I got up later today, but nonetheless I still ended up walking around the Eiffel Tower for an hour to waste time before the Musee de Quai Branly opened. It's a charming neighborhood and there were crows and graffiti and stickers to photograph, so I didn't mind. Paris is quieter in the morning; you can almost feel in certain places like you have the city to yourself. Life moves around you, somewhere, and it's peaceful.
The museum itself was nice enough. Not my favorite, but not my least favorite either. There were three exhibitions that were quite good: the first on the history of jazz, the second on the halfway-lost mythology of Manreva (a grouping of islands in the Pacific), and the last on modern-day cultural blend and exchange (basically, the effect of globalization on art and culture). I loved the exhibitions. The museum itself was lovely, too, but by the time I got to it I was starting to get restless. I went through two of the galleries in full-- the Americas and Africa-- and briefly saw the Australia section of the Oceania gallery before I left. The gallery for the Americas had very little from the continental US, and from there mostly from the Sioux. There was only one artifact from the southwest-- a funerary pot from one of the Pueblos (they didn't say which). Everywhere else was pretty well represented. Kenya and many of its surrounding states were strikingly missing from the Africa gallery, but I guess I only noticed that because I was looking for it.
I have to say, the design of the building is intriguing at first, but the distribution of the light is strange and it gets to you after a while. The Louvre was more open, even if its collections of art form outside Europe are rather...limited, shall we say. But still. It was a nice museum. I enjoyed my visit.
I took the bus back to the stop near Sophie's apartment, and from there the metro to the Musee Cluny stop in order to get to the Luxembourg gardens. Once I got out of the metro, I managed to go the wrong way three times, despite the fact that there were maps of the neighborhood every so many feet. I'm just fabulously uncoordinated that way. Once I went the right way, though, I made it without a problem. I bought a vegetarian crepe from a stand near the entrance that Sophie showed me the first time I visited her here ("You have to know the crepe stands; a lot of them are second-rate, but the good ones are -really- good"). This time I had the time to visit the gardens more thoroughly: walk around, take pictures, smell the flowers, enjoy the sunshine... Let's see, what can I say about the Luxembourg gardens apart from that they're beautiful..? Well, there were some giant sequoias, which was interesting. I wouldn't have expected them there, and actually wouldn't have realised that they were giant sequoias but for the fact that there was a little sign saying so. Yes. And evidently everyone had the same idea as I did, that a nice visit to the gardens would be a good way to spend the afternoon, because it was absolutely packed (or as packed as a park can be). There was a dog that wouldn't stop barking at me while I was eating my crepe-- I guess he wanted some? His owners didn't seem to care; they would just wave a hand once in a while and say, "Oh, mais tais-toi, enfin" (Oh, shut up already), which was about as effective as it sounds.
So, yeah, that was my afternoon, rather quiet and pleasant... Once my feet started to get tired from walking around, I decided to head back.
On the way back to the bus stop, there was a little news stand that had copies of the Economist, which I've been sorely missing in France, so I bought myself a copy, which turned out to be a good idea-- no one was at the apartment when I got back and I didn't have a key, so at first I walked around and looked at the shops and restaurants in the neighborhood (including a particularly interesting new age bookshop that smelled like incense and cigarettes), but as my feet were tired I quit after half an hour and went to sit on a bench inside the gate and read until Elisabeth came home and let me in. Sophie came home a little while later, and we set out to go see an Andy Warhol exhibition...
...except that the exhibition is closed on Tuesdays, so we walked around the area for a little while, crossed the Pont Alexandre III, and walked through Invalides and eventually all the way home. It was a perfect evening, in terms of the temperature and the set of the light, and it was nice to spend time with everyone else since I've been doing things mostly solo for the past couple of days. On the way home we got a baguette with bacon bits in it to share (it was...interesting?), had dinner, and now we're just relaxing. Everyone is on their own laptop, which is amusing. And now I suppose I'll write something, if I haven't written enough already, or read. We'll see.
Tomorrow we're going to a mime show, which should be interesting, and apart from that I don't believe there's anything on the radar. But in Paris, you never know. Stay tuned!
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