“Two-fifths,” I said on the second landing.
“What are you doing?” Mike asked me.
“I like to do math in my head when I do reps at the gym. It
keeps my mind busy. So I’m doing it with these steps. Halfway!”
“I hate it. Stop.”
“What? Why? Don’t you like knowing how much further you have
to go?”
“You’re like – in a group of POWs that is being forced to
march a long distance, you’re like the one who goes, ‘it’s okay guys, we’re
over halfway!’”
“Did you just compare these five flights of stairs to being
a POW?”
“Yes. I did.”
“Huh. Seven-tenths!”
Mike and I had a very busy day on Day 2. We started off
seeing if there was a way we could fix his phone. The screen is cracked and the
LED is messed up because it fell from the tray table to the floor of the plane
on the flight over.
“It fell.” I knocked it over. I’m a bad girlfriend.
Mike literally just told me the new Samsung 8 is the most
fragile Samsung on the market ever. They used to make Samsungs more durable
than iPhones, but now they’re making them fragile AND making them hard as balls
to replace. Mike’s new phone is beautiful but that’s a shitty way to treat
customers.
So it turned out that, no, Mike’s phone could not be fixed.
It still mostly works, but sometimes the LED screen gets all blinky and jittery
and then starts phantom pressing buttons on its own. It’s hard to tell when it
will happen. The pictures, however, are fantastic. Great quality.
After a very average croque madame for breakfast and a
disappointing trip to the Samsung store, Mike and I walk through the Jardin de
Tuileries. It’s a beautiful walk with a lot of Roman statues that takes us
right up to the Arc de Triomphe and then the Louvre.
Mike takes a picture of every single statue in the park.
Every. Single. One. I sit down and buy us tickets for the Louvre, only to find
out they’re closed on Tuesdays, I accidentally purchased for Wednesday, and
Wednesday is our Versailles day so that won’t work at all. An email fixed it so
we are going on Thursday now, but still. Every other museum in Paris is closed
on Mondays. The Louvre is closed on Tuesdays. Mk.
So instead, Mike and I wandered around the Palais Royale, a
courtyard where revolutionaries during the French Revolution and throughout the
19th century used to meet.
“Camille Desmoulins used to work,” Mike told
me.
“Who?”
“He was a contemporary of Robespierre. He would give these
long, improvised, rambling speeches, and people would boo him or yell questions
at him. And any time a police officer would walk by, he’d say ‘see! They’re
coming after me! I’m too dangerous for them!’ And the crowd would eat that up.”
“Huh. People have always been dumb I guess.”
“Yeah. You see these movies with the polished speeches, and
the crowd is quiet, and it wasn’t like that at all. It was a rowdy crowd that
the speechmaker would get all riled up. He wrote his most famous one, A Call to Arms, that led to the storming of the Bastille."
Interesting. Then I sat down next to a fountain, Mike gave
me his backpack and said “I’ll be right back” as he ran off to take pictures,
and I stared at the water and the architecture for 10 minutes while I thought
my thoughts and rested. Also my phone was dead, so I couldn’t take any
pictures.
 |
| Mike at the Palais Royale |
 |
| Last pic before my phone died :( |
After the Palais Royale, we visited the Musée D’Orsay.
Neither of us really knew what to expect, so when we walk into that first room
that is entirely marble and gold and crazy opulent, we were both like “oh damn,
this is fancy.”
“What do you think they even used this room for?” I asked
Mike.
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe the nursery.”
“Yeah. Or the garage.”
“Storage.”
“Pantry.”
 |
| Laidback. |
They have a Van Gogh exhibit, which is cool, because smart
phones have absolutely ruined going to museums. That picture you’re taking of
the Van Gogh painting looks like every other photo of a Van Gogh painting you
can find online, so the only thing you’re succeeding in doing is blocking my
view and making me hate you. (I guess that’s two things.)
I did take a photo of one painting because it was gay Jesus
and the gay apostles and I felt like I had to. (By this time I had managed to charge my phone up to 17% so it was good to go.)
 |
| Homosexuality is a sin. |
After the Musée d’Orsay, Mike and I grabbed a crepe from
this hole in the wall right across from where a couple of my parents’ friends
used to live, right off St. Michael Square. Mike got a savory crepe, with ham
and cheese and egg and onion, and I got a butter and sugar crepe, and it was
exactly everything I wanted in that moment. I think the butter and sugar crepe
is super underrated. It’s simple yet delicious. I might also think that because
I am allergic to nutella. I don’t know. The butter and sugar crepe is great.
It was literally the best food I could hope to eat at that exact moment. I was underselling it.
We stop by the Notre Dame but don’t go inside because
there’s a line and we got some catacombs to get to, and that’s like a mile and
a half away and we got an hour. So, for the first time during the trip, because the bottom of my feet are already about to fall off, Mike and I take the Metro.
We did take one wrong train because it’s been a long time
since I’ve taken public transportation in Paris and I asked myself how I
managed any of this when I was 20 years old, but after that one mishap it was
fairly easy to navigate. And way faster than walking! I super recommend it.
“Just follow directions,” Mike said, mocking my earlier
edict about how easy the metro was when we took a wrong train due to my
confusion. (But three guesses on who is doing the navigating to begin with down
here.)
Also, seeing print ads for sitcoms and movies in another
language is one of my favorite things. Since you don’t have any context on the
show or movie in question, you mostly just have facial expressions. Mike and I
made up a new game where we mimic facial expressions to show personality traits
of people in sitcoms. It’s so fun. It’s the most fun game I’ve ever played.
 |
| What is this guy thinking????? |
“Tomorrow, we should walk to Versailles,” Mike said.
“That’s not a thing.”
“Uh, actually Caitlin, leading up to the French Revolution,
the Women’s March-“
“Okay. Fine. I’ll meet you there.”
We get to the catacombs and I gotta say, the catacombs are awesome. Paris is a natural resource for
some kind of limestone, which they used to build structures such as Notre Dame
with. At some point, when the cemeteries around Paris became too full, they started
emptying the cemeteries and dumping them down here. Apparently, if you lived
next to Cemetery of the Innocents before it shut down in the 1700s, the stench
and overflowing dead-ness of the cemetery was so overwhelming that your milk
would go bad in a matter of hours. GROSS. Being alive in historical times
sounds terrible.
The catacombs have been open for tours since the 1800s, but
you had to be fancy royalty/Otto van Bismarck to gain entrance at that time.
Now any shmuck can get in. Like us!
 |
| Fake news. The earth is only 6,000 years old. (I am killing it with the religion jokes today!!!) |
 |
| "You are invited not to touch and not to smoke in the ossuary." Only in France would you need to tell people not to smoke in underground alleyways. |
 |
| Very organized. Damn. |
 |
| #artsy |
 |
| Stop! It's here, the empire of the dead. |
 |
| Stop! It's here, the empire of the dead. Also, a killer smile! |
Also, a couple brought their infant to the catacombs and at one point he started crying because he's in a damp, dark, space underground that is surrounded by bones and skulls. But hey, I get it. There's just not very much to do in this city. Gotta get out and enjoy something.
After the catacombs, Mike and I went to dinner and Mike was
introduced to profiteroles for the first time. He is a fan now. The woman next
to us insisted he get profiteroles if he didn’t know what they were and she was
right and I was right and Mike was very grateful obviously.
Back at the room, I flopped on the bed immediately.
“You look like one of those girls in the paintings at the
museum,” Mike told me.
“Oh yeah? Is it called ‘I’m never walking again and you can’t
make me’?”
“No. It’s called ‘The Woman.’”
We’re exhausted. Versailles tomorrow!!! (Not walking.)
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