Up and gone early enough, trying to get a Musée d’Orsay avant 10.  Mission accomplished?  Close enough.

Is spending five hours looking at modern masters too much?  My feet hate me.  It’s all that shuffle waking and standing:  brutal on the footsies and not elongated enough to satisfy the musculature.  Very fatiguing.  And I lost the tip of one of my earbuds.  The law of something-something:  Between you and paradise lies a vast bureaucracy.

I entered the museum and proceeded to the x-ray scanners.  They ask that all electronic devices be sent through the scanner, and you are to walk through the detector.  And by they ask I mean there are signs with pictures on them and the humans shake their heads when you get it wrong.  They have no trays so you have to place your personal music player, your telephone, your camera, your keys, and all those other bits directly on the conveyor belt, which is surrounded by Plexiglas back to the rollers.  Just strip naked and dump it in a heap using your rain-gear to catch all the little bits.  If only I’d known this one simple trick I’d still have two earbud tips.

Then into the ticket line.  Then scan the ticket and inside the museum proper.  Walk over and get an audio guide because, I don’t know, listening to British voice actors read historical copy is entertaining?  At least I can use my own headphones.  “Where is your coat check?”  “Due to the zombie apocalypse the coat check has been cancelled.”  So I take the coats off and start rearranging all the stuff for museum wandering.  Stuff one coat into the pocket of another.  Everything back inside where they can fit, briefly wishing i had not decided to leave my pack behind.  Grab that old music player and pull off the headphones to discover the aforementioned missing tip.  Scan the floor on the off chance but no.  Well, one can listen to the Brits with one ear and not miss anything.  Descend into the sculpture gallery at the bottom.  Notice the sign displaying a backpack with a red line through it and realized the backpack wouldn’t have helped.

Keep in mind I wandered though this place for four or five hours.  It’s filled with a lot of my favorite modernists:  Cezanne, Van Gogh, Matisse, Renoir, so many more.  It gets progressively more crowded as time flows by and my strategy of saving the least interesting (popular) stuff for last (by accident because the map is pretty useless) turns out to be a grace in disguise.  Furniture and architectural items.  Peace and open spaces.  And, in spite of dozens of chairs, no place to sit.  Oh, the irony!

Decided to try for the lost and found before departing just in case.  Asked one of the ticket scanners if they had a lost and found.  He asked what I’d lost.  I showed him my earbud situation.  He showed a sad face and I said “I know; it’s impossible”.  He pointed me toward the lost and found and I walked that way.

Oddly, all I saw was this fully operational coat check!  Asked another guy where was the lost and found and he said they didn’t have one.  I asked one of the cashiers in the shop and she walked me toward the coat check.  Turns out the coat check, where I would have loved to have checked my coats, also acts as a lost and found.  Such a treasure trove of information!  Five stars for this article.

When I showed him my headphones situation, the guy in the coat check showed me the same sad face.  They understand:  they have ears, like music.  It’s impossible but we have to look.  Nada.  C’est la vie.  Have to buy some new ones.  Surely there’s a fancy headphone store in Paris?

Rolled out of there sometime between half-past two and four.  Not sure.  Hoofed back toward my adopted neighborhood and this noodle joint I heard was good (Neko Ramen).  Noodles and broth are decent.  Living in Seattle has perhaps spoiled me a bit.  Also that noodle joint RL and I visited in Sydney.  I digress.

The egg had prefect doneness.

Met an American (Edgar from HI) nurse doing residency (ten years) so he can work in 27 countries (and working at a noodle house to pump up his French).  He has a friend from Louisiana.  We’ll get drinks tomorrow.

Also ate next to a guy from Munich (Simon) and we talked for a long time and then wandered over to a different bar (Faubourg 34) and had a cocktail before splitting for the night.  What was it?  Two cordials in some bubbles.  One was limoncello but can’t remember the other.

Gotta sleep.  Somehow it’s nearly one again.