Marchons!

Martha with Monet's water lillies at the Orangerie:

The brand new Musee du Quai Branly:

Highlights of our first full day in Gay Paris:

1. Sleeping like goddesses til 9:30 and then having a lovely breakfast in our apartment of brioches, cheese, cherries, OJ, & coffee. We are pleased that the French have discovered Tropicana Orange Juice. We don't think this represents any serious undermining of the national commitment to haute cuisine, and it perhaps makes up for the fact that the French never got hold of Florida despite centuries of imperialst activity. Bottom line is it's vastly better than the boxed kool-aid they used to try to pass off as orange juice, and it makes American tourists happy.

2. Heading out into a WARM day at around 11:30 and managing to visit the brand new and extraordinary Musee du Quai Branly (primitive stuff from Africa, Asia, and the Americas) and then hopping over to the other side of the Seine to visit the beautifully renovated Petit Palais and the sublime Orangerie, with two huge rooms devoted to Monet's enormous water lillies. The Quai Branly is amazing both architecturally and aesthetically/philosophically. The exterior is an exquisite blend of primitive and postmodern; the inside is pleasing to be in, but the viewer is constantly reminded through all kinds of multi-media commentary of the politics of self and other involved in any journey into the primitive. You know you're not in an American museum the moment you look up and see comments from Trinh Min-Ha on the walls. It's beautifully conceived and executed. Don't know if the photo I've put in here adequately captures it, but it is an impressive space/experience.

3. Making friends with Brian and Jeanie, a sweet ex-hippy type couple from Spokane, in the Orangerie. They got amused when they saw me taking the above photo of Martha standing by the water lillies and we started chatting. We kept running into each other in the museum and wound up talking for ages, eventually exchanging contact info and telling them what restaurants to hit when they're in DC for a convention in September. It was one of those, "Gosh, haven't we met before?" kind of instant intimacies that only happens when one is far away from one's usual element and bumps into someone that feels somehow familiar. Brian wound up telling us that he has a tee-shirt that he loves wearing to places like Utah that says, "Nobody knows I'm a lesbian." Later, when we were telling them that Martha and I have been together for 22 years, I said that my tee-shirt says, "Everybody knows I'm a lesbian," so I came out when I was three and we've been together ever since. I always have mixed feelings about meeting up with other Americans when we're in Europe, but for every Gomer you meet in a Promise Keepers tee-shirt you meet two swell folks like Brian and Jeanie, so we keep striking up casual conversations when we hear American accents. Whaddaya got to lose?

4. Having a lovely risotto for dinner at a brasserie in the Latin Quarter and then stumbling upon the Lycee St. Louis, where I stayed when I was in Paris thirty years ago. We called it the Lycee St. Merde back then, because it really was a dump. The food was inedible, and we all got robbed of whatever jewelry we had brought with us from Indiana, but I still think of it fondly as the place from which my youthful conquest of the city was launched. The brasserie was Brasserie Balzar, and our table was practically out in the middle of the street, but we had a delicious little dinner in the shadow of the Sorbonne. I'm sure Simone and Jean-Paul probably dined there many times. Note to potential visitors to the City of Lights: Your wallet will be extremely light when you leave Paris. They're not kidding when they say the conversion to Euros has led to significant price increases, irrespective of the lousy (for Americans) exchange rate. Our lovely little dinner (no appetizers, no dessert; one bottle of wine, one bottle of water) cost a little over 100 euros, and this was a brasserie, not a top-drawer restaurant.

5. Being happy to get home at the end of long day and find that our internet connection was working better than it was last night. Martha's theory is that the system crashed because the French were so overcome by their triumph in the World Cup that even the computers went nuts. I'm skeptical, but glad to be up and running in the blogosphere.

See you all again soon! Bon soir!