We’re changing up the flavor of the blog for this post, because the last several days in Paris tell a very different story. As we said at the end of our last post, we had a surge of chaos hit us (of our own making, to be sure). A lot of reservations had to be changed or cancelled, and there was a long spell where the question boiled down to “just admit defeat and go home, or spend more time in Paris.” Now, that sounds like an easy decision, right? “Oh darn, more time in one of the world’s great cities.” Yeeeaaaahh.. So, this is where knowing thyself comes into play. The tuition was pretty high, but this was the class where we learned that a week in Paris that we’re expecting is very different from a week in Paris that caught us by surprise.

The first thing we did was establish where we’d stay. It turned out that the flat we had been staying in and liked so much, was still available! So that was easy… except that, in the chaos of cancelling and changing plans there had been a variant where Lisa stayed in Paris while John flew back to Portugal for his license. While that plan was “active”, we booked a hotel room for the night using rewards points of the non-refundable variety. So, we actually packed up and stayed in a hotel for the night, then moved back in to our flat. Oooonnn the other hand, the place we moved in to wasn’t so bad. A block or so from the Tuileries Garden, right next door to places like the Ritz, it was pretty spiffy. It was absolutely the kind of place we’d never spend our money (in excess of €1,000 a night when there isn’t a special on) but the points were reasonable enough. Anyway, getting treated like we must be secretly wealthy people who dress bougie to blend in was kind of fun. Best story of the day was walking through a gaggle of teens when going to dinner, then again the next day when going out and coming back. I finally stopped at the Concierge desk and asked if somebody famous was at the hotel or something? “No need to tell me who, I’m just curious about the kids outside.” The concierge goes poker faced and says (in good English but a classic French accent) “I believe there is someone who… makes.. the TikToks?” To which I replied “oh for fuck’s sake” before catching myself. “Oh, please forgive me,” I began, but he interrupted me with a quick “oh no sir, I feel exactly the same way.” So that was fun.

We settle back into our flat easily enough, since we already knew where the towels were and how the washing machine worked. Then we got into how to spend our remaining 4-5 days… and that’s when it got tricky. There was the incredibly “drawn out” feeling to being there. Obviously different people would react differently, but to us we had been “done” with Paris, and had had lovely conversations about future trips. We legitimately didn’t know how to pivot, at least not completely. We went on a lovely walk that Lisa had researched that took us through these really cool “Passages”, which are … well, imagine that an alley between blocks had a roof put over it, and all the shops spun around so their storefronts faced the alley. That’s kind of it.

We took in a lot of ambience. We walked the garden paths and ate every variety of French food that we could come up with. At the risk of sounding like a broken, Lisa has been posting really nice reviews of our meals while traveling, up to and including our last one at Au Bourguignon du Marais. After we finished there, we packed it up and headed for home. It was a strange week. We were in one of favorite destinations, but we had been turned around on our plans. We had known going into our trip that after so much time in cities, what we’d need is a more contemplative pace; scenery instead of grand sites. As a result, when we reset our plans we had a much less successful trip. I don’t think we’re at fault per se, we made the best of a tricky situation in real time and it was far from bad.

In 2007 we took our first overseas trip together, to London for about two weeks. Two truths in our lives came out of that trip, along with a hundred memories: 1, the travel bug had well and truly hit us, and 2, we had so much to learn. I imagine we’ll spell it out in more detail some day, but from packing our bags to when we landed to where we stayed and what we did there, we’d repeat almost none of it. Over our many trips we upgraded what we knew about everything when it came to our traveling. What we’ve realized with a little hindsight is that this trip was, in a lot of ways, a new London trip. We live an entirely different life now, with different prospects and different goals. Much of what we knew about how to travel effectively is going to need revamping. It’s a daunting prospect, but it’s also exciting. Let’s see how it goes!

Rejuvenated after a nice evening together, we played the Museum game once again. We mentioned this earlier, but there was in fact a die roll involved. See, this all goes back to us redefining what exactly our travels are. They aren’t vacations, because what exactly are we vacating from? These trips are the point of this whole endeavor, so we are thinking about them differently. For one thing, we’re not even pretending that we’re going to do all of a place, certainly not a place like Paris, all in one visit. Rather than being a concern if this is probably our only visit, it’s actually a relief. Since we know we’re not going to get it all done in one go, the order we do things in doesn’t really matter (much). And so – Lisa put together a list of 12 locations we want to visit at some point, and then we roll a d12 in the morning to discover where we’re going. And so, we rolled the die and came up with the Musée de l’Orangerie.

This particular museum is kind of funky. First of all, it’s located in a corner of the Tuileries Gardens which is what people in the real estate biz call a “prime location.” Which is to say, it’s in a world famous garden, at the other end of which is the Louvre, with the Seine on one side and a row of some of the hoitiest of the toity hotels and shops in Paris. Secondly, for all of this prime location it is a remarkably compact and focused museum. It essentially houses three things: one, a modest space for temporary exhibitions, more or less one long hallway. When we were there it was a single piece by David Hockney entitled “A Year in Normandy.” (I think it’s safe to say that we both belong to the category of people who view Hockney with a shrug. This could easily be our philistine tastes, but there ya go.) Two, it houses the collections of two deceased art collectors, Jean Walter and Paul Guillaume. Both men left the same woman behind as a widow (probably not simultaneously). She arranged a gift to the state of their collections provided that they were displayed “appropriately.” Apparently, one of the most exquisite locations in all of France was deemed appropriate by both herself and France. So that’s nice. And third (and most excitingly), the top of the museum houses eight monumental paintings by Claude Monet, the Water Lilies.

You’ve probably heard of Monet’s water lilies, gods know he painted a ton of them. These are different, however. There are eight panels, each of which is 2 meters tall. Four are displayed in each of two oval rooms in a way meant to be reminiscent of an infinity symbol. All told they are roughly 91 meters long. It’s … shocking. They’re beautiful, but that doesn’t really explain their effect. We didn’t get a great picture of the rooms (you’d be in people’s way if you tried to get the right angle) so I’m pulling this from wikipedia:

They’re magnificent. They’re absurd. I wish we could spend longer with them. We will spend longer with them. Sadly, despite admonitions and signage to observe silence while in the rooms, people were quite chatty, and it made it difficult to really lose yourself in them. Strangely, that day at least it seemed to be a hangout spot for young women; like college age or maybe young professionals. Despite their chatter, we spent a good amount of time just looking at the paintings, and then went home. Dinner that night was at Salento, a teeeeny little Italian spot just around the corner from our flat. Unsurprisingly, Lisa has a lovely review that captures the evening quite well over on our Facebook page.

The next day was purposefully quiet. We had to make sure that our laundry was caught up so that we could get packed up and have a good night’s sleep, because the next morning we were picking up our car rental and heading out for a a week or so in the Loire Valley. The castles! The scenery! It would be a grand adventure.

Except.

At about 4 PM, Lisa looks up from her laptop where she was finalizing a couple things and says, wide eyed, “do you have your driver’s license?” This is not as strange a question as you might think. We don’t have a car over here. We have our passports with our D7 visas with us at all times (some day hopefully we can carry our residence cards, but for now it’s passports). We both had long since tucked our licenses away for safe keeping. Had I brought mine with me?

You know that thing you do (or maybe you don’t) where you’re certain of the answer but you still go through the motions of a thorough search, partly “just in case” and partly to give your brain a chance to recover from shock? So that happened. “No, I don’t. Do you?” I replied eventually. Lisa went through a similar drill, and once that was over we began a several-hour journey of discovery and disappointment. We confirmed that we couldn’t rent a car with facsimiles of our licenses. We briefly toyed with the idea of one of us flying to Portugal, getting our licenses, and flying back. This seemed like the least bad idea until we remembered that our visas had very strict rules about how many times they would get us across the Portuguese border, and we’d basically screw up all of our long term plans if we did this. We pondered a variety of options (trains, buses, hired cars, quitting the whole trip and going back to Portugal) before finally, finally deciding that making the best of the situation would mean staying in Paris for another week or so. “Oh no, trapped in Paris” you might say, and we definitely saw the silver lining here, but there’s still a difference between planning to be in a place and having to be in a place. And so, with some fast communication to our AirBnB host we managed to secure the exact same flat for another week. More or less. We’ll talk a little about the fallout of our shenanigans and finish up our trip next time.

Our next day dawned… well, still cold and gloomy, but with just a touch of I don’t know what. Lisa was feeling a little peaky, and was ready for a quiet day in. She suggested, however, that John (ok, this post is pretty much all me, so I’m going to drop the pronoun games, kk?) go to the Musée d’Orsay, which is a) my absolute favorite place, maybe on the planet and this is not an exaggeration, and b) not her favorite, though she likes it fine. She’s been a couple of times now and wasn’t going to be pained by skipping it once. I pretended to be put out by the suggestion for a few minutes before scampering out of the flat with Road Runner spinny legs and a cloud of dust, pausing only to throw on my coat and tug on my gloves against the chill. (That’s some foreshadowing, y’all.) I head to the taxi stand about 200 meters from where we were staying; seriously this may be my favorite short-term accommodation ever, factoring in all the amenities. I hop in, make a little small talk with the driver, pull off my gloves, and even take a couple of photos out the window as we drove through the Louvre, passing a view of the Eiffel Tower, to get to Musée d’Orsay. (MOAR FORESHADOWING.) He drops me off across the street, and I go to the completely empty queue to get in to the museum. Entering the foyer, I pull off my backpack to go through the metal detector… and suddenly realize that I’m not wearing my wedding ring.

This, of course, sets me off in a panic. I frantically pat myself down, look around, check pockets etc… but I’m starting to hold up the line. The security guard, not unkindly, says something in French that I parse out as a mixture of “move it along” and “is something the matter?” I hold up my left hand and point emphatically at my ring finger; her eyebrows raise as she immediately gets it. (Charades, the international language.) So I scoot through the metal detector and immediately head out the exit. I make my way to the front entrance doors again and begin to methodically retrace my steps. There is no crowd to navigate, which is good.

Two things kept me from being optimistic, however. First, note the color of the pavement. Now, learn that I have… sigh had… a white gold wedding band. It was a half-hour or so of mounting frustration. And second, I was already 99% certain my ring came off in the taxi when I took my gloves off. See, I’ve lost a modest amount of weight relative to our wedding day; not shockingly transformative or anything, but enough that my ring has had a little play in it. So, while it would be highly unlikely that it just magically slid off my finger while walking and without me noticing, it was all too easy to imagine it being pulled off with my fairly snug gloves, and I might not have felt anything else what with the glove coming off. After confirming that my taxi was long gone, I leaned against the low stone wall overlooking the Seine and called Lisa.

So, skipping intensely personal conversations, she was fine. I was more upset than she was. Not that she wasn’t bummed, but my wife is a compassionate and reasonable person and understood that sometimes the universe decides that what you need is a kick between the legs. In fact, I was going to come home but she told me I was already there and since there was nothing to be done I should still go and enjoy the museum. Wow. But you know, when you think clearly about it (which she is amazing at doing) she was right; what’s done is done, and Paris still lies before us. In I went.

Why do I say that Musée d’Orsay may be my absolute favorite place? It’s a lot of things. For starters, I have discovered in the (hopefully) middle of my life that I just plain love a museum; no idea where it came from, I didn’t study art, ever. I didn’t get taken to these kinds of things as a kid, at least not more than every other kid. Anyway, at some point I realized that I love reading the little cards, and listening to a guide if there is one, and just absorbing the visual arts. Before this gets too pretentious, I want to be clear that I don’t think I have any particular insights, and I don’t think I’m somehow more in tune with museums than you or anybody else. All I know is I that I absolutely love it. So, that’s museums. As far as Orsay goes, I think the building is absolutely gorgeous. I also love how compact it is; it’s like a beehive of art treasure, and you can wend your way through it in such way that there’s nary a step wasted getting you to the next little room or cove. And then, to top it all off (literally; hang on) it turns out I’m a sucker for the 19th and early 20th centuries. I’m pretty sure that’s considered entry level taste in art to the real connoisseurs, but I think I’ve made it clear by now that I’m not an expert, just a passionate amateur. Anyway, Orsay is specifically geared for that period (and later into the 20th as well) so it’s just catnip. The top floor is the Impressionists exhibit (see, you hung on!) and it’s just… I really don’t have words. Some day I really am going to give myself a day to just go up there and start staring. The museum cafe is on that floor as well, just past the room, so I can break for lunch before going back in. And, again the building is just gorgeous. If God had never gotten into the cathedral business, it’s what a cathedral would be thought to look like. Musee du Louvre is bigger, and many places are grand (the National Gallery in London, the Ufizi, etc..) I suspect I’ll post a photo dump somewhere here, it’s tough to just show one picture and say “see? isn’t this great??”

I scooted back to our flat, and we went out for a lovely meal. I honestly don’t remember which one, but they almost all were. Make sure you’re seeing the restaurant reviews that Lisa has been posting over at facebook.

Story time. (Isn’t that literally the entire blog? Shaddup.) On our second trip to Paris we were there with friends. (Hi, Ryanses!) We all had a pretty similar list of must-sees, with the usual suspects of museums, scenic walks and so on. I had somehow been the one to suggest an itinerary to maximize the use of our precious time in the City of Lights and, being a group of my wife and some of our dearest friends, they readily accepted my suggestions. And it was great, really. Perhaps my favorite traveling story ever happened that week, and really it was fun all around. The last day of our stay was Tuesday, and we had saved the best for last : musée du Louvre. (Some of you are snickering already; well, no extra credit for getting to the end early. :P) European art’s crown jewel. Famous in a hundred different ways. One of the top tourist destinations in the entire world.

And also? Yeah, closed on Tuesdays.

Unsurprisingly I’ve never lived that story down, although it’s the gentle good-natured ribbing (I think? I hope?) between friends who have been through it all. That said, we have spent more time than is probably healthy talking about all the different ways we would dissect and consume every square inch of that (#*&@^#@ museum when we got our chance. Day 9 was our chance.

Having spent more approximately the same amount of time planning the Louvre as we did on our wedding, we were prepped. We don’t have a room-by-room plan, more like an overall strategy. The trick is not to do too much of the museum at once. It’s an overwhelming (literal) palace of art, and if you have any notion of actually taking in what you’re seeing you can’t do it at all at once. Or at least, we can’t. So our plan is to either a) have a nice meal and then spend the afternoon there, or b) spend the morning until whenever we’re hungry and then break for a meal. On a “b” day, we allow for the possibility that after having a nibble we might go back for a little bit more.

For this first day, we decided to start with a special exhibition they were hosting, “Paris & Athens”, which explored (via the visual arts, natch) the rise of the modern Greek state. It was really fascinating; the pieces of art weren’t “famous” but they were amazing. In particular we loved these absolutely gigantic drawings of sites like Delphi, meticulously depicting the site as it was at the time so that it could be displayed at a massive exhibition in Paris at the turn of the century. In a somewhat common practice, especially before the ubiquity of photography, these enormous depictions would be done for numerous locations and then sent on tour, they being the closest most people across the world would ever get to seeing them at all. The Delphi piece in particular was fascinating because it was paired with an identically sized work, by the same artist, where they took their own liberty to depict what the site might have looked like “back in the day”.

After the Paris-Athens exhibit we paused for lunch. This is a good time to break and examine why, exactly, we chose to make this trip in January; I mean, there are some fabulous gardens in Paris but they’re basically dirt tracks in the winter. Yes, but – there was literally no line to enter the Louvre when we arrived at 10AM. When we paused for lunch we went into one of the on-site cafes, where it was… enh, call it 1/4 full. No, the building isn’t empty, per se, but we still felt like we had the run of the place. It’s pretty great. As for the meal itself, I don’t think Lisa posted a review of this meal in particular, but she talks about museum food in general and this place fell right in line with her thoughts on the subject. In other words, “enh.”

After lunch, we began our exploration of the museum in earnest. Our plan in a nutshell: Go to one of the numbered galleries in any wing, and then wend our way through whatever that section is. In a perfect world we would finish a given section (say, French painting to the 1850s) in a day. In other words:

According to the map above, we would attempt to get through the fuchsia part of the Sully wing of the museum. If that doesn’t seem like a lot… well, those corridors are wide enough to hold two rooms side by side that are maybe 25 feet across, so you’re weaving your way through, in the example above, maybe 20 rooms. Each of which is wall-to-wall exemplar pieces of the represented era, region, and style. Believe me when I say it is a lot. When we were younger we’d talk about getting in to the museum early, doing a wing like that, then breaking for lunch, and then doing another one, but we know now that this is a recipe for burnout.

So, how was it? I mean…. it’s the Louvre. It really is informational overload to try and describe everything in detail. The highlight of the day, however, was the series of monumental propaganda pieces created by Peter Paul Reubens at the behest of Catherine, Queen of France, née Catherine de’ Medici.

They tell the tale of her life from the presentation of her portrait to Henry II of France (he swiped right, it seems), to her ascension to Queen at the cough pleadings of her court, to the untimely cough death of Henry the day after she was crowned, and on to the estrangement and reconciliation between her and her son. It’s a hell of a story, or actually hell of two stories: the truth, and what Catherine wanted told. And also, smarter people than me say that the series had a profound effect on the course of art in Europe. So that’s nice. Whatever other qualities these paintings have, they are huge. 6 or 7 feet tall (I’m guessing, I’m sure the information is out there but a quick search failed me and I’m sleeeeeepy at the moment), and altogether they take up a massive gallery all by themselves. It’s the kind of room you can spend an hour or more in, walking a few steps and then sitting on the next bench and staring; one, after the other.

A couple of hours of intensive northern European painting and we were, in fact, done for the day. 2 halls worth of art were a good start, and we could continue to look forward to future visits. We scooted home in a taxi and collapsed into another quiet night. The next day beckoned with *another* of the icons of Paris: the Musée d’Orsay. Oh, and John nearly has a nervous breakdown that day. Fun!