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waiting at the Louvre
Friday, January 25 2002
setting: Paris, France
Last night Gretchen found a little student-oriented coffee shop where the prices were considerably cheaper than your standard brasserie. We sat in the window of the place this morning and I drank a little café crème. For some reason we were grating on each other after that, so Gretchen decided to go take a tour of the Musée d'Orsay by herself while I stayed back at the hotel and read. But I didn't stay long. Eventually I hit the streets, heading to no specific location, allowing myself to become completely turned around in the weird medieval geometry of central Paris.
I was hungry, but frankly, the food I saw being vended at the little lunch markets frightened me. Who knew where oeuf might be lurking, and I didn't know the French necessary to tease out the truth on my own. In Paris, it's natural to walk around munching on a long piece of bread stuffed with various cheeses, meats, and condiments, but it not always easy to tell what exactly those sandwiches contain.
I walked all over the Left Bank and then across to the Right, where I strolled in widening circles through the commercial district to the northeast of the Louvre.
Gretchen and I had a plan to rendezvous at the Louvre at 4pm, and (since I don't have a watch) I was using my Psion as a timepiece. I didn't know this at the time, but when I'd set it to match her watch, I thought she said "quarter 'til noon" instead of what she'd actually said, "quarter 'til one." So, unbeknownst to me, I arrived at the Louvre an hour late. There I was, standing around at the bottom of the escalator as various tour groups of high school kids milled around. I couldn't help but notice that most of these groups consisted of 95% flirty girls and 5% boys who seemed to think the world had been made for them. (Had I been in their place, I would have thought the same!) Time crawled by, and I mixed things up now and then by going up and down the escalator.
At one point I saw the elevator rise to take a guy in a wheelchair up from the sub-basement to the ground floor. I'd never seen an elevator like this one before; it was like some improbable invention out of the pages of Dr. Seuss. It didn't even look like an elevator at first; it was like some sort of humble metal reception booth. But once activated, it rose as a shiny stainless steel column up through the center of the spiral stairway, stopping at the top and deploying a ramp before allowing its occupants to disembark.
After an hour of waiting, I gave up and, in stages, walked back to the Hôtel Nesle. I paused for a time outside the Louvre pyramid, looking around and hoping Gretchen would materialize. But eventually I had to leave because I kept being hassled by single young women handing me their cameras and asking me in various languages to take pictures of them standing in front of the pyramid.
As I walked across the Pont Neuf back to the Left Bank, I found myself fearing the worst, that without me being around to caution her, Gretchen had stepped out New-York-stylee in front of a hurtling Fiat and was now on life support in some Paris hospital. But there she was, in the La Brea tar bed reading, wondering where I'd been.
The Pont Neuf, which I crossed several times today.
When we went out for dinner tonight, we thought maybe we'd do Indian again, since last night it had proved such a perfect antidote to French food burnout. But then we came upon a cute little Italian place, and one can never get sick of Italian food. Gretchen ordered in French, but our Italian waiter's French wasn't much better than hers and he kept misunderstanding what she was saying, particularly when she tried to joke around with him. At the end of the meal she took pity on the guy and left what most Europeans would consider an obscenely large tip.
View a gallery of pictures from this adventure.
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