Museum in the Marais, milonga in Montparnasse

Musée des Arts et Métiers

In Paris, As recommended by the ice cream makers I did go, briefly, to the extremely scientific Musée des Arts et Métiers. Feeling totally inadequate and extremely unintelligent in the face of so much scientific discovery and complex machinery I realised, dismally that I connected more with the aesthetics of the lathes, the stained glass, the autonoma and the painted chapel housing an example of Foucault's pendulum.

I went on to two milongas.  The first near Montparnasse took a good half an hour to get to from the Marais plus the time to find it, in a galleried “market”. I had a bizarre moment where I was on the phone to the host, trying to find the place, when suddenly I saw a dance school advertised by advertisements outside, mentioning tango.  I hung up and went towards it.  The woman who came out seemed to have taken another call.  There was no-one inside what looked like a beautiful dance studio, gorgeous floor, palm trees.  She waved me away from the floor, telling me I couldn’t go in with my outdoor shoes and saying she’d be with me in a moment.  But it transpired the woman was neither running a milonga nor knew of one.  It turned out I had not been speaking to her on the phone.  At this point I realised that I had not hung up the call and that it was still active with someone else on the other line... 

The great d'Arienzo track Unión Cívica was playing as I arrived but I stayed less than the time it took to finish the track.  There was dire dancing, not many there and all older. The milonga has been there a year and apparently had had tourists the previous week and the week before.  I said I was going out to get something to eat before I was collared with an entrada and skedaddled. 

I took a breather (€20) up the Montparnasse tower so that the trip was not wasted. It has to be done once.

The next day I received a somewhat aggrieved, passive-aggressive message in poorly spelt French from the male part of the hosting team stating that visiblement I had found the place and lamenting that I had not stayed to dance because he would have willingly danced a tanda or two with me, signing off Amicalement, with his name.  Someone else it seems who doesn’t get that dance comes from mutual desire, not coercion or anything else.

Evidently he was another Parisian who felt embêté.

But that was as nothing to the guy in the second place.