Fragonard Parfums and Domesticity

This morning, I decided to get out of my room for a bit. Since I had already seen all the major tourist attractions with my dad, I decided to look up something new. I typed in the google search box "free things to do in Paris" and a Perfumerie was listed on one of the sites. It said that they had a museum right in Paris that gave free tours. Everything else that came up was something I had already done.
So perfume it was.

After breakfast i headed out to find Fragonard Parfums on Rue Scribe.
I'm not gonna lie, it wasn't that exciting. The website that I had found built it up way too much and had a lot of information wrong.
This is what it said: "Fragonard's Perfume Museum occupies two stories of 19th Century townhouse on rue Scribe in the 9th arrondissement. After entering on the ground floor, you head upstairs to a series of large rooms with a mixture of period furnishings and perfume exhibits." What they ment to say, is you go upstairs into one room relatively the size of my kitchen, and look at a number of display cases along the 40 or so feet of wall.

They also say "One of the more intriguing exhibits is the orgue à parfum, or "perfume organ," so called because it resembles the keyboards of a seven-manual cathedral organ with its tiered rows of ingredient bottles arranged around a balance or scale that the perfumer uses when mixing and testing fragrances."
Here's the picture they gave:
Looks cool, doesn't it?

Well, this perfume organ shown in the picture is not at the Paris Museum. It is in the Fragonard Museum in GRASSE! Go figure. The one that they have in Paris only had 300 perfumes and is about the size of a bathroom vanity.

And the free, English-language guided tour they mentioned? HA! I got an English information card. So is life.

Despite my dissapointment, I still enjoyed myself. I don't blame Fragonard, I blame the website haha. And I certainly learned a lot about the history of perfume. For one, I didn't know that musk came from deer. (You probably all knew that but oh well.) Also, i was surprised to find that you need a TON of flowers just to get a little bit of essence (i.e. you need to distil 1000 kg of orange blossom, to get 1 kg of essence.)
But yeah, that about sums up my new perfum knowledge haha - at least the stuff worth mentioning.

To learn more about all this check out the Fragonad website. (click here)

They wouldn't let me take pictures in the museum, but I'll post some pics of what I saw on my walk there:



An apartment building under construction.

A store that I really liked. Didn't buy anything though.


The store had a lot of incense and incense holders. These were my favorites.

I went in to this delicatessen shop to look for some belgian chocolate for my mom, and the lady let me sample some amazzzing truffles.

This is the "Place de la Concorde." Here, over 15,000 people were guillotined during the French Revolution, including King Louis XVI and his wife, Marie-Antoinette.

"Let them eat cake!!" (I actually heard somewhere that she didn't really say that - it was just a bad translation or misunderstanding)

Anyway, here is Fragonard (Well, the outside of it):





On my walk back to the hotel, I decided to stop at Saint-Eustache to check out the inside. Although they are currently rennovating it, the church is still beautiful. And huge. I think the ceiling is higher than the one in Notre Dame. Here are some pics:

This is Saint-Eustache. Here, King Louis XIV made his First Communion.
This piece of artwork is near the entrance to the church. I found it cute that a little french girl had decided to climb up it.
This is the inside of the church... The ceiling is SOO high!

After my day out on the town, I decided to return to my hotel and tackle some chores. First, I decided to do laundry - It cost me 8 euro just to wash my clothes - That's about $13. Ridiculous.
Once I had paid for my token, I went through the tedious task of trying to figure out the hotel washing machine. They don't have settings like we do - their are buttons with various temperature options ranging from 30 degrees celcius to 95. With this, I had to turn on my computer and do some research. It took me about a half an hour but I finally figured out which setting would be considered a warm load.
With that all sorted out, I went back down to the laundry room to try my luck. I ended up putting 3X the amount of soap needed in the machine - There was a button that automatically put soap in and I thought it was the "start" button. After pressing every button on the machine numerous times I managed to get the damn machine to work.

40 minutes later I went back down to get my stuff. Thankfully, everything survived.

All in all, my clothes survived.

My next chore was to make myself dinner - that one actually went rather smoothly. I made myself a delicious BLT sandwhich and only burned myself once.

Following suite of the washing machine, the dishwasher proved to be just as difficult to manage. I fiddled with the knob for a while - thought that I had turned it on, but after an hour of it making this horrible noise I decided I must've done something wrong. I was right. I had been putting it through the rinse cycle when the thing hadn't even filled up with water. A little more fiddling and i got it to work.

After that I quit life and went to bed.