Wednesday the 30th of July, 2008 – Paris contains museums.

We got up to leave early to beat the lines at the Musée d'Orsay (the other day had frightened us off). Emm and I had to change from our eight-bedder room to another, so we checked out at the desk and left our bags on Josh’s bed until we could check back in later that afternoon.
We got to the d’Orsay, sans lines. There was room upon room of art from all over, everything from the Impressionists to Post-Impressionists, the Classics to the Neo-Classics. We spent quite a while there.

Oh, there were also tourists taking photos of the paintings.
WHO TAKES PHOTOS OF PAINTINGS AT A MUSEUM?

I mean, because - y’know - why settle for a glossy reproduction in any number of art books when you can have your very own poor-quality, shadowed and improperly angled on your digital camera. Morons.

Anyway, I was taken back to my days of year 11 and 12 art history at school. Like Emma, I was trying to remember all the significance of each symbol and brushstroke, and why they shocked and astounded and seduced each particular society.

Lunch was at a cafe not far from the museum, with quiche for Emm and I (hurray for quiche!) and pasta for Josh. We all had salad.

Next was the Centre Pompidou, which I was obviously very excited about. I’ll say this now: I prefer the Tate Modern. How’s that for home-town spirit?

The building itself was fantastically whimsical – all exposed escalators and block-coloured pipes - and contained a great little product design orientated gift shop on the first floor, which we could have spent all day at. We went to check out the main exhibition ‘d'jour’; a large and winding existential/ teological exhibit focusing on the exploratory relationship of artists to the concept of God. It was called Traces de Sacre.

Ok, so it was good and all. But really...do you really need to rely on Damien Hirst that heavily? Oh and also, I didn’t think too highly of the curation – they seemed to want their patrons to follow a particular path through the works but it just didn’t work out. People were scattered all willy-nilly, confused and scared. It really took me back to my course unit on the Philosophy of Religion that I did back in uni. This isn’t necessarily a good thing, as I thought some of the commentary was quite theoretically advanced and therefore, inevitably confusing. And monotonous. Don’t get me wrong, I liked the exhibit over all, but I had my doubts.

Then the most amazing thing happened: we went for a picnic on the canal. Fabulous.

On the menu of items that we bought from the marche:

- a ring of soft goats’ cheese (Josh was getting annoyed at the length of time it took for Emm and - I to select a delicious cheese at the marche),
- a tin of sun-dried tomatoes,
- a tub of tabbouleh (yum yum),
- a bottle of Lychee liqueur, and
- a bottle of Sprite.

It was so lovely.

We ended up so exhausted by food, sun and good times that, after spending some time attempting to socialise with some stereotypically uncouth and uninteresting Australian tourists at the bar, we watched the entirity of Fight Club in the chill out room.

Then sleep.