Jeremy's Weblog

I recently graduated from Harvard Law School. This is my weblog. It tries to be funny. E-mail me if you like it. For an index of what's lurking in the archives, sorted by category, click here.

Saturday, December 20, 2003

I stand corrected. Apparently entree means appetizer. I was thinking of entrer. Which means enter. My notes must have gotten smudged. :) One of the more interesting places I visited yesterday was the Musee de Publicite, which is close enough to English that even I could have a pretty solid guess what it would be about. They had an exhibit on the history of Air France and all of its advertising campaigns -- and, what was truly interesting, a multimedia component where you could sit down at a computer kiosk and watch a selection of French TV ads from the last 30 years or so. I spent a solid thirty minutes watching ads for beer, soft drinks, and chocolate. It was fascinating. The other thing I noticed was that French keyboards are all mixed up. The A is where the Q should be, for example. And there are all sorts of accent marks and carets and weird characters we don't have. But the A where the Q should be -- that really threw me off.

The Unofficial Guide to Paris tells me my planned excursion to the Music Museum and the Science Museum in a park on the edge of town is worth it, and should be less crowded on a Saturday than other things I might choose to do. I am not a good tourist. As you could tell from my observations on the Picasso museum, I don't love art museums. I have a tendency to speed through museums, not really interested in taking the time to look carefully at things. Especially paintings. I did the Museum of the History of Paris (which was anart museum, despite a name that indicates it mightn't have been) yesterday in 22 minutes, the Picasso museum in 27, and the Publicity museum was saved mostly by that kiosk. And at about 5 dollars a museum (this history museum was free), I'm wasting my money. Hence, in an attempt to be the only tourist ever to do so, I intend not to visit the Louvre. Really. And not to make a point or anything, just because I don't think I'll get anything out of seeing the Mona Lisa in a mob of hundreds of other tourists. And the museum of modern art, in a lovely modern building with the pipes and staircases on the outside, was lovely from the outside. But I just didn't have a desire to go in. The music museum today will hopefully be cool though, and the science museum. And, on a reader's tip, the Musee de somebody-from-the-19th-century on Monday. Jacquesmart-Andre, I believe. I don't know if that's his name or the place he shopped for groceries. I'll let you know.

This post has been less interesting than yesterday's, I think. Sorry about that. I'm better when I'm working off notes scrawled in the margins of my guidebook. "Subway handle -- detached penis" was one of my notes yesterday (see #6 on yesterday's post). If the woman next to me on the train knew English and saw me write that...