I should change the name of this blog to “a Paris museum a day or the equivalent thereto,” since my research showed not a single open museum on New Year’s Day in Paris. A good number aren’t open at all until next week. Parisian curators must celebrate the New Year in a major way. I’ll just have to go to two museums someday soon – Sunday, probably. Perhaps a good thing that I couldn’t grace a museum with my jet-lagged presence, since packing for five months means that certain articles dear to the heart of the traveler, such as, say, one’s toothbrush, end up somewhere in the bottom of a bag. At least I hope it’s there… I’ll find out tomorrow when I move from this hotel to my apartment.
But before I go, a bonus story about a closed museum: a few years ago, I was in Rome, and decided to take a day trip to Naples to visit the archeological museum there, which holds most of the stuff from Pompeii. Probably a good thing for someone who claimed that she was a specialist in Roman art to see, right? I went to the train station in Rome and bought a ticket to Naples for the following Monday, and then realized that, probably since the days of the Empire, Italian national museums are generally closed on Mondays. So I wandered along to the train station’s tourist information office, and enquired, in my best Italian (which makes me seem only slightly mentally challenged), if, by any chance, the archeological museum in Naples was closed on Mondays…. The woman I was asking replied “Of course!” with a horrified expression, as if I had just asked her, in my pathetic ignorance, if perhaps an espresso made in Rome were superior to coffee served in a diner in Duluth. So I changed my ticket (an undertaking not to be embarked upon by the light-hearted; I actually have no memory of how I accomplished it, but I’m sure that I could un-suppress the memory given intensive therapy) and went to Naples on a Tuesday.
The train ride from Rome to Naples is only a couple of hours, but on the way I developed a headache and fever. This was in July, by the way, when a fever is not necessary in Naples. Which was hot. And smelly. And hot. And did I mention hot?
The archeological museum is, theoretically, a ten minute walk from the train station. After about forty minutes of wandering, I realized that I was not merely walking very slowly, or in some space-time warp, because of my fever; rather, I was lost. Really, really, lost, it seems, since a municipal policeman just laughed when I asked where the museum was. And then refused to talk to me about directions until we had covered the crucial subjects of:
- Was my bracelet made of gold? If so, why was I wearing it? Didn’t I know that thieves riding motorbikes would rip it off of my arm and speed away, perhaps severing my hand if not my entire arm in the process?
- Then, once I took off the bracelet and put it in my bag: why was I in Naples? A student? How nice. Studying what? Where did I come from?
- Then, once he found out that I spoke English, I obviously needed to talk to his partner, who had been a busboy in Brooklyn! So the partner and I have the entire conversation over again, in English – complete with the part about the danger of thieves, since he’s heard of my bracelet follies.
Finally: directions. The English speaker has no idea where the museum is, so it’s back to Italian. I have wandered so far that I’m beyond the zone shown on the map I have. They both start making the Italian hand gesture that means “go that way… a really, really long way that way” back in the direction from which I’ve come. I manage to make it a few hundred feet back that way before I start to cry. And cry. And cry. At least it gave me something to do for the forty minute walk back to where I started. I consoled myself with pizza, and then finally made it to the museum.
Fevered, exhausted, but finally ready to take in the wonders of Pompeii (which one of my professors calls “the Roman Hoboken”), I dragged myself to the museum doors… only to find that the Naples archeological museum, while joyfully open to the public on Mondays, is most definitely closed on Tuesdays. I.e., the day I was standing there. Sigh.
So, lesson learned: be prepared for the closed museum. I recommend pizza as a consolation device.
