This is a little belated, but I had a wonderful three days in Paris at the end of my trip with Leonid, Matt, and Tim. Paris is an amazing city (I like it better than London) and three days was frustratingly short. The food was excellent too, and restaurant staff were very attentive about eggs. And it turned out that a little immersion in a francophone environment was all it took to revive my ability to speak passable French. Out of the Louvre, Notre-Dame, and all the other famous sites, two places I visited struck me in particular: the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, and the Panthéon.

I went to the National Museum of Natural History on my first morning in Paris for the most un-touristy of reasons: to look for specimens from French Polynesia of the moths I want to research for my PhD. Before my visit, I had been warned that despite being one of the world's preeminent natural history museums, the MNHN was chronically underfunded and the collections were poorly organized. The latter certainly turned out to be the case. The insect specimens were held in narrow cardboard boxes that were slid vertically onto shelves like volumes of an encyclopedia, unlike the far sturdier wood-and-glass cases that are used at the Natural History Museum in London or the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. In London, at the MCZ, at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, and at the Essig Museum in Berkeley, the specimens are arranged taxonomically and sometimes geographically, but the Paris collections were arranged largely by collector, which meant I spent most of the day going through an entire wall of boxes and never found any of what I was looking for. The people there were very helpful and friendly, in particular the curator who I had arranged to meet in advance. Towards the end of the day people started emerging from the woodwork, and asking me if I could get them a specimen of a random moth species from Palm Springs, and asking if I wanted to see a moth that had been collected from Clipperton Atoll, a thousand kilometers off the coast of Mexico (I had no idea what it was, prompting the next question: Do you know an American who can identify it for us?). Ultimately it was a fruitless visit, but I never would have known unless I had gone. It was reassuring that everybody was so friendly and interested in interacting with me, because I had been warned in advance at Berkeley that it can be virtually impossible to get into the MNHN, especially as a lowly foreign grad student. The only way I was able to get into the museum in the first place was because the curator at the British Museum had given me contact information; there is no information, even in French, about how to contact museum scientists on the MNHN website.

We had a little bit of time left in the day after I got out of the museum, so Leonid took me on a walk around Paris that included a stop at the Panthéon. The Panthéon is a secular temple to the glory of the French Republic, that looks like a very large Greek temple. Aboveground, there is a vast hall surrounded by murals of the lives of Saint Geneviève (who comforted and watched over Parisians during the Hun invasions) and Joan of Arc. In the far end of the hall is a mural showing La Marianne and the French army routing the armies of Britain and Russia. In front of this painting is a militaristic marble sculpture with the inscription "Live free or die", which you may remember is what it also says on New Hampshire license plates. In the hall is also a Foucault pendulum, and to explain its incongruous presence are touchscreen kiosks scattered around, which kept playing an ominous piece of music that sounded suspiciously like part of the soundtrack from Revenge of the Sith. Belowground is a crypt housing the great men and women of modern French history, from Voltaire and Rousseau to the Curies and Alexandre Dumas. Nobody (at least anymore) is buried immediately in the crypt; you must spend some length of time in your normal grave, after which your posthumous greatness has become such that you are reinterred in the Panthéon.

It's become increasingly fashionable to point out how similar the United States and France are. After visiting, I feel comfortable saying that there are very few countries, that think of their identity so much in terms of their ideals, and think of these ideals as so universal that they would ever dare construct anything quite like the Panthéon. The obvious counterparts, of course, are the monuments in Washington.

(Photo of Sainte-Chappelle--another very beautiful place--by Tim.)