la Musée d’Orsay
After leaving Notre Dame, fulfilling our spiritual needs, we visited la Musée d’Orsay, an art museum, to fulfill our cultural ones.
Being one of the few museums open on New Year’s Day, not to mention being famous for its contents, location and history—the museum is a former train station, World War II mailing center and motion picture filming sight on the River Seine and houses Impressionistic, Post-Impressionistic and French art dating from 1848 – 1914—the line was long. Waiting to enter, we spotted a young couple leaving the museum and making a beeline toward our spot in line. The young (German?) couple approached us and asked us in impeccable, barely accented English to buy their tickets for five euros each.
This was weird. Blaire and I, standing in a line of 100-plus-person line, without bringing attention to ourselves, had been approached and solicited. The couple claimed the stamped tickets would guarantee a quick re-entry.
So far in our trip, we had spoken to hardly anyone and randomly approached by no one (the French are known for respecting personal space, a reason many American tourists find them so aloof and therefor rude) so our suspicions were understandably arisen. But we figured these two people, near our own ages and friendly, seems legit and if things turned out to be a scam and we were not allowed entrance in the express lane? Well, we would still be outside a museum, waiting to get in. However, the tickets being true, we quickly entered and never again saw our helpful German friends (perhaps they were angelic constructs, a corporeal form of the Patron Saints Of Not Letting Tourists Wait In Line or something. Alas, we shall never know).
And here we thought provocative clothing on musicians was a recent development.
Looking around, we say famous paintings (pointed out by an excitable nine-year-old that seemed to know more about Art History than many adults and also seemed to hover around me, taking some kind of sick glee in rubbing my nose in my own steaming pile of ignorance of the matter), busts of (we assume) famous French people [in two pages], statues of musicians with interesting wardrobe choices [in three pages], and various plates, cups and silverware housed in what Blaire dubbed “a big goddamn china hutch.”
From its second floor, we surveyed the giant clock left over from its train station days, its obvious train platform layout, and then ate at the gilded restaurant where we were introduced to the delightfully French dish of beef tartar, an uncooked mass of seasoned, room-temperature hamburger served topped with a raw egg (all of which was wolfed down voraciously by an middle-aged French woman, who also attempted to lovingly fed it to her adorable grandchild after seeing the girls horrified looks at the dull red monstrosity crouched on the plate of sa grandmère.
Unfortunately, or desire to see paintings of distorted benches, flowers and people faded, and we headed out, back into the wondrous world of Paris.
