Yesterday I spent over twelve consecutive hours sightseeing and generally bopping around Paris. To begin the day, I met Steve at 10:00 am in a café near the Luxembourg Gardens for a post-program interview. After a nice talk and a bit of camera-shy muttering on my part when the video camera and microphone emerged, I took the RER B out to Gare du Nord and picked up the train tickets to Normandy which I had purchased online Wednesday evening. Okay, let's start counting public transportation lines: just the RER B so far.
Around 11:00 I went back to St. Michel-Notre Dame (still the RER B, but the station has been closed for a week so I had to exit through the Cluny-Sorbonne metro stop - does that count as another half of a line? No, it does not.) and walked the few blocks to Ile-St-Louis where I had seen an interesting-looking shop about a month ago when I was walking around in the night-rain with Margaret. I suspected that it would be a good place to finish my souvenir shopping, and I was correct. I walked the perimeter of the island for fun and then called Kierstin, with whom I had planned to visit the Natural History Museum near the Jardin des Plantes.
We decided to meet at the Place Monge metro stop, so I took the M10 from Cluny-Sorbonne and transferred to the M7 at Jussieu, only a stop away from my goal. (Three lines now!) It only took us a few minutes to find the museum and decide that we thoroughly approved of the fantastically-mustachioed ticket taker with the Indiana Jones hat who looked at our student IDs and let us in free. The ground floor showcased the Gallery of Comparative Anatomy. Wow:
Row after crowded row of wired skeletons of all manners of creature. You name it, it's here. Hippopotamus, toucan, giraffe, wolf, bat, elephant, turtle, tiger, gerbil, dog, snake, manatee, elk... Kierstin and I were fascinated, to put it mildly. We slowly worked our way through the aisles exclaiming over unexpected structures and cunning displays. (Who knew that those little horns on giraffes' heads actually have their own bones? And I find it very plausible that elephant skulls originally inspired the Cyclops myths.) Caleb caught up with us while we were still stunned by...the whales. Whales are really big! And they have hand bones! And some of them have baleen! Which as Caleb said is like an inside-out mustache! And really really big!
Also they have a narwhal. When this fact became apparent, a commotion was caused, because they are so awesome.
Even as I happily perused the specimens, I didn't forget the downside to galleries such as this: I'm sure most of the skeletons were collected in the bad old days by the method of "shoot as many different things as you can." While it's easy to agree that such a method is bad, and I very much hope it's not used anymore, at least these specimens have been preserved and used and are still edifying visitors over a hundred years later. It's better than the things-that-got-shot going to waste, right? Maybe?
No such moral debates cloud the enjoyment of the first-floor gallery. In a word: dinosaurs!
The gallery of paleontology featured dinosaurs and fossils and megafauna like mammoths and the (huge) (terrifying) ground sloth of North America, my personal favorite.
It turns out that, like dire wolves, cave bears are a real thing. Rather, they were a real thing, as opposed to just being dreamed up as ultra-carnivores for fantasy novels. Finally, the upper balcony featured invertebrate fossils (read: lots of really big shells). All in all, the Natural History Museum is one of my favorites of the museums I've visited in Paris. The displays are exotic and interesting, and the museum building itself has that wonderful quintessence of old-fashioned pedagogy: creaky wooden floors, a slightly musty smell, strategically-placed oscillating fans instead of central air conditioning, explanatory posters with typewriter-text painstakingly mounted on faded construction paper...If I couldn't be a physicist, I'd work in an old museum. (Well, there are a lot of places it would be fun to work, and it would actually depend on which one hired me. But the sentiment is there.)
We were done with the museum sometime before 3:00 pm and parted ways under the blessed, blessed drizzle that had unexpectedly decided to deliver us from the heat of the past week. I headed over to the old opera house, the Palais Garnier, the one that pops into everybody's head at the words "Paris opera," the setting for the Phantom of the Opera. Let's see, that involved catching the M5 at Gare d'Austerlitz and transferring to the M8 at Bastille. It's easy to tell when to leave the metro for the opera house because the correct stop is called "Opera." Five lines now total, by the way.
I paid a student-discounted few euro for a pass to poke around the areas open to the public. Yep, it's a pretty building all right. I had a particular overture in my head the whole time, and perhaps I can be forgiven a slight preoccupation with the numerous chandeliers.
Following my self-guided tour, my steps led me down the Boulevard des Capucines to the Madeleine church and then along the Rue Royal to the Place de la Concorde and the Tuileries. Owing to my lack of umbrella, I got to walk in the rain, something I've been wanting to do but had to keep forgoing out of consideration to the computer in my backpack on workdays. Picking up a crêpe sucre from a Concorde vendor, I figured I'd look around for the Musée de l'Orangerie, which I knew was nearby and featured two rooms of the vast Monet waterlilies for which he is so well-known.
I found the museum, and the (stunning) waterlilies, and - a whole corridor full of Renoirs. To think I could have missed them entirely if not for my wandering feet and a whim! The best part? Unlike the M 'O, this museum has no quarrel with amateur photographers.
Those strawberries make me want to eat strawberries. I lingered and lingered until the museum closed for the day and they kicked me out.
As far as I can tell, the Renoirs were part of an incredible private art collection that was donated to the museum at some point and contains a decent number of Cezannes (especially landscapes, hurrah!), a Monet and a Sisely, and a bunch of not-too-post impressionists with famous names like Matisse and Picasso. It was a very nice gallery indeed. And of course the huge Monet waterlilies are stare-worthy for their ethereal colors and textures. Well done, museum, well done indeed.
Okay, now what? I had an hour to kill before meeting the others at 6:45 pm on their way to the restaurant Steve had picked for our end-of-program dinner. Hopefully you won't find me lazy if I tell you that I just sat around in the Tuileries and watched the fountains do their fountain-y thing.
Dinner was great. All of us were in the same place at the same time, something that hasn't truly happened since the beginning of the program. Plus, NSF paid for the food. I was extremely hungry (don't worry, Mom, I had a waffle too in the morning that I forgot to mention) and ordered the roast chicken with mashed potatoes and profiterolles with ice cream for dessert. Mmmmmmm.
I don't honestly remember which metro line I took back to the RER B at Chatelet, but I'll be generous and assume it was the M1, since that's the route I take at least three times a week what with all the museum visits near the Tuileries. So that makes for a grand total of six public transportation lines in one day. I am getting much more than my money's worth out of my Navigo pass.
Back in my room at 10:00 pm, I showered and caught a few hours of sleep, because I was exhausted from the day. But I couldn't oversleep this morning, because I had another big day planned...
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