Pink Trash Goes to the D'Orsay

Paris is a vibrant and exciting city filled with celebrated museums. From the Louvre to the Pompidou, these notorious monuments are sightseer magnets. For me, however, they parallel my attitude towards three-hour long Parisian dinners: they aren’t necessary. I want to leave before my ass goes numb. So knowing we’ll have houseguests over the next few years, I postpone my rendezvous with these cultural icons. But with the arrival this past week of our first official visitors I no longer could delay the inevitable. On a bright and sunny afteroon, Pink Trash went to The Museé D’Orsay.

I was reluctant to go. It was Sunday and I preferred to see a movie. After all, it had been over two months since I sat inside a cinema with Diet Coke in one hand and imitation movie candy in the other. But one can’t expect guests arriving from Chicago to spend the afternoon watching The 40 Year Old Virgin.

Our day began around 1:00 p.m. With strong hunger pains and a craving for a Café Olé, Joel, Mike, Chris and I headed around the corner to a hopping French café serving brunch. Having just been to the gym, I was hoping to eat a relatively healthy and small meal. Instead, we all felt the need to justify the €25/person charge for the buffet filled with both French and American breakfast treats. We didn’t realize the price until after we loaded our plates with pancakes, eggs, curry chicken and some type of basamati rice. So after a few more trips inside to carb load on dessert tarts and chocolate mousse, we were ready for our walk to the museum.

Thirty sweaty minutes later, we arrived at the Museé D’Orsay. For some odd reason, the weather in Paris has been unusually warm. The average high temperature for October is 59 degrees. Instead, it’s been an uncoformatable 76 degrees – fine if you’re wearing shorts and a t-shirt but not so much when you’re outfitted in the latest fashion trends designed for brisk autumn days. Fortunately, the space was air-conditioned so I immediately found my happy place at the beginning of our tour through the museum.

Opened almost twenty years ago in 1986, the Museé D’Orsay is a converted railway station originally built in 1898-1900. Inside is one of the world’s largest art collections devoted to the late 19th century. I, of course, had no expectations. I knew it was a museum. I knew it had art. I knew I would be bored. However, I was pleasantly surprised by my eagerly acceptance of this cultural and grown-up affair.

With the likes of Monet, Degas, Renoir, Gauguin and Cézanne (not the drag queen from Chicago), the walls were decorated with names and images I’ve seen in books or heard discussed by intellectuals at cocktail parties (it was, however, hard to believe the art was original and not imitations sold at Linen n’ Things for $19.99). Better yet, our tour through Impressionism gave Chris and I the opportunity to better our French. We’d try to translate the descriptive card by reviewing the painting. A game makes everything more fun.

So for the low price of €5,50 a ticket, I enjoyed marveling at what some would consider wonders of the world. It wasn’t too painful. It wasn’t too tedious. And more importantly, it wasn’t too long. I escaped with my sanity in check and with an ass that wasn’t numb.

Photos Courtesy of Robert Zizzo Photography © Robert Zizzo Photography