Classes and a Trip to l'Orangerie

Today I got up at my usual 8am for class.  All three classes.  That's a rather rare occurrence, but one that I definitely do not relish.  I not only drank my usual café au lait with two sugar cubes this morning, but I also needed to drink a coke in order to get through them all.  Fortunately, by 12:45 we had a short break for lunch so I was able to escape to refuel.  At 1:30 I was back in class until 2:45.

At 3:15 we met with our Program Director at the entrance to the Musée de l'Orangerie.  L'Orangerie used to be an old greenhouse, built in the 19th century.  It houses eight of Monet's large water lily paintings and a private collection of Impressionist and Avant-Garde art assembled by Paul Guillaume and his widow Domenica Walter-Guillaume which was donated to France upon her death.  To be honest, the entire tour was quite boring for me.  I don't like Monet, and being forced to stare at eight paintings of his water lilies in a 2 hour tour was miserable.  Not only did we spend extensive amounts of time on the water lilies, but also on models of how the museum used to look, obscure impressionist paintings, and a handful of Avant-Garde artists that I'd never heard of and never care to hear about again.  The only saving grace for the entire trip was the collection's very small number of paintings and sketches by Pablo Picasso.

Of course, our guide spent only a few minutes on these before moving onto an Eastern European Jewish artist who liked to paint dead animals and call it still life.  The trip was less than enjoyable.  Especially because we spent two hours in only seven different rooms with only a handful of paintings in each.  Talk about torture.


That was why I felt that I deserved gelato afterwards.  On the way back to the Foyer, me and another girl on the trip stopped to get gelatos from Amorino, one of the best gelato shops in all of Paris.  I had a crêpe for dinner then settled in to do a bit of studying.  When I finished my studying, I went out with some of the girls on the trip for drinks at a pub down the street.  We gossiped, talked, and laughed then headed home.  Upon arriving at the Foyer, I realized that it was 10:50pm.  The showers are locked at 10:45 and aren't unlocked until 7:00am.  I need to be awake and downstairs by 7:30am tomorrow so I can't shower then.  Fortunately, the security guard at the front desk was rather absorbed in a phone call when we walked in, so I ran up all six flights of spiral stairs to see if he'd locked the showers yet.  He hadn't.  I quickly got ready and jumped in the showers right next to my room.  The men's showers.  Fortunately they were uninhabited.  Seven minutes later I was strolling back into my room, having safely avoided awkward encounters with both naked men and the security guard who'd wonder what I was doing in there.