We awoke and, after some debate about whether or not our watches had been reset correctly, determined with a mix of surprise and horror that it was in fact 11:00 a.m. Some combination of total darkness (produced by Shari's clothespin holding shut the thick curtains), jet lag, melatonin, and total physical exhaustion had allowed us to sleep 15 hours straight.

Editor's Note: What Sam fails to mention is that he actually called his father back in California to confirm what time it was.

We'd probably missed the continental breakfast that we were entitled to as part of our package deal, but since we didn't know where or what time it was served, and since it was lunch time anyway, that was a small writeoff.

After fairly quick morning preparations, we launched ourselves into the bracing 45-degree air of the city, taking a short walk past the Louvre, across the gardens of Les Tuileries, and over one of the many bridges across the Seine.

We had heard that this was a small city and so it made perfect sense that things might be closer than we thought due to our maps being printed on a scale to which we were unaccustomed, but the knowledge and proof that that was true was starting to sink in to our brains much deeper now. We had anticipated this to some extent, and had spent time back home attempting to estimate distances in a more objective way by counting city blocks from our hotel to various places—but it turned out that Parisian blocks are also much smaller than we are used to. Everything was going to be even more convenient to our hotel than we had thought, and we had already thought it would be in the center of a lot of things!

In what seemed like just a handful of minutes, we reached and crossed the much-anticipated river Seine.

To my midwestern eyes, so used to thinking of "a major river" in terms of the Mississippi, the Seine was strikingly wimpy, little more than a tributary. Walking across its bridge was again much less distance than we thought, amounting it seemed to only a few tens of yards, perhaps enough length for a dozen cars to parallel park.

The great mystery of the Seine, I suppose, was how it managed to stay its dull shade of brown/gray all the time, since it couldn't have had much mud—its banks were encased long ago with masonry walls, in a style that must have been "de rigeur" here for many hundreds of years before Los Angeles would be falsely blamed for its invention after having done nothing more egregious than replace the fancy stonework with ugly concrete. But I didn't start pondering these mysteries just yet—there was the Seine in front of us, it looked just as it had in pictures, lined with stonework and peculiarly colorful small boats, and we stopped for a moment just to take in the very European-ness of the whole scene.

About this time, we were also starting to discover another small subtlety about which our research hadn't fully succeeded in enlightening us. While the temperatures were, as promised, very similar all day to the evening lows back home in the bay area, nobody who had been there and no guidebook had even hinted at a very basic fact: Paris is windy. Very, very windy, if you're anywhere within a couple of blocks of the Seine. Rather like San Francisco if you're near the bay, but not so bad as Chicago near the lakefront.

My gloves and long-johns were still in my suitcase back in the hotel room, but I'd at least dressed with several layers, and Shari is very much what a Southerner would refer to as "warm-natured," so we were OK, just making a mental note to add a layer tomorrow.

Almost immediately upon getting across the Seine, we reached our planned destination, the Musée d'Orsay. Spoken of much less frequently but much more glowingly than its neighbor the Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay is primarily an art museum, and boasts some of the world's best known paintings and sculptures, and includes a big exhibit of photography from the first three decades of this century. We ignored the ridiculous queue at the front door, and followed instead some very clear signs to a side door, a huge privilege accorded to us by virtue of having a 5-day general admission card good at most Paris museums and monuments. We again thanked our lucky stars we'd had such good information and such a good package travel deal! A stern-faced guard at the door where we entered was loudly turning away everyone else who tried it, but he let us in, requiring only that I stop and write the date on my museum pass card so that it could expire five days later. Shari, way ahead of me, had already done so on hers.

I was glad to know enough French to catch the word "ecrivez" in his babble, because the guard's instructions had given me the first hint of what I would quickly conclude: that although four years of high-school French is quite enough to formulate most questions a tourist might need to ask, it's totally inadequate to understand any but the simplest of the answers.

First order of business inside the Musée d'Orsay was to find the restaurant, said by the guidebooks to be a little known treasure, and get something into our stomachs—we hadn't eaten in around 18 hours. After some wandering and bickering, we found it sequestered away in a dark corner of an upper level, and with a huge queue of people waiting to get in. Oops. We scrambled to find the less-formal cafe (Le Café des Hauteurs) in yet another corner of yet another level, and while that had an equally impressive queue, the queue had a major difference: it was moving. We were seated in a few minutes, and both ordered the quiche and salad. Delicious! The cafe itself was a bright, airy place, filled with sunbeams and the noises of bustling waiters. One side was an exterior wall inset with a 30-foot diameter circle of glass which had giant backwards roman numerals around it—we were right behind, and getting our sunshine through, one of the gigantic majestic clock faces that make the building such a landmark from the outside. Talk about ambience!

After lunch, we wandered the Musée d'Orsay for a while. It amazed me that so many classic paintings by some of the most famous artists of all history were presented as they were—hung from rods on simple stone walls, mostly in thick, dingy (and ugly) gold-colored frames, and most surprising of all, with nothing between the painting and the tourists but a velvet rope set eighteen inches from the wall. Nothing but courtesy kept the tourists from touching, or even defacing, the original works of the great masters.

It didn't take me long to learn that the world's most renowned abstract art doesn't do much more for me than the abstract art selections that I might have found at the mall or the flea market. I like my paintings to LOOK LIKE something. So although there were several definite exceptions, I must admit to being such an uncultured slob that I spent more of my gawking effort on the names than the paintings. And such names they were! Degas, Van Gogh, Monet, Manet, Renoir, Seurat, Gaugin, Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Pissaro—it was a veritable who's who of art.

Editor's Note: Shari does not share the above sentiments about the art found in the museum. She thought it was wonderful. And most of the art was not abstract.

The sculpture impressed me much more than the paintings, especially in one particular gallery, where the statuary was superbly detailed. One statue of a young woman managed to render the feeling of the thin delicacy of the folds of her veil, yet the detail of her face under it as though it were really transparent, and all in marble. And it didn't hurt any that this particular gallery was a room which, with its gold leaf carving work and intricate ceiling paintings, was as spectacular as any of the chambers we would see later in the royal apartments at the palace of Versailles.

However, as good as the art and sculpture was, the real jaw-dropping show-stopper, the one thing to remember for the rest of one's life at the Musée d'Orsay was...the Musée d'Orsay! Originally built as a train station, the museum has a huge sweeping central gallery, as breathtaking in its scope as it is in its gilt ornamentation. Rarely have I ever seen a place whose architecture is so striking that no matter what is put in the building, the experience is JUST BEING THERE. Not even Notre Dame cathedral would compare.

After seeing our fill of sculpture and paintings, we decided to skip the photography exhibit and, motivated by the stunning architecture of the museum itself, checked out the architecture exhibit. This seemed to consist mostly of intricate cross- sectional models of such landmarks as l'Opéra de Paris, but the highlight was a huge model of the whole city center of Paris, made from paper in the manner of an architect's sales-pitch model of a new office park, which was underneath a giant glass floor for "aerial" viewing.

After a rest on the benches and a strategy conference, we finally left the Musée d'Orsay to walk the few blocks to the Musée Rodin, picking up bottles of the ubiquitous French brand of "Vittel" bottled water at a vendor's window along the way (verdict: better than Evian, not as good as Crystal Geyser).

For me, at least, the Vittel bottle would instantly earn a permanent place in my jacket pocket for the rest of the week, to be sipped from each day and refilled with hotel tap water each night. The French don't seem to believe in taking fluids into the body—they don't seem to install drinking fountains, don't sell drinks on every street corner, and their idea of beverages to serve with a meal is six ounces of red wine and two ounces of strong espresso coffee. The French must be among the most chronically dehydrated people in the world.

As we zigzagged down the narrow alleys that pass for streets in the 7th Arrondissement (district) of Paris, making our approach to the Musée Rodin, we heard a large number of chanting voices, and Shari caught sight of some placards being carried on a main thoroughfare a few blocks away—some kind of demonstration was occurring. To this day, we have no clue what it was, but as strangers in a foreign country, we wanted to stay as far clear of this as possible, and were fortunate that the Musée Rodin was on the near side so we didn't have to cross it. The trouble was that a police barricade had been set up in the last block of our journey—in the very last block, so that that the only access to the front entrance of the museum would be past it. However, it was far enough from the demonstration to be very quiet and relaxed there, and it looked like the officers were very unperturbed about letting pedestrians _OUT_, so it didn't seem too harmful to approach and politely inquire whether we could go _IN_.

Shari was in the lead at this point, and I suppose she hadn't noticed that the pedestrians freely passing the barricade were all headed OUT rather than IN. So, she just about jumped out of her skin when the policeman held up his hand and stopped her. I came up behind, and (largely from having rehearsed it in my head while walking up) mustered enough French to say: "nous voudrions visiter le musée de Rodin." The officer replied with a brief but dense flurry of French, out of which about all I caught was "Rodin" and his waving hand indicating we could pass. We scurried by in what we hoped was an inoffensive manner, and I counted a point for myself for having been useful enough at least on one occasion on this trip to start to make up for Shari having done most of the homework.

Chez Rodin is a building that is a bit small to be the museum that it is, but ridiculously grand and intricate, in that old-world stone-carved sort of way, to be a private residence, which is what it was. It had been Rodin's own residence, as Shari informed me: by some sort of wheeling and dealing Rodin was allowed to occupy this sumptuous house and its gardens in a prime section of Paris for free for many years in return for donating his artworks after his death. I tried to imagine someone letting me live in, say, an antebellum style mansion on the Presidio, or maybe the old seaplane terminal on Treasure Island, for a few decades in return for willing the city the tapes of my latest ASIC designs—it sounded as desirable as it wasn't plausible.

Our museum-pass cards got us quickly into the Musée Rodin without waiting in line at the ticket booth, and we proceeded to ooh and ahh over statues of the famous and the anonymous alike, some of which are made of just a portion of the body, the better to express a particular mood or emotion through the positioning, tension, and body language of just that part.

The highlights for me had to be the two statues I had heard of before: "Le Penseur" (The Thinker) and The Kiss. The Thinker is, surprisingly to me, on a pedestal in the garden, exposed to all of the elements. This might not be by the choice of the curators—many works here are still located where Rodin himself placed them, and he might not have been concerned nor expert in preservation. The deep black stone of The Thinker and my sleepiness combined to foul up my camera metering and give me just a silhouette, but Shari got a lovely photo of it.

One insider's tip if you should happen to visit there: it will probably occur to you to sit down at the base of the pedestal and pretend that you, too, are thinking. Go ahead and do so, and get your souvenir photograph, but stop before you get around to congratulating yourself on your own originality and cleverness, since I can assure you that at least every third tourist before you has done the same, and looked just as smug for having thought of it.

The Kiss, another rightfully famous statue by Rodin, surprised me by how large it was—probably the diameter of a good dining room table without the leaf, and about six feet high—and by how intricate was the detail. It was almost as good as the similar work "THE SMOOCH," in which Kermit and Miss Piggy kiss each other (as documented in my coffee table book Miss Piggy's Art Treasures of the Kermitage).

After a quick look through the gift shop and being turned off by the mob of people despite some very nice merchandise, we left there and plotted the best route to a Métro station that could be accomplished by walking only in the direction AWAY from where the demonstration was going on. This turned out to be hard, because all the Métro stops in that area were on the same major street where the demonstrators were, but we'd walked far enough from home that we didn't want to walk back, and so we persisted and were able to find an acceptable destination.

Our first encounter with the Paris Métro was, as any really good transportation system should be, quite uneventful. Our five-day unlimited tickets worked in the turnstiles without even having to stop at a ticket booth to validate them (although I came later in the week to suspect that we were supposed to, but of course we really wouldn't have known what to ask the attendant anyway). It reminded me a lot of the London Underground, although I was a bit surprised at first that the trains are so narrow.

Shari had obtained multiple Métro maps prior to the trip. In addition, there were plentiful large maps on the walls throughout all of the stations, so getting lost was really only possible due to one's own carelessness—or sometimes by the annoying fact that the paper wall maps are always torn and abraded clear through exactly at the spot representing the station you are currently in, due no doubt to the passage of so many pointing fingers.

The Métro ride put us back at our hotel a bit hungry, but late for lunch considering that we had dinner reservations in a couple of hours. So, Shari opened the French doors of our 3rd floor (really 4th floor) room and, pointing down the street, directed me a block down and a block over, past the church of St. Roch, to the friendly neighborhood crêpe-vending cart which we had seen the night before. I went there and was dazzled by the sheer number of choices for foodstuffs that could be folded into or drizzled onto to a crêpe, virtually every one of which sounded delicious. For a few Francs, I picked up two can't-lose choices: a chocolate crêpe and a Nutella-banana crêpe. When I got back to the hotel room, I learned that Shari doesn't like bananas and must have thought I'd ruined a good Nutella crêpe, but she was far too good-natured to complain, and the look on her face after biting into the chocolate crêpe convinced me that she was too delighted to want to complain anyway.

We lay around the room for the next couple of hours, resting and watching the French version of "America's Funniest Home Videos"—Video Gag. Even in French, the added sound effects and the voices dubbed onto babies and animals sounded just as stupid. When we saw in the credits that the same production company was responsible for this one as for the USA version, the only surprise to be had was that a European audience actually tolerates such dreck. I suppose it was also news to us, but not really very surprising, that stupid home videos are just as entertaining when you don't understand the least bit of the commentary.

We ventured out of the room again in time to take a quick ride on the Métro over to the 8th Arrondissement, where we had dinner reservations at an establishment called La Fermette Marbeuf. Shari had made the reservations on the Web, thus giving us at least one planned meal and saving us the pain and agony of having to make phone calls in French. They had our reservations recorded, no problem, and we were ushered to a little table near the back.

La Fermette Marbeuf had a truly incredible decor—little alcoves framed by ornate columns and lined with stained glass, arched luminous green ceilings, painting, and giltwork dominated every surface. Shari explained to me that the owners had purchased this building and begun removing the old plaster from the walls of a dingy back room, only to discover all of this decor already in place, covered and forgotten some thirty years before. The restaurant is now on the French register of historical monuments, and with good reason.

After pondering the menu over our pre-dinner "Kir Royale," a champagne drink lightly infused with cassis (black currant liqueur), we ended up both ordering the same thing without having discussed it—just great minds thinking alike. Of course we ordered "Le Menu," the set-plate meal, but we also chose exactly the same options and variants. The appetizer, (which in French terminology is called the "entrée") was delicious and not at all as unlikely as its description sounds: A fluffy bake of puff pastry containing a layer of savory sauteed leeks, served alongside a poached egg, all with a hearty sauce. For our "plat" (which is the entree), we both had the roasted guinea fowl. Delicious! If there's one thing the French know how to make, it's those complex savory sauces.

Since neither of us knew anything about wine except that we wanted to try some while in France, I ordered at random from near the low end of the price range, choosing a bottle of Beaujolais. This turned out to be a light red, fruity without being sweet, that by good fortune was an outstanding compliment to our entree and plat. Or maybe not by good fortune—I don't think you can GET a bad bottle of wine in such a place.

After our plat, Shari ordered the dessert du jour, a big fluffy chocolately cakey-moussey thing. Since my sweet tooth wasn't raging and I wanted to choose the local over the universal where possible, I decided to do something definitively European, and choose the cheese plate as a dessert. The assortment of French cheeses were all quite scrumptious! It's certainly not a dessert, but it does make quite a nice finishing course if you aren't craving sweets. We finished off the meal with coffee, served as a separate course after dessert, the tiny cups of potent brew bearing much more resemblance to Espresso than to what an American would call coffee.

Coinciding with about the latter half of our meal, we got a close-up and first-hand demonstration of why the French must hate American tourists so much. An older American couple was seated at a table less than a foot from ours, and proceeded to give an entire culture a bad name. They at no point even attempted to utter a word of French, they bickered loudly with one another, they couldn't find "le menu" (the set-plate meal) and ordered steak and potatoes! Then they argued over what vegetable came with it, then asked for their steak cooked "medium rare," which is a big mistake—the French use a completely different scale than we do, from "saignant" to "bien cuit." The most cooked end of their scale, "bien cuit", literally translates as "well cooked," but in practice corresponds roughly to medium rare, because no Frenchman would ever ruin a steak by cooking it more than that. So to order in English is really to leave your fate to the roll of the dice: will you get their interpretation of what you want, or will you get a direct translation? You never know, it depends on just how much knowledge of American culture the waiter has, and while falling back on the waiter's judgment is typically a safe thing to do in France, I wouldn't try it while being noticeably obnoixous. About the only local custom these people did seem to understand and desire to follow was the acceptability of smoking in restaurants. They both puffed away to an extreme that, if the French did it, would I'm sure lead to smoking being banned there too. We renewed our pledge to try to speak French to the French wherever possible, even when we were sure they spoke English just fine, and to maintain a standard of politeness suitable to the more-formal standards of the French culture.

After dinner, we weren't very tired yet—French meals are satisfying and divided into many courses, but the portions aren't that large, and we left this restaurant the way we would leave all restaurants in Paris: satisfied but not stuffed nor sleepy.

So, not ready to return to the hotel just yet we took a nighttime stroll along the banks of the Seine and finally underneath the Eiffel Tower, gaping in awe at the splendor of its nighttime lighting. It was a bit late to tour the tower and I didn't have my camera to photograph it, so we just enjoyed the view for a few minutes.

We then strolled towards the nearest Métro station. There actually isn't any Métro station all that close to the Eiffel tower, although that is only true in relative terms, since it is claimed that no point in Paris is more than 500 yards from a Métro station. The guide books, which conveniently call out the name of the nearest Métro station for every attraction, tell you the nearest one is "Bir-Hakeim." This misses the fact that there are several to choose from, all of equally inconvenient distances in different directions. I would see Bir-Hakeim later in the week, but this night we decided to go for a different one that seemed slightly easier to get to. The combination of darkness, lateness, distance, tiredness, and uncertainty about how good a neighborhood we were in caused our attention to wander somewhat, and there were at least two "wait, where the heck are we?" stops in which Shari's laminated map guided us once again in the right direction. After finally completing our version of the "random walk" problem, we found the Métro station before the cold and windy conditions started to get too uncomfortable.

This station was, to our great surprise, above ground and elevated. We climbed the ridiculous number of stairs, caught a quick ride home, and crawled directly into bed, exhausted but happy.

| Intro | One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Seven | Eight |

All text and photographs copyright © 1999 Sam A. Mahmoud and Sharilyn Horne.