The First Twenty-Four (Hours)

I woke in a panic as I had missed free breakfast at the hotel and had overslept to counterbalance the difference between my intended and actual bedtimes. I was due uptown (which is a totally inaccurate but wholly-of-habit term) in 43 minutes to meet Mike and Zoe who only a week before had not been married.

So I showered and sang and flossed and unpacked a little and FREAKED OUT and left with 20 minutes to go. I made it on time, of course, as there would have been a Metro collapse or a foreign occupation of Paris if I had left right away. We scrapped our plan to visit the Jewish Museum of Art and History for sushi (an interesting, but excellent choice of a first meal in Paris) and recountings of the wedding and then took the trip to the Jewish Museum of Art and History, which was...unique?

The art was almost engaging, the Jewish relics of France were almost intriguing, and like just about every other Jewish person, I feel guilty to freely admit that I am usually a little bit underwhelmed by Jewish Museums.

Probably the strangest part of the museum were the little blurbs from French Jews in each area of the museum. In about two paragraphs, Jews would prattle on about their lives and identities and what it meant to be Jewish. It was kind of a fucking downer.

Most of them said they used to have this inimitable feeling of connection to their Jewishness, but yeah, they don't really practice anymore. 90% of Jews probably feel that way, but you aren't supposed to admit that, especially not in a museum! What if your mother saw it? Other such accounts were straight out of their French /Sartre/existentialist milieu and made no real sense:

Moroccan Jew: I grew up being told to hate Arabs, but then I had milk with one of the them in an August of my childhood and it was nice because we thought we were the same and then I saw a green sink today and it reminded me of how I don't believe in fraises and God anymore.

Artsy French person: I knew I was born Jewish, but then I became a Buddhist. Somehow I know they were are all related, but I am frankly too high to even manage to explain what the meaning of it is and how it affects my own decay and suffering. Zee end.

I digress. The art and the artifacts were nice to view, Sephardic talit and the like, but we had more fun being weirded out by the random testimonials. The honeymooning couple cooed at the Ketuhbot (marriage contracts) and I lovingly stroked copies of American Pastoral and The Human Stain translated into French and available for purchase in the gift shop.

I balked on the purchase and in the courtyard, Mike and I began to explain the roots of Modern Zionism beside a large statue of Alfred Dreyfus. This happened after Zoe decided that she wanted to teach Mike how to waltz and so they waltzed to silence in the courtyard while I voyeuristically took pictures like one does in a nature sanctuary.

They didn't mind or notice. The museum was underpopulated so it was the most privacy we'd have outside all day. Otherwise, it might have been a notch off of a completely idyllic moment.

Afterhand we all got a crepe outside the Centre Pompidou (admired it but didn't go in), and strolled past the two-street remnant of the Paris Jewish Quarter where they had awesome-smelling falafel and kosher delis and cute little shops and we listened to a 107-year-old woman as she took us through a little synagogue tucked away from the street, speaking very demonstratively in French with us nodding along mostly clueless.

It was a small place with no frills or windows, but a whole room for an arc, full of Torah scrolls and it was very impressive. She asked to donate and we did and left, plotting a later return for Shabbat services, which didn't happen because we eventually split ways and I felt self-conscious in my tennis shoes.

We stopped in the Musee Carnavalet because it had a nice looking garden and went to the Place des Vosges, where three years while backpacking before I met a French pianist there who invited me to see his apartment complex because it was near Victor Hugo's (of Les Miserables fame), he then invited me in, got me drunk on absinthe with his dog Bogey, played an earth-shattering, immaculately-performed piece of music on his grand piano, and then suggested that I join him in a threesome with his ex-girlfriend, who surprisingly enough wasn't going to be there til morning. I bolted and giggled, not necessarily in that order. Fucking men...They never just want to a show you where Victor Hugo lived, do they?

The point being that I never got to see the Place des Vosges, which is a scenic park in Le Marais completely surrounded by a square of unreal apartment mansions, one of which housed Victor Hugo like two hundred years ago. It is a wonderful spot and we sat and awed and got cold watching a woman breastfeed on the bench across from us and decided to go for some wine.

We went to a bar behind the Picasso Museum, which we didn't go into, and we had a quiche and some red wine and got a little heavy on it. The bar was a lounge type of place with plush couches and was meant to look like a living room if you had $250,000 to spend on a living room. It was very cool and they had scrabble, which we played (Mike and Zoe vs. me) and naturally, I won (take that honeymooners!).

The interesting thing about French scrabble is that the point values are different for each letter because of their different use in French and English. Thus, a K or a Y (both usually worth four points in English were now worth ten) and a Q (usually worth ten in English I think was only worth five). This is about as deep into the cultural differences between France and America as I really get on wine. If this had been a hash bar in Amsterdam, you would have closed Firefox ten minutes ago and I would have a PEN/Faulkner Award.

Mike and Zoe parted and I walked agendaless for another five hours, passing the Colonne de Julliett by the Bastille...

walking the Seine, circling Notre Dame, visiting the Pantheon...

having steak and wine and coffee in a little bistro in the Latin Quarter by the Sorbonne, and masturbating (emotionally) over what my life would have been like if I had grown up in France in typical Adam fashion.

Though I've been here before, I can't qualify in description what it feels like to just walk around here, but for those of you who have visited, you know that Paris, even without much extracurricular activity, is an a matchless experience in itself.

I didn't enter the places that would have really stopped me in my tracks and made me think or change, but I found myself turning corners and wanting to linger like I was back ambling the sidelines at some middle school dance, studying my shoes and hoping for something intangible or talking to someone I couldn't quite communicate with. I caught myself smiling a lot in these moments, especially after I gave a French person the wrong directions to the Pantheon when he was clearly in a hurry. Aww. I've never done so much in not doing much and was home by midnight, I slept for ten hours.