Capt Rees and His Birthday Extravaganza

Wednesday we aimed our sojourns closer to the river Seine and, after a hasty breakfast of bread and jam, set out for the Jardin des Tuileries, walking past the high fashion boutiques selling watches for 500 Euros. We found some seats next to a central fountain in the gardens and decided that rather than rush the experience of the Louvre and other museums we should appreciate the decent weather and recumbent chairs and vegetate for a spell. Afterwards Tripp and I agreed we felt much better, having shaken off the morning stiffness in our joints, so we headed for the iconic glass pyramid in the central square of the Palais de Louvre, designed by I.M. Pei and which is now the main entrance into the museum. We navigated through the throngs of tourists and after a brief period of discussion decided to wander rather than aim for specific works. This is actually quite prudent when dealing with a museum the size of the Louvre, the statistic that I found most telling about its vastness was that if you were to sped one minute in front of every work of art in the Louvre, day and night, it would take over 2 weeks before you had seen everything.

With that chilling fact in mind we entered the central of three huge wings that make up a large “U” shape and proceeded to marvel at all the beautiful and celebrated works around every corner. We saw the Venus de Milo statue, the Winged Victory of Samaranth, the wall size Jacques-Louis David paintings, and of course the Mona Lisa, which attracted the biggest crowd and apparently merited the biggest display case. Tripp marveled at the audacity and garish grandeur of the fifth “wall”, placed in the middle of the room and covered in glass, whose sole purpose was to house the Mona Lisa, a painting roughly a foot in length and width. I suppose that when Dan Brown thinks you hold the key to an unsolved mystery of Christianity, your already immense value as a work of art sky- rockets. We continued on, seeing many interesting works including one of my personal favorites by Ingres called the Turkish Bathers, a very voluptuous painting that somehow captures the feeling of a steamy sauna on canvas.

Wandering for hours and only skimming the surface of what the Louvre had to offer we settled on following our growling stomachs across the river into the quarter called St. Germain-de-Près, a very expensive arrondisement with lots of art galleries and beautiful facades. At different intervals this area of Paris was home to many of the city’s noted avant gardes, existentialist writers, and surrealist painters. After buying a baguette and cheese (yes and the obligatory bottle of cheap French wine) we marched straight back to the sunshine of the Tuileries to lounge and eat and drink to our hearts content. By this point the sun had come out and I was nicely full, so we decided that a nap was certainly in order.

After catching some rays and watching a group of about ten French kids play a spirited game of cache-cache (hide and seek), which was enough to wake us up, we hit the dusty trail and headed for the Musée d’Orsay, home to a huge collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings and sculptures. Walking through the well laid-out museum was very enjoyable and we were able to see many of the actual paintings that we are studying during this prolonged research voyage, including works by Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Monet. I was thrilled however to see what is certainly my favorite painting hanging there, Les Raboteurs de Parquet (the floor strippers) by Gustave Caillebotte, it really is a different experience seeing it in the flesh.

But why was this night different from all other nights? Because tonight Rees the great arrived from his adventures in Italy and the south of France to spend a week with us in Paris. It also happened to be his twentieth birthday so we made it a point of greeting him in style, by going out to an expensive Indian restaurant for dinner and toasting his health repeatedly. After dinner we dithered about how best to celebrate such a momentous occasion and settled on walking south till we found a club or bar worth checking out. Thus it was that the saga of Wednesday night began. Rees, Tripp, our mysterious roommate JP, and I waltzed along the streets of Paris, coming eventually to a bridge packed with groups of French youth making merry and playing music as the lights from the banks of the Seine twinkled like the stars that glistened in the water below. After marveling at the beauty and warmth of that view and the spirited raucousness of the locals, we moved on in search of an unnamed Jazz bar or other establishment, preferably with live music we agreed, and then came to the startling realization that it was just after 1 am and our hostel, which was half a city away had a lockout curfew at 2.

As the metro had stopped running we decided to hoof it back, but thanks to my phenomenal sense of direction and orientation, I was able to send us roughly a kilometer farther west than we should have been. It was at this point that Tripp took over directing us and, without a map, set us on the right track. Rees then saw that it was getting close to lockout time, so sprinted on ahead through the Parisian night, with Tripp and myself pelting along behind him shouting directions, unfortunately not aware that JP was not inclined to run after three crazy people he hardly knew and thus wasn’t following us. Somehow we came to an intersection and I saw Rees turn off to the left, which Tripp and I yelled to him wasn’t correct, but he was too far away at that point to heed our shouts, so Tripp and I jogged back to the Hostel, found it still unlocked twenty minutes after the curfew (so why the blazes did we run helter-skelter?) and decided that Rees would never be able to find the hostel since he had only been once to drop off his bags, and had admitted to us that he got lost that time as well since it was incorrectly marked on his map. What a wonderful birthday present to give someone, a night of wandering and running lost through the streets of a foreign city, topped off by sleeping on the street because you couldn’t find the hostel you paid to sleep at. However, miraculously, Rees then appeared at the door along with JP, who he had somehow run into (what were the odds?) and the night ended well with the three of us marveling at my horrendous failure to find magnetic north, and JP backing away slowly from his now clearly adrenaline crazed bunkmates. In the end, it wasn’t the night we had planned, but it was the night that transpired and it was quite an incredible experience.