Complex Numbers

All Out of Louvre

So, yeah, I didn't go to the Louvre yesterday.

Look. I'm not a young man of 55 anymore. Sometimes, my knee hurts. Yesterday was one of those times, because I'd spent the last two days hiking around Paris.

Paris was never the purpose of my trip. I agreed to three days there because I figured I could use the time to get over any jet lag, and see firsthand how bad my French pronunciation is [Narrator: vraiment très mauvais], and also to meet my new friend there. No, the purpose of the trip was wine tasting in the countryside, and beer drinking in Belgium later.

If I'd gone to the Louvre, that would have been more walking and standing and stopping and staring. I would have liked to have seen some of the art, of course. But not the Mona Lisa. There's only one reason to see the Mona Lisa, and that's to be able to brag that you've seen it, while complaining about how small it is and how crowded with tourists the room is. The obvious hypocrisy there is that you're contributing to said crowds.

I can skip the seeing it bit and accept the information that the painting is surprisingly small and the room is extremely crowded.

Besides, if I can't paint a mustache on it, what's the point?

So, in an effort to preserve my walking ability for the really important stuff (chateaux and wineries and such), I kept things pretty low-key yesterday while my knee recovered. But I did get a bit of walking in. For instance:

Remember how I said most French beer is ass, except for some breweries in the east? One of those breweries produces a lager called 1664. It's a fairly large brewery that exports, so we get bottles back home. I've heard it's pretty popular in England, too. I buy it to drink when I want a lager, because it's a better alternative for that style than the pisswater the big names try to pass off as lager. Anyway, I found it on tap at a restaurant near the hotel, so of course I ordered one, and it was even more delicious than the bottled and exported version.

And also, if I'd wasted the day at the Louvre, I never would have encountered this delightful example of street art: