Complex Numbers

Landmarks

I don't use fitness apps, so I have no idea how many steps I took yesterday, or how many kilometers they added up to. But both numbers were very, very high.

While I was still exhausted from the trip, my contact here texted me around lunchtime. We'd never met. A mutual friend introduced us. It's probably only the mutual friend that kept us from going "what if the other's a psycho killer?"

Anyway, she's like "I'll be at [landmark] and we can meet at 1 o'clock." (She's American, incidentally, so we're texting in English.) At that point, it was 12:10. I checked Maps. Walking to [landmark] would take 45 minutes. I can just make it...

...except that I'd be walking through one of the most historic and architecturally interesting parts of Paris, and there is no way I would be able to resist stopping and gawking at something. Especially when the destination was on the other side of the Seine, and what foreign tourist can NOT stop and look at the river while crossing it? Maybe someone with more self-control than I have, but certainly not me.

So we met here at the hotel and started walking. I won't bother you with all the world-famous shit I saw yesterday, but there was a lot of it and it's world-famous and it's still thrilling to see that shit in person. Just one example: my hotel is a couple of blocks from the Louvre. Well, a couple of blocks from one corner of it, maybe a kilometer from the opposite corner. It's that big. Even without going in, the building itself is a work of art. And we didn't go in anywhere; it was Saturday and the tourism was in full force, creating chaotic crowds.

Hours later, we parted, and I made my utterly exhausted way back to the hotel. Along the way, though, I paused to snap a picture of perhaps the most culturally significant of all of Paris' landmarks, located on Rue de Rivoli.

Because, though I may have gotten some of the details wrong, it was here where, sometime around 1990, famed American visitor Vincent Barbarino discovered that, in France, a Quarter Pounder with Cheese is not, in fact, called a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, but a Royale with Cheese. Because of the metric system. These events were related in the documentary, "Pulp Fiction," which depicted quite the embarrassing and tragic ending for Vincent, but at least he got to spend time in fine Parisian restaurants.