18/4/09 Paris

It rained all day so I decided that it would be a good day for Versailles. It took about an hour to get down there on the RER (I only had to use one of my tickets we already paid for, which was nice) but the real problem was that once I got there, there was a huge line. I waited literally an hour and a half playing scrabble in the rain while those silly EU students could go in for free. It was pricey on top of that, 13 Euros.

The palace itself was good, but after seeing palaces across Europe, it wasn’t that out of the ordinary. It’s one of those places I learned a lot about during history class and felt like I had to see, but it was sort of a disappointment. There weren’t a ton of rooms open, all the signs were in French, and I was already wet and upset I had to wait in line for so long.

They had tons of paintings, and seemingly every room had incredible ceiling paintings. The chapel was also awesome. I’d heard so much about the Hall of Mirrors that I couldn’t help but be a little disappointed by it. It’s very long and incredibly ornate, but it wasn’t the most amazing thing I’d ever seen or anything. On top of that, the mirrors were all sort of dirty.

I went through the king and queen’s bedchambers and apartments, the coolest part being where Marie Antoinette escaped though a side door when the revolution happened. But that was about the whole place.

I went outside and looked at the gardens a little, but it was more money to get into that, something I didn’t want to spend, so I took the train back into St. Michel’s.

I decided that since it was rainy I’d go to the Pantheon. It’s another huge building with an amazing interior. To top it off, in the middle was where Foucault’s original pendulum experiment was, they have it recreated there today.

My ticket got me into a panoramic view of the city as well from the dome. I didn’t have high expectations for it, especially in the rain. I was wrong. It was a great view, I wish I went when it was nicer.

In the crypt is where they bury all the famous French dudes. Voltaire, Russeu, Alexander Duman, and Marie Curie were all down there. The crypts weren’t that impressive for the most part, but it was still worth it. For what I paid, this was a much better deal the Versailles.

I took the train back to the hostel and looked for a place where I could go sit and get free wi-fi. There was a place in the square I was at yesterday around the corner from Hemmingway’s house, so I went for it.

I ordered tomato and mozzarella, which was covered in an olive oil. Pretty awesome. I also had a coffee. I can’t believe I can drink that stuff. It’s not like I’ll be ordering it all the time (outside of France and Italy), but it is tolerable.

I got online and tried to work on my column. I got a good amount of it done when a guy behind me saw me checking box scores and wanted to know what was going on. He told me his best friend played for the Red Sox. I asked who. Turns it’s Rocco Baldelli, who has screwed my fantasy team for many years. He’s a great player when healthy, but hardly ever is, and had a major disease he is getting over. He just signed with the Red Sox this summer.

He told me a lot of Rocco stories (they went to high school together and lived together last year when Rocco was hurt). He told stories about Rocco and him traveling and stories about the players, like how Jonny Gomes is crazy, that Rocco loves Bill Burr (who Mark and I saw at Uno’s in Chicago) and we talked sports for a while.

Then he introduced himself as Ben Hague, a comedian. I swear I’ve seen him somewhere. We talked for a long time about comedy and how he got into it. We knew a lot of the same comedians and talked about the state of comedy and how to make a living out of it, all things that might apply a lot to me. He said LA isn’t the place to start, even though that’s where he did. He said New York is the place, or establishing yourself in a smaller town. It was a fascinating discussion.

A couple hours later a couple from New York came and the New York guy and Ben started going at it about the Yankees and Red Sox. Ben was just messing with the guy, but he got really upset. It was very funny, he kept saying how the Yankees would win the World Series this year for sure. Very typical New Yorker. It was fun to watch.

Ben ended up leaving around midnight and told me to Facebook him and Rocco. It was one of those crazy meetings that you sort of hope for in a Paris café but never actually expect to happen. On top of that, I wrote most of my column, a very memorable night.

I rode the train back, getting a white chocolate Kinder bar, which is terrific, and then came back to work some more on the column. I was hungry so I got these red almost marshmellowy kind of things out of the vending machine. They were alright, no idea what they actually were.