Lifelike sculptures and random walks

Most days here, I try to start with a maximum of one specific thing I'm going to do. Be it an exhibit I want to see, or a restaurant I've been wanting to go to for a while, I've found it makes the day a lot less complicated. As soon as you start building up these lists, and saying "I'll see this museum, then this museum, then walk here and see this monument, then go here for dinner" you kind of cut the whole exploration out of the whole deal, and that's half the fun when you're going around a new city.

Today, it was the Fondation Cartier, a contemporary art museum that has an exhbition of one my favorite sculptors, the hyper-realist Ron Mueck, who started his career in film and then moved to designing incredibily detailed, convincing, and sometimes painful or awkward sculptures. Here are a few examples of his work (caveat - some of his work is nude): Big Man (which I saw at the La Melancolie exhibit), Boy (I also love this closeup of the detail on his feet), and the top section of a woman I saw today who was over 10 feet tall and covered by a large duvet.

After that, it was walking/coffee time . While it's still cold here, at least the sun was out and there was plenty to see. I stopped in to check out the mass at Notre Dame Cathedral, which is quite the experience. Hearing the hymns being sung in latin was actually quite powerful, almost considered converting to Catholicism for .01 seconds.

The tricky part here is avoiding the tourist traps for dinner. Since virtually all of central Paris is also tourist-ville, there's more than enough brasseries full of American and Japanese tourists paying way too much for a sub-par dinner. Searching off the beaten path can be tough too, and yield some restaurants that look less than clean and sparkling.