Paris, Day 2

I bet this guy owns at Pictionary.

June 15, 2009

We woke up without an alarm clock (room didn’t actually have a clock, at all), which is probably the nicest part of being on vacation. I’ve always thought that shocking yourself awake with a loud buzz is a barbaric way to start a day. They had a breakfast nook downstairs at the hotel, so we went down and enjoyed my very favorite pastry in the world, pain au chocolat. I think I had seven of them.

It was a rainy day so we thought it would be good to hit up the Louvre, a nice indoor activity. Just like NY, when it starts to rain in Paris, men magically appear on street corners hawking cheap umbrellas. Very convenient. We took the metro right to the Musee de Louvre stop and walked through the concourse underground right up into the main entrance area. We’d gotten hopelessly lost in the bowels of the Louvre last time, so we got a map and studied all the different wings. After looking at the map, we were able to determine that we were definitely going to get lost again, so we put it away and just started wandering. We saw a lot of stuff we hadn’t seen the last time we were there, and some stuff we had. We caught a glimpse of a room that was chock full of statues being stored. Gorgeous statues. They store extra art like I store canned goods.

We saw artists who set up their canvases to copy paintings that were in the Louvre. They were amazing, every detail was the exact same. I bet those replicas go for a ton on the black market.

It was still raining, so we thought we’d go on an old-fashioned date to dinner and the cinema, as the Europeans say. After ample research, we figured out that movies listed with “VO” after the title meant they were shown in English with French subtitles. There were not too many, but we opted for Sunshine Cleaning, which won something or another at Sundance. We went to buy our tickets before dinner, which struck the ticket agent as very odd. She kept explaining to us that the movie started after 9 PM, and it was only 6 PM now. We assured her we understood. I guess that is not the normal way of buying tickets.

We looked around the Bastille area and found a little cafe with an awning nearby and sat down. Bottled water is just as expensive as wine, so I couldn’t think of any excuse not to get a big ol’ carafe of red wine. I can’t really conceptualize volume in milliliters, so I just chose the highest number. Like always, we tried to speak our French and were quickly recognized as Americans, so the waiter switched to English for us. Dean ordered pasta carbonara, which had quickly became one of our favorite dishes while we were in Italy. The waiter asked him if he wanted it with “om.” It took Dean three “perdon”s and the waiter articulating “ommm” as best he could for Dean to understand the man was saying “ham.” Oui. Om would be tres bien.

We wiled away a few hours watching Paris in the rain and munching on delicious food. It’s the best waste of time ever. Then it was time to get going to our movie. The way it’s done where we went is you wait outside until they open the theatre ten minutes prior to the show time. We’re both usually pretty bad movie-talkers, but since that didn’t seem accepted, we tried to keep quiet. There were a few funny parts, and I have to admit we were the loudest guffaw-ers. Generally it was a cute flick, and it was fun to experience something so every-day in a foreign country.