The Long Overdue Vacation: Day 10 – Sick Day
Our bread today was poor quality. We woke up too late and all the local shops and bakeries had closed down. We had to settle for supermarket baguettes, which was kind of hard and crunchy like Shaw’s brand baguettes. Not fresh, warm, and soft. Except a Shaw’s brand baguette in France is still 10x tastier than a Shaw’s brand baguette in the US.
Ezeibe was mostly out of commission today. Poor guy tossed, turned, and moaned all night in his sleep. Waking up and hearing him struggle to breathe in his sleep was somewhere between fascinating and horrifying. With Ezeibe still in bed fighting the bug, Alan and I did what good friends do…we left him alone all day. Sickness during a trip is kind of an awful thing. It’s also inevitable. One person always falls ill when traveling in a group of more than two people for some reason. There are a lot of ways travelers deal with “the sick one,” none of them convenient or less awkward from the other. Leaving Ezeibe at home seemed to be the most mutually agreeable option. Ezeibe was getting tired of our museum obsession. Alan and I were tired of Ezeibe’s complaining of the cold and walking too much. Plus, Ezeibe was content being glued to his internet and phone. So hey, to each his own. I guess everyone was happy, except maybe Alan, who was still stuck with me all day.
So our museum du jour was the Musee d’Orsay. We had a rough start to this museum. Our day started late which meant we got to the museum during peak tourist hours. Unfortunately, the security lines for the Orsay are not quite as efficient as the Louvre. Alan and I waited a good 45 minutes outside in the freezing cold to even get into the building. Worse for me, there was a school group of Japanese tourist children one row behind us. Japanese tourist children are one level up in the irritating scale from Japanese tourist families, just slightly below the worst of all evils, Japanese tourist teenagers. I couldn’t fathom why they had to take pictures of themselves throughout the entire wait in line outside in the freaking cold. There was a separate, shorter line for groups, I don’t know why they were in our ticket line. I nearly popped a vein on my forehead every time we were adjacent to them in the queue. I wish I could’ve punched the chaperone or something to lower my anxiety and blood pressure. Sorry to make you uncomfortable with my race-hating rant, I just had to get that off my chest.
Me amongst the Japanese-tourist-children posse. Don't get it twisted, that's the smile of a psychopath who has been pushed too far.
Musee d’Orsay was Alan’s and my favorite art museum of the bunch we visited. First, the museum was a former train station, which is inherently cool. Second, the art is much more relatable. The art in the Louvre is far too biblical and academic for the normal person. And modern art pretty goes over the head of everyone as well. Orsay holds art between mid-19th to mid-20th century art, which includes the Realism, Romanticism, Impressionism, and Naturalism movements. Essentially, the time period where everyone chucked out the Bible but before they started painting surrealist, whatever-pops-up-in-my-disturbing-dreams phase. The Impressionism wing is worth the price of admission. Any Impressionist painting or poster that hangs in your house is probably in that museum (mine is Monet’s Nympheas).
So cold outside, even the polar bears went indoors.
The main area of the museum. The exhibit rooms were along the side.
The clock that sits on top of the Orsay museum. A really cool view
When we were done with that, we went back to the apartment to grab Ezeibe for dinner. Since he was in the apartment all day and was sick, we decided it should be his day to pick the restaurant we would go to. And that’s how we ended back in Japantown, sitting on stools eating Udon noodles in the corner window of a tiny hole-in-the-wall noodle restaurant. I’d rather not say any more.
Alan and I still had some juice in us after dinner. After about nine days being lame, it was about time we went out for some drinks. Alan’s girlfriend had recommended a bar where you drink out of baby bottles. Good enough hook for me, so off we went to the quiet 6th district. If I ever move to Paris, I am living in this neighborhood. This place was hipster central. We wandered a bit trying to find the bar. Unfortunately, when we found it, baby bottle bar wasn’t taking walk-ins (more on that tomorrow). Luckily, there were plenty of other decent looking cafes and bars in the neighborhood. First, we stopped in a Taschen bookstore, which is the very definition of a hipster bookstore. You may be thinking, aren’t bookstores by nature hipster? Apparently, not quite. It was amazing that this place was open at 10:30 at night. I guess they have these in the major cities in the States as well, but this was my first experience in it. I contemplated dropping 100+ euros for the Big Book of Breasts.
We went to a hipster lounge called Cafe Jade. It was a really well-designed interior, with names of famous people decorated all over the walls. There was a DJ playing techno music and plenty of cute college girls all having girly drinks. The beers we had were kind of pricey (my hipster wanna-be downfall), and I think the ambiance made Alan more uncomfortable than he led on.
Hipster bar! I mean, Oscar Wilde is tagged on the wall. You can't get more hipster than that.
We had one drink, took in the atmosphere and caught the metro back to our area before the last train ran. We figured we’d just drink by the Montmartre area where we had seen some nice cafes and bars earlier in our trip. The issue was we made some poor navigational decisions and ended up nowhere close to the nightlife. We gave up and went back to the apartment and called it night.
A somewhat forgettable day in the grand scheme of the trip, so thank god for writing this all down.