Hrm. Feeling a sense of … disquiet. Spent a good part of the morning, strangely, swapping dishes. Putting old stuff away, taking out the various things we got for the wedding. Got steak knives, and new flatware organizers. New shoes. Merrells to replace the Merrells I completely wore out over the last two or so years.

I weigh the same as I did before the honeymoon, but look & feel a lot better. Traded some fat for leg muscle, due to the hours and hours of walking we did. For all people’s speculation about dieting and exercise, my guess is that if people just walked from place to place, and our jobs didn’t require 8+ hours of daily sedentary-ness, we’d almost entirely eliminate our nation’s obesity problem.

Some of my friends got us a Canon Rebel XT camera for our wedding. Frankly, it’s like learning to drive on a Ferrari, but I’m not complaining. Learning how to drive, slowly. Not killing anyone (or anything) yet. Still taking mostly just average snapshots, but even then, they look much nicer than on my old FinePix 4700.

Back in the USA! W00t! Got in yesterday around 6ish (BART from the airport, then a ride back from BART from my mom). Glad to see the dog, and the house, but no housemates were home. Ended up waking up this morning at like, 6am from the jetlag, but there you go. Legs are also sore as all get out. Not in a bad way, but in a good one. I’m definitely skinnier than I was when I left, but I weigh the same. Guess all the walking converted some fat to muscle. Not a bad trade, though not noticable visually unless I’m wearing shorts.

Otherwise, things are good. We reorganized our dishes today, to use the stuff we got as wedding gifts, instead of the old hodgepodge of stuff we used to have. Neat!

Gotta start writing thank-you cards, return some duplicate stuff, and get some new shoes, since the ones I had are completely toasted from the trip.

Tomorrow, back to the grind, but today, relaxation. Good stuff.

Read a friend’s blog (nehrlich.livejournal.com), and he was talking about about working on his weaknesses. Doing things he knew he was bad at, in order to get better at them. And this isn’t just talk, either – words backed by *action*.

One of the weird things is that this trip has really made me realize that I really like a LOT of things. I like enough stuff that I simply don’t have the time in the day to do them all to any reasonable degree, even if I were unemployed. I want to paint. I want to play music. I want to draw, and write, and exercise, and cook, and do all these things *well*.

Like Eric talks about “natural advantages,” I’m pretty quick at becoming decent at a lot of things. All of the above things, I’m decent at. Better than average at a good number of them. Some things I’ve invested tremendous time in, some I have not. Thing is, all that time invested, and I’m still merely “better than average.” The only thing I think I can make a reasonable argument I’m very, very good at is my current job.

But the thing is, as much as I love the content of the work I do, I want to do *more*. I want to do a number of things, but I want to do them better than I currently do. And there simply isn’t time. So at some point, I have to look at the situation, and figure out how to maximize the time I do have. In some sense, I do have to work on my strengths, because if I work on my weaknesses, I *have* to ignore stuff that I already have a foundation upon which to build.

I don’t need more hobbies. I don’t need more friends, or more space, or more stuff – more than anything else, what I need is more *time*. Or a desire to do less, better. I can’t make myself want to do things less, so it’s just a question of what do I want to focus on, and can I make myself focus on that to a degree where I can ever break out of a sense of mediocrity?

I dunno – I spent years drawing, and it never really went anywhere. I never got to a point where I’d consider myself good at it – in comparison to most people who consider themselves “artists,” I’d even say I’m not good at *all*. Yet, this is something I spent years doing, in every free minute. What it’s left me is that if I need to communicate something visually, I can do a pretty reasonable job at it.

With music, I used to be able to play about six instruments “fluently.” Never in a way that I really felt was inspired, but I could bend them to my will – I could just never find a will that made the music more than just notes. Still, what that’s left me with is that I can pick up a violin, which I haven’t played in probably 18 years, and still get a reasonable tone, and play somewhat in tune, after a few minutes of practice. But to what end?

I don’t know. The skills I have are *perfect* for my job, mind you – as a game designer, having immediate access to a wide variety of skills, and knowing *how* to find out more about a given topic is a genuine strength – one that I think gives me an edge that is difficult to match. That’s not to say I’m a super-genius, or that my work is superior to some of my coworkers. What it means, though, is that I have a set of skills that’s taken my entire life to develop, and that it’s a *rare* set of skills to be as versed in as I am. Which is good. But I dunno – I don’t really know what to do with it, outside my job. I want to do a lot of things, but simply don’t have the time to do it.

and yeah, I know this sounds like I’m an egomanical wanker, but there you go. 😀

Yesterday was Arc de Triomphe, lunch at Bistro Romaine on the Champs-Elyssee, back to the Louvre, then off to a falafel shop in the Marais, and the Place des Vosges. The end first – Place des Vosges was closed, so we didn’t manage to make it there. The falafel place was *AWESOME* – best cheap food I’ve had so far. I had a schwarma pita, and Ei-Nyung had the falafel – both were extraordinary, and will likely be dinner tonight, if they’re open.

The Louvre was great, again, even though we mostly hung out in the Italian painting section that we’d blown through relatively quickly the first time, to get to the Mona Lisa. We’d ended up seeing pretty much everything we’d wanted to see (though we didn’t get to the Venus de Milo), though obviously, not in the great detail one might like.

Bistro Romaine was pretty terrible, IMO – I had a lasagna, which I thought might be different because say, France is closer to Italy – but basically, I’m thinking this must have been a chain of some sort. It was pretty blah, and we had ended up spending 2:30 there, because it took us :45 to get the check. I ended up really frustrated and agitated, because at this point, I had really wanted to get back to the Louvre, but we were stuck sitting at a crap restaurant on the Champs Elyssee – I think that place just isn’t for me – the whole street, that is – it’s just too touristy and craptacular. The rest of the city has been quite wonderful, but that street is just too much.

The Arc was pretty impressive, though – lost of stairs, great view from the top, and just an impressive structure with an impressive surrounding layout. The only thing was that the view wasn’t all that impressive compared to the Eiffel, which we had been at just the night before.

Today was pretty excellent, though. We walked a bit south to a restaurant where we had sandwiches and coffee to start off the day. Then down to walk along the Seine, which was closed to traffic, so you could just walk, bike, or skate along the street. Reminded me a bit of when they close off the big street in Boston on Sundays. Walked around a bit, then caught the Metro from Hotel de Ville to Saint Sulpice, where we walked to the church, looked inside, then headed over to the Jardin des Luxembourg (yes, I’m sure I butchered that), where we sat on chairs by the fountain for a couple hours. Perfect. Just a great, laid-back way to end the vacation, and I could imagine little better to do.

We got up, wandered around, got some crepes, then walked out and ran into a band, made up of a couple horns, a trumpet, a drum kit, trombone, and tuba. They ended up playing some covers of popular songs, such as Paint it Black. They weren’t great, but they were pretty fun to watch.

We headed back to the Metro, where we went to Bastille, to walk to Place des Vosges, where I led us in the wrong direction. Oops. On the way back, it started raining. We were totally unprepared, so we headed back on to the Metro, and came back to the apartment.

It’s been a pretty excellent day, and a great way to end the trip. Looking forward to coming home, but definitely leaving feeling really positive and happy.

So, we’ve been eating at a pretty wide variety of places in Paris. Some street-side stands, some random pastisseries, some nice restaurants, like L’Atelier. Last night, we went to Equinox, on Lindsi’s recommendation. The food here’s good – no question. But it’s not … mindboggling. And a lot of poeple said the food in Paris would be mindboggling, or extraordinary in some fashion that I haven’t seen yet.

And so that sparked a bit of conversation between Ei-Nyung and me last night, and I wonder if maybe we get food that defaults to “excellent” on such a regular basis that the gulf between daily food here, and daily food back home simply isn’t that large?

I mean, sure, a “standard” lunch here is miles apart from the crap Chinese food from the EA cafeteria. If I’m measuring by that yardstick, food here is leagues better than it is at home. But when I think of the sort of “standard” food I consume on a marginally regular basis, I think of things like Aperto, like Geta, the stuff we cook at home, or Angelfish. They’re not (apart from home meals and Geta) “everyday” dinners, but they’re not “only once in a long while” food either.

There’s also the question of ingredients. Yeah, it seems from the *way* that people shop, they tend to use better ingredients in their day to day cooking. The method of food procurement I think forces people to think about and appreciate the food more, since they’ve got to shop for quality on a regular basis. But again, to point out the lack of contrast, we’re constantly surrounded by ingredients of rather extraordinary quality. Some things, like the butter, doesn’t match up because of FDA regulations, but most of the produce and meats, I think the things we have access to through our local stores, and through Joe, are on-par or superior to a lot of the things we’ve seen out here.

I dunno. I’m not sure those are really the right reasons for the lack of blown-away-ness. L’Atelier was extraordinary, no question – but it was also the most expensive lunch I’ve ever had by probably a factor of three or four.

Can you think of a game that’s really rife with symbolism?

Can you think of a game that makes funny, subtle references to other games through symbolism?

That seemed to be something we saw a lot today in various paintings, and I was wondering – there are probably enough long-term gamers that would actually be able to comprehend the short of emotional/visual “shorthand” that one might create by manipulating things we’ve seen in older games.

Would a certain “boss battle” structure evoke a different feeling, if the player understood that it was a reference to say, something in the original Contra that they’d played many years ago?

What would it mean to run across a crate, in a game, that had a big pixellated question mark on it? Could one use that as shorthand to evoke some inherent Mario-ness? What would that even mean?

I don’t even think that we see much of the traditional symbolism that pervades other media in games – it’s rare, at best. Is that because the interactive nature of things isn’t as condusive to really understand symbolism, or is it because we don’t feel that our audience has the capacity to really understand symbolism and reference unless they’re so brutally obvious that they’re on the level of Final Fantasy X?

?

So, today was all-Louvre, all the time. I thought this would be exhausting, that we’d maybe do two hours, then break for lunch, wander around outside, and come back or something. nope. 11:30-6pm, walking through the museum, with a break for about 1 hour in the Denon Cafe for lunch.

First off, let me wholeheartedly recommend the 5 euro audio guide, if you’re not already very well-versed in the history of art. Very helpful to decode a lot of the symbolism, meaning, and structure of the art to the untrained observer. We also picked up A Guide to the Louvre, a 17 euro book that’s full of pictures, and further descriptions. This was helpful in figuring out what we *didn’t* want to look at, as well as what we did. Given the size of the place, six hours in the museum got us through very little in any appreciable detail.

What did we actually see? Mostly Italian and French paintings from 1400-1800. And yes, A_B, we saw the Oath of the Horatii. In fact, it was one of the paintings I enjoyed the most, particularly with the additional information the guide and the book provided. Saw the Mona Lisa, which is disappointing only in that there’s so many people, and you have to stand so far away from it, that functionally, it’s not much different than looking at it in a book. I was much more impressed by the … er… I believe it was the Madonna on the Rocks that we saw at the National Gallery in London, because there you could get right up to the painting, and see the detail.

Still, obviously worth taking a look at.

A couple randomish thoughts:

1.) It’s really weird to see how styles evolve, and how they percolate through the entire culture of the time. The level of detail of faces, or backgrounds, varies quite a lot, and periodically, you see some outlier in a given time period, where things either look more or less contemporary for the time, and wonder WTF was going on. One that struck me in particular was a montage of various arms and hands that, surrounded by portraits and religious paintings, was photorealistic in technique, but almost abstract in content.

2.) Most of the action in a given painting appeared to be almost solely along a single plane. Or, if there were multple planes of action or movement, they were almost always split up into several discrete planes, all of which were parallel, or close to parallel to the plane of the painting itself. I saw very few paintings that had a lot of movement from fore-to-background. In certain cases, this worked to quite great effect – the Oath of the Horatii, for instance, felt so planar that it made me think of the Egyptian story wall carvings – they both have some sense of perspective and foreshortening, but still felt very “flat.”

3.) Little in the way of what I currently perceive as “motion.” Sure, there were many paintings that depicted movement, or action, but they still felt relatively still. I felt like it was almost as though one took the opposite of Jack Kirby, where he always depicted things at the very apex of their motion – stretched or squished to an impossible degree. Instead of finding the peak of motion, it was as though the painters or scuptors looked for a different moment, when the subject might have been in motion, but had stopped accelerating, and as such, looked relatively still. Sure, that varies quite a bit, and I know that I’m actually used to representations of speed and movement that rely very heavily on the vagaries of photography. So, my observation is pretty heavily biased by the *current* representations of action and motion that I’m used to seeing. I wonder what someone who’s looking at both types of representations for the first time feels is more natural?

4.) Obviously, I’m pretty out of the loop, but I never see representations of modern life painted with such grandeur. Are they still done by anyone? Do we see giant portraits or recollections of events painted in very old-school style, or has that literally been made obsolete by photography?

5.) The other weird thing is, what happens to digital media, from a future archaeologist’s perspective? On one hand, if the media doesn’t lose all its information, and the data can be recovered, it’s relatively “pure” – it’s not like the paint cracked, or the original finish has been lost – but at the same time, I have a hard time imagining that future civilizations will be decoding jpgs of current-day life. Do we record moden living in a real physical, more-or-less permanent way? Printed photos? Newspapers, sure.

Anyway – my feet, again, are toast. I’m surprised we lasted so long in the museum, but it was really fun, and consistently interesting. We ended up walking through the 14th through 17th century French painters backwards, so it was really sort of strange going back in time, and seeing who the influences were on the paintings we’d already seen. I don’t have a strong enough recollection to really post detalis, but maybe I’ll look through the book, or our photos, and post some of the things that I really liked. (no photos of the Italian paintings, though – those sections were off-limits to cameras.)

One last thing – Every goddamn time someone takes a flash photo of a priceless artifact, I want to punch them in the goddamn mouth. Your idiotic, poorly-framed photograph is worth destroying this priceless work of art? Fuck you. Yeah, your flash on its own makes relatively little difference, but it would make relatively little difference if I killed a millionth of you, as well. Jackasses. I can’t believe how many illiterate, or just completely inconsiderate jackasses there are. jayzis. I saw this one woman wandering around, taking all sorts of flash photos, and after every one, she’d mumble about how she didn’t think the flash would go off *this* time. Gah. Morons.

Yesterday was a bit of a blowout. It was so busy, and at times, quite frustrating. Being in a country where the dominant language is one you don’t speak is immensely tiring, and even simple crap, like not realizing you have to explicitly buy each grocery bag can add up to larger frustrations. So, this morning, we took it easy, and slept in.

Went to the Pompidou, where unfortunately, they’ve only got one floor of exhibits open to the public (the second main floor is under reconstruction for the better part of the year, as I understand). Still, the exhibits they had were one that was about motion, and the other was a guy named Hans Bellmer. The first exhibit was “The Movement of Images” – at first, I thought it was pretty much the same video-art schlock I’ve seen before, in a class I took at MIT. The first thing that really was interesting (ie: not a guy walking backwards around a tape square) was a video of car assembly, set to a nice syncopated beat. In a minute, they assemble a car, and all of their actions are tied to the rhythm. Very cool, and reminded me of a VW ad they had a year or three ago with a similar, but more organic-feeling concept. It’d have actually been nice to have seen the two juxtaposed.

There were a few other interesting pieces – some video, some sculpture, some painting. But the one that really entertained was a guy named John Wood, and another artist – they did a series of short videos, one of which was called “Board,” which was so reminiscent of Warioware, it was just uncanny. There’d be some sort of establishing shot, that would hold for a few moments, and often, a human would enter the scene, and instigate some sort of action. Often, they were simply humorous, but some of the time, the thing that would happen would really severely contrast with what you’d *expected* to happen, evoking a sense of surprise, or humor, that was really unique to that particular display. Ei-Nyung and I watched the entire series of pieces, which probably ran 15-20 minutes. Great stuff – funny, challenging, unexpected, and interesting.

The Hans Bellmer exhibit was odd. It was mostly a series of sketches, that looked like they’d be pretty at home in a deranged high-schooler’s notebook. Very sexual, very odd – imagine a sketch of the Arc de Triomph turning into a giant deformed penis, penetrating the weird four-legged mannequins from Silent Hill 2, and you’re pretty much there. Of course, the guy had the normal “traditional” technique, so it was clear he *could* draw pretty much anything he wanted, he just chose to draw brick walls with high heels cut out of them. It was interesting, no doubt, but I’m not sure I really “got” it, if there was anything there to get, other than that this guy really liked eyeballs that looked out of vaginas.

*shrugs*

In between exhibits, we jogged out to get some “greek pitas” – basically gyros squeezed in a panini press, some fries, some pastries, and a giant bottle of water. Ate that in the courtyard of the Pompidou, watching some kids firedance to loud music. There was also a guy with that thing that you do with two sticks, some string, and a top-looking thing – he was really good. The firedancers were merely ok. Some cops came by, and apparently ticketed the guy playing the music & the firedancers – something to do with the DJ’s dog, apparently.

After eating, we walked to the far side of the courtyard, and watched a guy put on a play with three non-French-speaking members of the audience. Standard street art humor stuff, but very well done. Gave the guy a couple e’s – he raked in a huge umbrella full of cashola. Still, well deserved. Funny guy.

After the Pompidou, it looked like we were pretty wiped. But after a few minutes of sitting around, we realized we still had all sorts of stuff to do. Halfway through our time hear (more than that, actually), and we hadn’t gone to the Arc de Triomph, the Eiffel Tower, or the freakin’ Louvre. It was an hour or so before sunset, though, so we figured it’d be pretty easy to knock down the Eiffel Tower, since there isn’t much surrounding it that we’re super-excited about.

So, off we went, via Paris’ woefully convoluted Metro system. Man, given that Paris is smaller than London, I’d have thought that they’d have some sort of coherent, easy-to-navigate layout, but jiminy christmas, the Metro’s a pain in the ass. Anyway, we end up at the Tower, and head up to the second level as the sun sets. Quite an impressive view – lots of pictures, though they’re all undoubtedly the same pictures everyone takes from that place. The blinking lights are actually a lot more impressive from the tower itself, and a lot less ridiculously gaudy than it does from far away. Still, looking through the history of the Eiffel Tower shows a long history of various novel lighting schemes, so hopefully, this one will eventually pass.

We walked down the stairs from the second level to the first, where we read some of the placards and looked at the various displays of the history of the tower, and such. Watched a movie about how they repaint the thing, and marvelled at the ridiculous bravery/fearlessness/idiocy of the painters in action. Once night had thoroughly fallen, we wandered down to the plaza in front of the tower, took a picture, and headed off to find some food, when we realized that, holy crap, it’s 11pm. So, off to the first place that’s lit up. Ei-Nyung got a club sandwich, and I got a Confit du Canard, which was not quite what I was expecting, but absolutely delicious. What I was expecting, in retrospect, was a cassoulet. Oops. I’ll have to have one of those somewhere before I leave.

Again, on to the metro, and back to the apartment, to let the blood drain out of my feet.

Fun! Less stressful, more entertaining, today. Tomorrow morning, the Louvre, in the afternoon, perhaps the Arc. We’ll see.

So, today was Musee d’Orsay (hopefully I didn’t f that up too much), L’Atlier de Joel Robuchon for lunch, and then Saint-Chappelle. Of the three, I was most impressed by Saint-Chappelle.

Orsay: lots of stuff, largely impenetrable. I enjoyed a reasonable number of the pieces, both painting and sculpture, but it wasn’t until I was on what felt like somewhat “familiar” territory that I really could appreciate what it all meant. Familiar being Van Gogh, in this particular case. One thing I found, which isn’t a *new* conclusion, is that I really don’t understand what impressionism is about. That is, if I had to guess, I’d say that impressionism, based on nothing but what I’m pulling out of my butt, is a move away from photorealism, towards painting techniques that substitute some sort of abstraction in the representation to communicate how an artist feels about a subject. I have no idea whether that’s the “textbook” definition, to be sure. But basically, as we moved through the museum, and transitioned from older works to newer ones, I found I had a very hard time telling the difference between certain types of impressionism, and bad technique.

Here’s where I’m going to get tripped up, because I don’t know who speciically belongs to which schools, or what’s considered what, so take this all with a grain of salt. When I look at something like a Renoir, there’s a softness, and an… airy sort of haze to some of his portraits that feel ethereal – the focus is on very specific details, and because other things have some detail abstracted, the viewer gets a sense of what is and is not important – the “feel” of the painting is intact, even though the details are not, yet there is enough detail for a viewer to understand the painting as a whole.

Monet seems to have pulled even further away from reality, and uses the color, as well as the brushwork, to create a sense of visual emotion that surpasses photorealism – the specific painting that sticks out in my mind is a bluish silhouette of Parliament against a pinkish sky.

Still, none of this really “came together” for me, until Van Gogh. There were two specific Van Gogh self-portraits on display – one with a maybe yellow-green background, with very distinct blue streaks on his face, and one with a blue swirly background. Like how I use the technical terms? Bleah. Still, the “best” painting for me was the blue swirly self-portrait. In that, the mix of realism, with such expressiveness in the brushstrokes, and the stylized, almost symbolic patterning in the background is so evocative that it felt like the culmination of what all the works I’d seen previously had been hinting at was possible. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, I don’t know. What I do know is that two rooms later, there was a Cezanne that to me just looked unfinished, and a pair of crowd scenes by, I believe Toulouse-Latrec that I literally couldn’t distinguish from the drawings of someone who has no idea how to draw or paint.

I suppose that’s the common complaint about modern art, but there you go.

L’Atlier: Ei-Nyung had the menu, so I’ll let her describe that. The basic structure for those who might not be familiar with the style of restaurant (as I was not), is that it’s essentially a bar, somewhat like a sushi bar, and there are a number of different small plate dishes, as well as some “larger” dishes, that are more geared towards being a main course.

Since Ei-Nyung had splurged on the menu, which ran E98, even at lunch, I figured I’d go for something… cheaper. still not cheap, mind you, as it ended up running about $56 for the dishes I had, but what are you gonna do? It’s like, #25 in the world, right? I had L’Aubergine, or as we yanks know it, the eggplant. The dish consisted of a sprig of thyme, perched atop a stack of grilled zucchini, grilled eggplant, a slice of grilled tomato, and a slice of fresh mozzarella. There was, I believe, a comma-shaped dollop of basil sauce at the base. That is, I believe it was basil – it definitely was there. The little stack of vegetables and cheese was absolutely spectacular. Something about the seasoning, and the grilling of the components was spot-on, and the balance of flavors was just perfect.

Next up was a quail dish. There was a small, licorice-y salad of greens, a multi-ingredient mashed potato side, and the quail – split up into two leg pieces (leg & thigh), and two breast pieces, which looked like they were stuffed with some of the innards from the bird. Honestly, I couldn’t tell you what the bird was stuffed with, but that’s what it seemed like. I figured I’d get the quail becuase a.) I couldn’t read the vast majority of the menu, and at that point, we’d asked so many questions, I didn’t want to press much further, and b.) we’d recently had quail at Chez Panisse, so I figured why not compare? As it turns out, the quail had been the weak point in the dinner at Chez Panisse, and the quail at L’Atlier was far superior. Crispy skin, done to perfection, not dry or greasy in the least, and in a small amount of perfectly seasoned jus. A piece of the breast meat, with the stuffing, a leaf or two from the salad, and the potato fit on a fork nicely, and all the flavors complemented each other perfectly, with the bitter brightness of the greens offsetting the richness of the meat & potato.

For dessert, I had L’Orange. Yeah – this was an odd thing. Good, but odd – and more challenging than uniformly “delicious,” I think – perhaps a more sophisticated palette would find it uniformly enjoyable, but to me, it was far more academically “neat” than out-and-out to-die-for-delicious. Still, a totally unique experience, and worth every moment. Basically, the dish consisted of a canape of orange sherbet set atop slices of mandarin orange (the slices were cut, not peeeled), which sat in a pool of orange juice. On top was what appeared to be a very thin, pressed piece of the caramelized rind. I was wrong about the rind – though it looked as though that must have been what it was, it was a very thin layer of orange-flavored sugar – though that doesn’t really describe it accurately, because it was far more savory than sweet. It was like they had pulled all the savory components of the flavor of an orange, isolated them from the sweetness, and then turned that into a thin layer of completely un-sweet sugar.

Very strange. Even weirder was that the orange sherbet had a strong clove (and possibly nutmeg) flavor that again accentuated the savory aspect of the orange. This had more of a hint of sweetness than the “rind,” and was a little more accessible. Turns out that the orange slices were also sitting in what appeared to be a second orange sherbet, which was even sweeter, but again, was paired with some sort of spice that accentuated something different. I can’t even really describe it, except that it tasted like a halfway point between the clove/orange sherbet and what you’d normally expect. The orange itself was exactly what I’d have expected, as was the orange juice, but in comparison/contrast/complementing the other flavors, what you ended up with was that each mouthful felt like a different perspective.

I always think that it’s weird on the Japanese Iron Chef when you’d get someone saying something ridiculous like this, but basically, it was as though you’d put an orange on a pedestal in a darkened room, shone a spotlight on it, and taken a variety of pictures from different angles. Each mouthful was like eating one of those pictures – each slightly different, with a slightly different take on the flavor. Maybe it’s like you got a bunch of impressionists all painting the same orange, and then you’ve eaten all their paintings and gotten a bunch of different perspectives on the same subject matter. (Ei-Nyung suggested that something like that (a variety of impressionists painting the same subject) would be really illuminating in a museum like the Orsay.)

Anyway – I really enjoyed L’Atlier, but I do confess that I wasn’t prepared to really sit down and confront that kind of food for lunch. It was basically more than I could really “understand” outside of dinner. Dinner ended up being far more pedestrian – we got some gnocchi, lardon, tomatoes, and an eggplant sauce, and cooked it all up at the apartment. Delicious, and way, way cheaper.

Sainte-Chappelle: whoa. For all the idiotic panhandling they’ve set up at the Notre Dame, S-C was done right. The information stuff, and the “shop” and what have you were downstairs, in the much less impressive but still cool lower area, and the upstairs was left relatively untouched. And holy crap, it’s astonishing. Too much, perhaps. While the interior of the building is relatively straightforward, and the sculptures of the apostles were neat, it all pales in comparison to the stained glass. Yeah, this is useless without pictures, as I’m at a loss to describe it to anyone who hasn’t seen it already. It’s very “noisy” and frankly, though it’s appearently quite narrative, the stories are very, very hard to make out because the space between the narrative panels is taken up by repetitive colored patterns, and the visual density of it all makes it completely and totally overwhelming.

Still, it’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen, frankly, and astonishing that apparently, 2/3rds of the stained glass is original. Yeah, Notre Dame’s gigantic, and on the exterior, far more elaborate, but if that took 200 years to build, it must have been a Herculean effort to put up S-C in a mere six years. Wow. We have 4 day museum passes – I’m hoping that we get a really bright day, so we can go back and check it out in its full glory. It was a little dim by the time we got to the place, and cloudy, so it wasn’t as intense as it probably might have been.

Anyway – after all that, we came back to the apartment, and sat around. I’m definitely getting trip fatigue, and can walk less and less each passing day. I miss my dog, and my house, and my friends. Still having a ball, but yeah, whoo – tiring.

And for the record, the wedding, IMO, was just about as good as one could have expected. The weather broke (in a good way) for the day of the ceremony, and it was a truly spectacular time. Being married is indeed more or less as I’d expected – not a huge change from say, the day before – but still, sort of an interesting change. Got a ring on my left hand, which I’ve now worn for just about the entire week, which makes it the longest, already by an order of magnitude, that I’ve ever worn any piece of jewelry. Wacky stuff.

Yeah, now I call her “the wife.” It’s weird.