Helen after some logistics at a metro to eat dinner at Le Royal, a small resto near the Ecole Militaire. I had jambon de pays avec melon [salted ham with cantaloupe], pork with something orange:

tiramisu for dessert and actually a bit of white wine that wasn't too too nasty, and really we just chilled there for a fair while and talked, and while nobody else seemed to be as interested in Mystery Diagnosis as me, we all found common ground talking about TLC's Say Yes to the Dress, and it was good.

Weird things about France! Whistling. I'd held myself back before, knowing that it irritated CERTAIN PEOPLE, but recently took the habit back up when in solitude. Maria walked into me doing a nice operatic-pop medley and asked me what was wrong, and I checked frantically for what I was doing wrong and came up with naught, and she told me that when French people whistle it means they're bored, and that it is therefore abnormal to whistle in the house. I forgot to ask if it was rude, which is important. She went on to tell me about a previous student who liked to whistle a lot, who was taken out to coffee by the patriarch one day and apparently had a really awkward deep conversation because he thought the student was severely depressed and maladjusted.

Also weird: Rollerblading is a Thing here and it isn't weird at all to just go rollerblading about town.

Also weird: I hadn't realized until a recent convo with Vik, but guys wear scarves here and it's cool, or a better word is 'sophisticated,' I guess, and not just heavy scarves like sane people wear when its sixty Farenheit in the middle of summer but also silky ones with suits or nice shirts, or sometimes with just tee-shirts, and it's very normal, and I'd forgotten it wasn't in the US.