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.

Monday the 28th of July, 2008 - Gay Paris

So I get to the Eurail station at St Pancras International, right? And I assume that I got there with plenty of time to check-in for my 11:05 train to Paris and I’m trying to walk through the automated ticket gate but it won’t let me, and I'm thinking “why is there always a problem with anything I do!”. So I go to the desk with the man and he informs me that this is July. I'm like “uhhh I know it's July...”.

Then he shows me my ticket.
My ticket for the 28^th at 11:05.
My ticket for the 28^th at 11:05 in August.

Ba-bow.

Cue shock! Cue horror! Cue cursing myself under my breath and dashing to the Eurail ticket office, where a lady very kindly booked me on the next train (12:30) for no extra charge (it could have been 300 pounds).

Honestly, I am such a douchebag sometimes.

The worst part is...this isn’t the first time this has happened for a Eurostar train (may I remind you of the London-to-Brussels-for-Pukkelpop fiasco of ´06? The one that Sam and I swore we never tell anyone about but then proceeded to tell everyone about).

But I catch my train and all is good. While travelling, I dog-ear pages and circle items in my Time Out ´best Paris listings´ guide (I always trust those folks at TO; hereby referred to as TO for the duration of this post).

I get into Paris Nord and Emm, Josh and I have our little excitable triplet reunion. It’s hot in Paris in the summertime – much, much hotter than London, even on its good days. I’m wearing jeans and I’m schvitzing as we walk the four kilometres to the Hostel, catching up along the way. We get there and it’s this delightfully huge modern monstrosity, one big hulking cube of trendy exposed wood panelling – our hostel St Christopher’s Inn (one of a chain) and the adjoining Holiday Inn Express. I was pretty impressed with it though: all very clean, all very new. No unavoidable and scary odours. No urchins loitering in the hallway. Just a lot of Australians and Americans.

Emm and I were booked into a 6 bed down the hall from Josh's 10 bed room. We threw our backpacks into the lockers under the bed, changed and head out. We walked along the canal that our hostel is banked on and it all was so lovely and Parisian. We tried to find a bar that TO recommended but after 40 minutes, found it and decided that it was too early. We walked for quite a way before settling on a random café nearby for three ice cafes and a slice of apple pie to share.

From there, we wandered past a bar called Cafe L´Absinthe and thought ¨awesome¨ obviously, and ordered three absinthe aperitifs. It was so charming and cool, so we stayed awhile to chat and get tipsy off just a shot of absinthe and sugar painstakingly diluted into the cool water.

After that we walked to Bastille, did the tourist thing, and decided that it was probably going to rain. Which it then did. A lot.

Oh, summer! Humid rain! How lovely you are!
We would have just walked through it but we wanted to go out later and would have had anything to dry us off, so we hid in doorways and under shopfront curtains along the length of entire length of street. It was great, actually. We laughed the whole way.

It eventually stopped raining and we found our destination: a hole-in-the-wall crepe restaurant that TO had recommended. YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSS.

So good. The sweet, middle-aged lady who served us was so delightful. We drank a litre of their specialty of dry cider from special cider bowls´ before and during our crepe feast. I had the gruyere, egg and mushrooms, Josh had goats’ cheese, and Emm had Camenbare and walnuts. Then, even though we were fully sated, we just had to share a crepe suzette doused in Ramble.

We decided that we go out to a bar another night – we were pretty beat – and took the Parisian Metro back to our Hostel. There were snorers in the room and various other noisemakers, but we slept fine.

And that was day one of Paris. Thank you.