Another Weekend in Paris

Today is Monday, a travel day for most people on the project. The other Americans will arrive this afternoon. The Europeans who went home for the weekend will arrive tomorrow morning. So, there are very few people on the "platform" and there is very little core work available to work on individually. It's days like this that frustrate me the most. I come half way around the world to sit and twiddle my thumbs. The result is... time to post to my blog.

Friday night, I walked two miles to try a seafood restaurant & Jazz club near the Chateau Malmaison. The menu was very confusing. I hadn't realized the French had a dozen different types of shrimp all with different names. I ended up with a huge slice of white fish, the species unknown. Thankfully, they had German beer to wash it down. The Jazz band got set up just before I left. They were okay but not great jazz musicians.

K., an American from the services domain, was also in Paris this weekend. Unlike me, he stays downtown near Charles de Gaulle Etuille (Arche de Triumph) and commutes. We met up on Saturday and went inside Notre Dame. Afterwards, we visited the Musee des gouts de Paris (the museum of the guts of Paris). This is a tour of the sewer system. If you can get past the smell, the tour is quite interesting.

On Saturday, I went to the modern art museum at the Centre Pompidou. I'm not usually very fond of modern art. Too often the pieces are sloppy and thrown together with very little in the way of refined skills. But, I must say that the majority of works on display were quite good. There were only one or two pieces that I felt were a bit insulting. Such as the 3 white canvases. This goes well beyond the concept of minimalism and is, in my opinion the epitome of laziness. I can just picture the artist laughing his ass off about getting paid to hang up blank canvases!