Coffee/cafe

Yesterday afternoon we located a coffeehouse recommended by one of Dave's former students who is doing graduate studies in France.  We went to Le Cafeoteque, which was written up in the NY Times in April.  They were very nice and the coffee was excellent tasting as well as pretty!

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There was a student there from Seattle who is doing a whirlwind tour of Europe, who took our photo, but was unfamiliar with how to use the camera.  :(

We walked past the French National Archives;

Dave didn't look like he wanted to go in, and it's not like I can read a lot of French. 

This is what the actual archives building looks like - kind of what I think Starr should build to house their archives, don't you think?

After this we walked to the Marais neighborhood and went to the Georges Pompidou center.  This is the center for Modern Art.  Anyone who knows me, knows I am NOT a fan of contemporary art, but Dave is, so we went.  I forgot to take a photo of the outside of the building, because it was starting to rain a little.

Inside we were greeted with some performance art.  We think this might by the type of thing that Hannah gets into as an Art Major.

There were a bunch of women dressed up as Sleeping Beauty having dinner at this long table.  There were machine guns, dead animals with jewelry, etc.  Do you get it?  I sure don't.  Visitors could interact and I told Dave we were moving on, there was enough more nonsense yet to come. 

The galleries did have some great art, don't get me wrong.  I appreciate Picasso and Modigliani, and Matisse and even Rauschenburg, of which there was a cool piece, but some of the violent porn-type stuff is a little over the top. 

I know Elizabeth likes the Guerilla Girls and this was an entire very large wall.  It's hard to tell the scale, because I waited for people to get out of the way. The label in the bottom right corner was about 10x15 in, to give you an idea of how big the walls were. 

After this we took the metro back to our neighborhood and had dinner at an Italian retaurant.  Dinner is an event and takes a long time, but it was very nice and we sat through the rain that was coming down.   Afterwards we walked through some neighborhoods and looked in shop windows and stopped at the Monoprix to buy some snacks and water and beer.  That have very citrus-ey drinks, which I really like, and everything is very fizzy.  I especially like the Schweppes that has grapefruit in it. 

Dave's conference ends today and tomorrow we take a plane to Hungary, where the adventure will really begin.  I had a year of HS French, which has served us somewhat well - but we know NO Hungarian!!  Let the adventures continue!!