Free museums and garlic

My weekend in Paris happened to fall on Patrimony day, when many local museums are free of charge, and a few normally-closed areas are open to the public. However, the long lines prevented me from going to many places and that Saturday I ended up only seeing the sights without much of a line: the Pantheon and the cathrdral of Notre Dame. The Pantheon with its dungeon of sarcophagi seemed a rather unique place because it was the final resting place not of kings or nobles, but of men (and 1 woman) who were known for their artistic and literary achevements. Rousseau, Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas are all buried there. I don't know of a similarly respectable collection of corpses anywhere else.

Tonie had procured somewhere a paper bag, which, as a promotion, could be filled up for free with fruits and vegetables at an open-air market on the Seine near the Notre-Dame cathedral. However, by the time we arrived at the market the only items available for free were cloves of garlic and a few grapes. As a result, we were well-protected from vampires for the remainder of the day.

Tonie is a tireless walker, and we managed to see a fair amount of the downtown section that day. The streets were crowded with pedestrians, the thousands of cafes were bustling, and the sun was shining. It was hard to find something to complain about, although the Parisians inevitably did. In particular, they enjoyed complaining about Americans, it seemed. Over dinner, we met a couple from the city suburbs, who were extremely skeptical when I said I liked living in the US. If I had not told them at the outset that I was Russian rather than American, I wonder if they conversation would have ended there. The anti-American sentiment was quite noticeable in the papers as well.