The difference between...

This week-end was the European Heritage Days. For those of you who don't live in Europe, you can visit for free a lot of monuments and sites that are usually closed to the public.

I decided to visit the Musée Dupuytren, a little place full of specimens illustrating various malformations and diseases. It's really interesting, but don't go there if you're gone to have a baby, you will end having nightmares... Also now I know from were Chucky comes from ;-)

I also wanted to see the gardens of the French National Library. They are huge but closed to the public. Hmm, they are not opened on Heritage Days. But I saw these globes in the library (they were a gift to Louis XIV, their diameter is approx. 4 m, and they weight more than 2 tons):

Cool, uh ?

Let's say that I experienced one more time some of the difference between Japan and France:

First when entering the building, a woman with he stroller could not pass through the revolving doors. The Security guard proposed her to go through another door, and when she thanked him for that, he answered: "Oh, I'm not doing that for you, I'm doing that for us"

Then when trying to exit the huge Chatelet subway station. My subway pass (valid for one month), refused to let me go, and ticket booths with people were nowhere to be seen (in Japan, there's always somebody at every exit). I finally found a Ticket controller who was randomly checking people in the station. And he gave me this ticket to allow me to pass though the gates:

In French Voyageur en Infraction means Traveler in Infraction.