A Night at the Museums

Say nearly all museums in Paris were exceptionally open for free between 6pm and 1am on a balmy Saturday night in mid-May. What might our reaction be?

If you guessed "unbounded excitement followed by super-hardcore running around," you guessed right! For on the recent "Nuit des Musées," we combined our love of free museums with our preference for unusual sight-seeing experiences, ones that made us feel more like residents and less like tourists.

After starting off the evening right - with an epic apéro chez Adam and Rachel - we set off for the Jardin des Plantes and the complex of museums that surround it. Bizarrely, the complex is known as the "Muséum national d'histoire naturelle" (rather than musée - anyone know why?). Within the "Museum of Natural History" group, we wanted to visit the museums of Paleontology and Comparative Anatomy, of Mineralogy and Geology, and the Grande Galerie de l'Evolution, but only the last was open. For once, we waited in a long line (30+ minutes). Luckily the hordes of French children waiting with their parents kept us plenty entertained. And then, when we finally entered the building, we immediately forgot the line.

If you think these pictures are overwhelming, then you probably shouldn't visit the Grande Galerie. This is one of those museums where you could spend an hour moving 15 feet, and not just because of the crowds. On the other hand, if you get a kick out of life-sized models of animals and/or late-19th-century, World's Fair-style architecture, if you like accumulating a museum experience over several visits, or if you like watching little kids have the time of their lives, then boy oh boy is the Grande Galerie for you! And for us. We made an excellent first choice for our Grand Night at the Museums. 

Next stop: a museum chosen not for the interest of its content, but for the unusual nature of an event they were hosting. The Musée de l'Assistance Publique - Hôpitaux de Paris doesn't normally have a lot going for it - they charge 4 euros for three rooms of displays on the history of the public hospital system of Paris. Maybe if we were public health geeks we could get into it, but they focused too much on administrative changes and technological advancements, and not enough on some of the super old buildings that house the hospitals. In its favor, employees of the Assistance Publique - Hôpitaux de Paris (APHP) were performing chamber music live during our visit. Against its favor, the employees were not all that talented, and this is what we had to look at while they played:

In case the picture is unclear, this is a model of a hospital room souped up with all the latest technology, and a ballerina taking a break between performances. Performances of what, we don't know, because we didn't stick around to find out. The "museum" - even the "live" parts - just couldn't capture our interest.

The whole reason we showed up had nothing to do with technology or administration, and everything to do with something the hospitals excelled in circa 1830: serve soup to the poor. That's right! For La Nuit des Musées, the Musée de l'Assistance blah blah blah pulled a recipe deep from its archives and produced vats of  a characteristic bouillon, which (uncharacteristically for a 19th-century reenactment) was served to us by a fancy-looking chef.

As dusk brought a cool spring air to the beautifully appointed courtyard of this former hôtel particulier, a bowl of rich beef bouillon was just the thing we needed to warm us up and energize us for our next and final stop, the highlight of the evening, the

To be continued . . .