Je Prends le Croque Monsieur

This morning I bought cheese at a cheese store in French, and then I asked directions to the grocery store in French, after which I purchased salami and lettuce in French. Dear readers, I've gone native. Soon I will be wearing shirts with particularly wide stripes and employing exaggerated hand gestures when I talk. Hell, I already watched a classic American film late at night in a hole-in-the-wall revival house. I might as well order my beret and tear up my return ticket now.

Yesterday we discovered that the Louvre is closed on Tuesdays, so we walked, and walked, and walked, down the Champs Elysées (prompting me to sing the chorus of that song "Aux Champs Elysées" that we learned the first week of French I, and MFAH's resulting look of confusion—doesn't everyone sing that over here?) toward the Arc de Triomphe until we got close enough to see it clearly as we dashed across the street, dodging scooters and large trucks. Then we backtracked to the Musée d'Orsay, which contains 19th-century French art as well as thousands of tourists, all of whom want to take a picture of ma and pa and the little one in front of Van Goughs and Monets and not so much Delacroixes and Cézannes, which was nice because I prefer the latter and was happy to leave ma and pa to all those haystacks and windmills. Buy the god damned postcard, people! It will look better anyway. And put your video camera away! When you get home and never watch the footage again, you may not realize that you didn't really experience the musuem at all. I started off my tour through the museum approving of the policy, so different than in American art museums, that allows photography, and ended by deliberately walking through people's shots because I was so sick of standing to the side while dozens of flashes went off.

Then we had a rather expensive lunch, where I learned the delights of the Croque Monsieur, which is ham and cheese on toast, although those simple words don't do this tasty snack justice. We rested our aching feet (well, I rested my aching feet and MFAH pitied me my old-before-their-time insteps) and deliberated whether we'd attempt Notre Dame or just go home for a nap. We decided to do both. Notre Dame is pretty amazing, he said banally. It's so huge, and the ceiling is so high up there, and the builders in the 12th and 13th centuries didn't have calculators or cranes, but they managed to create this stupendous monument to their faith. It's almost enough to make an atheist genuflect. Again, there were also thousands of tourists using flash photography, despite the fact that a flash is but an annoyance to those around you when your target is the chancel several hundred yards away.

Then it was nap time. One of my favorite things about this city is that no matter where you are, you can pretty much get where you're going in less than an hour. The trains are everywhere, they run constantly, and as long as you have a decent map, you can transfer with ease from one line to another, arriving back at your apartment with plenty of time for a doze. Après nap, we had dinner with Agnès et Ralph, two art historians (I think) MFAH knows, at Japanese restaurant that thankfully was not a sushi restaurant. I had a noodle soup, which I failed to eat elegantly because I still can't figure out why anyone would want to eat noodles with chopsticks. Then we took part in that most holy of Parisian experiences, the café crème in a sidewalk café somewhere along the same cobblestone streets where perhaps Hemingway and Sartre once sat drinking café crème. (But not together.) And then it was off to the cinema for what is now my favorite Michelangelo Antonioni film, because I liked it quite a bit, whereas I actively hated The Passenger and thought Blow-Up incredibly overrated. But Zabriskie Point was a compelling snapshot of the late 1960s, a strikingly beautiful film, and fodder for one of those fun "did she or didn't she" conversations on the train on the way back to the apartment. More on that later.

Today it's lunch with a Parisian movie critic, followed by a trip to the holy of holies—the Cinémathèque Francaise—for a screening of Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight and later a screening of Brandherd, a German silent film so unknown to the United States that it as yet lacks five votes on the IMDB. Perhaps I will be #5.