deux semaines à Paris

The plan: Paris –> London –> Montreal –> DC

Up at 5.40 Paris time.

Meeting our shuttle to the airport downstairs at 6.20. Riding out of Paris.

No troubles at the airport. Business class lounge hidden in the basement, but nice. Good British trashy magazines to read, shortbread, ginger biscuits, and tea.

Heathrow is still at the top of my least favorite airports list, even when I don’t spend the night there. It’s just a mess. Utter chaos and queues everywhere. Very inefficient.

It was strange to approach people and initiate communication in English.

The best part was that we were able to get upgraded to business class for the transatlantic flight back. The whole trip was supposed to be business class, but when we booked the tickets, there was no room in that section for us and we had to take economy. But this was very strange, since, once we were on the plane it was clear that the section was not even near full.

This flight was even nicer than the one on the way there, as the seat back went pretty much totally horizontal. Lots of champagne, far too much food:

– plates of nuts
– four different kinds of bread with butter
– wine
– chickpea/cheese fluff wrapped in grilled eggplant to make rolls
– some sort of root vegetable flavored risotto on a large mushroom cap with a delicious sauce and roasted vegetables around
– cheese with dried fruit, toast, and port
– dessert (heavenly lemon mousse!) and coffee
–after dinner drink cart (drambuie, etc)

And then, when I was still absolutely full and dozing, there was another snack served, which I declined.

And they kept offering more champagne, more wine, more everything.

The transfer in Montreal wins the prize for most confusing and frustrating and irritating airport experience ever. Apparently “your bags are checked through to DC” means that in Canada you have to retrieve them from the baggage carousel and go through Canadian customs, as though you are actually visiting Canada. Then you have to go through US customs while still in Canada, and they go through everything in your bags in front of you, before they let you re-check them so they can be put in the belly of the plane. Of course, no announcement about this was made and no signs explained it and we only found out about it after we had already been through Canadian customs and left the secure area where the baggage claim was.

Then, since we were flying into Reagan National, we had to go through two more security checks.. to get into the gates area, and to get into our gate. The one at the gate was supremely annoying because I’d already had my carryon searched, item by item, 5 minutes before. And then we had to be “wanded” down though we had just passed through the metal detectors. After the metal detectors, I had returned my metal lipbalm tin to my pocket, and of course it made the wand beep. But taking it out and showing it to the Wand Guy wasn’t enough, he made me open the lip balm tin and show the contents to him.

I’ve never really been irritated by any of the airport security measures taken since September 2001. But this just seemed to take it one step beyond, to the level of the utterly ridiculous. And, by that time, we’d been awake, more or less, for 24 hours, so I’m sure things seemed even more strange and irrationaly that they really were.

All the confusion and frustration stayed there, though, since in DC, we were able to just claim our luggage and go out to get picked up by Will’s mom and cousin around 22.30 eastern time or so.

We stayed at Will’s parents house that night, rested on Friday, had dinner together, and then Will drove us home while I dozed off.

We arrived in Carrboro right at 2 am today (Saturday) to four cats who were very happy to see us. It is so quiet here that I had a very difficult time getting to sleep. Cuchulain didn’t let us sleep past 7.30 this morning.

We also came home to no hot water. We won’t have any until Monday. My landlord and her husband came over to look at it. When he pushed the reset button, there was a spark that set the insulation on fire. Excitement!

So, we’re back home (though Will still has to get back to NY), and I’m unpacked, but things are not quite back to normal. We’re both feeling exhausted and kind of dazed, and we’ll be heading around the corner to Suki and TJ’s with our towels and bags to take showers in a bit.

My landlord offered to put us up in a hotel until Monday (she rocks) but the last thing I want right now is to feel like I’m travelling again.

And that is the end of the narrative-chronological story of this trip.

There are a few more posts I want to make about a few small things, though, so I’m not quite finished here yet.

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Our last day in Paris. Looking forward to being home, dreading leaving Paris.

We went to the Centre P0mpidou to see modern art. I was not overly impressed with the collection or the museum. There seemed to be a lot of poorly used space, and a whole chunk of the space shown on the museum map was inaccessible. But I did enjoy myself. Will… well, if he wants to tell you his view on it, he can do that. Here’s a photo of him in the Pompidou’s external habitrail, looking as excited as he was before we went in.

You could also see an example of my favorite street art from the habitrail:

I enjoyed the exhibit that opened the day we were there–Big Bang, Destruction and Creation in the Art of the 20th Century–which grouped works into rooms on a theme: monochrome, the grid, melancholy, war, etc.

I particularly liked the work of Francis Picabia. Saw some lovely sculptures by Giacometti - I think I saw them once before in a travelling exhibition, but I’m forgetting where… likely in DC.

Experienced two Jackson Pollock paintings in a manner I’ve never experienced his works before. I’ve always been fascinated by him and his work, but never moved by it. This time I was moved.

My favorite piece, hands down, though (and this is coming from someone somewhat skeptical of multimedia installations as typically seen in museums) was Bill Viola’s Five Angels for the Millennium.

It had started raining while we were in the museum. When we were done, we ducked around the corner for some crepes for lunch before we saw the Atelier Brancusi. Brancusi lived, worked, and exhibited his work in his atelier, or studio. The studio and all the pieces from it are reassembled in this separate building in front of Centre Pompidou. I loved seeing it.

On the way to and from Pompidou, we stopped to feed the birds in front of Notre Dame.

Our plan for the afternoon/evening was another picnic at Luxembourg Gardens, but the rain spoiled those plans. Instead, we decidedc to go to one of the places mentioned in one of our guidebooks, Maison de Vanille, where they have all kinds of yummy vanilla things. We walked there, but the place was either closed or relocated.

We wandered and stopped for a coffee at a cafe and people watched and savored our last evening, trying not to let the weight of trying to have it be the perfect last night squish us. Or maybe that was mostly me.

In the end, we got the same sandwiches we would have eaten for our picnic, and I had a butter/sugar crepe and we ate these at home while packing and listening to music and drinking the bottle of bubbly we’d saved.

Hanging out the window, trying to burn all the sights and sounds into my memory.

And then, sleep… for our airport shuttle pickup was arriving at 6h20 the next day.

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A late start this morning due to being exhausted and needing to wait around to make some phone calls regarding our return flight.

I’m getting sad about leaving, yet I’m feeling a little homesick for my cats, my kitchen, my soft sheets, and my friends. Here, it’s hard to not feel like I must constantly be going somewhere, seeing something, doing something, noticing everything because it’s so beautiful and so rich in history and stories and culture, and because it will be a while before I can return. I want to wring all the experience I can out of my time here, live fully *on*, and it’s just too much to maintain that level of attention and energy for much longer. Actually, I think I’m mostly spent now.

It will be good to get back home to a more or less regular routine, where simple transactions at stores can be carried out close to mindlessly if necessary, and where my cats greet me at the door.

I got to pet a cat on the way home from dinner for the first time since leaving my own at home. I was a little surprised at this. I knew Paris was full of dogs, but I also was under the impression that there were lots of cats about. Not around our place, at least…

I’ve loved being here this long, though. I feel mostly familiar with my surroundings and their rhythms: the tweeting of the police directing traffic during rush hour, the quietness of Sunday, the breaking plates at the cheesy Greek restaurants on rue Huchette and the eventual sweeping of the fragments, the emptying of the glass recycling bins of all the restaurants with all their wine bottles, the ringing of the bells of Notre Dame, the opening and closing of the wine shop and bakery and the booksellers on the banks of the river, the tour boats sliding by incessantly, the surge of people in the neighborhood at night, the blend of music from multiple places at night, and more more more…

Yes, it’s rather noisy in our neighborhood, in our apartment, but it doesn’t really bother me. Aside from car alarms and street fighting, I tend to like city noise for some reason.

Today I gave a confused tour group who showed up at the wine store some basic recommendations. Just a few minutes later, I was giving people directions to Place Maubert on the street. If we don’t look like locals, at least we look like we know what we’re doing and where we’re going, at least a little bit, at least sometimes. It feels good.

I’m starting to be able to understand more and more of what people say to me in French, and a few small pieces of my basic grammar have come back to me. It saddens me a bit that I’ll lose it all again so quickly.

ANYWAY…

Today we had a late start, and then we went to La Conciergerie, first palace of the French kings, on Ile de la Cité, established in the 1300s. Later they moved to the Louvre, and La Conciergerie became a prison. One of the towers was a torture chamber. People charged had hearings here and were held before being freed, punished or executed. There is a torture tower, Bonbek, and a tower where treasure was supposedly hidden. Marie Antoinette and Robespierre and many many others spent their last days here before being hauled over to what is now Place de la Concorde, where they met the guillotine. It was really chilling and fascinating to wander around this building, feel the walls, feel how some of the stair steps are so worn down they are like bowls, put my hand in the fountain where women prisoners washed their clothing, and see various artifacts from the history of the place.

Then we shopped for gifts, and I picked up a few things for myself at BHV. Lunch at home of camembert, lettuce, tomato, egg, and mayonnaise on a pain lait.

Then we went out shopping some more, looking at books and searching for a chocolatier in Ste-Germaine-des-Pres.

We saw:
- the house at 5, rue Christine, where Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas lived
- the house where Picasso painted Guernica, just around the corner
- the location of the original Shakespeare and Co., where Sylvia Beach published Joyce

We went to Lhassa (a Tibetan restaurant between 11 & 13, rue de la Montagne Ste-Genevieve) for dinner and it was wonderful! It was the first time I’d had Tibetan food. Will had a tofu and vegetable curry. I, of course, got a full menu:
- vegetable and tofu soup with crunchy bits to put in it, with the spicy paste and some soy sauce to add to taste
- six amazing vegetable dumplings filled with spinach and potato and possibly cheese, and the most delicate flavors
- a blue and white lotus-shaped bowl of cold, pitted lychees in light syrup
- butter tea, which is a strange and delicious mix of flavors: buttery, milky, salty, tea — it tastes like how warming up inside after being outside on a really cold day feels.

Then home…

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Photos from Thursday–Musée Rodin, wandering, La Samaritaine, Notre Dame, etc–this way –>

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Photos from Versailles on Friday, this way –>

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Photos from Saturday–Musée d’Orsay, around and about–this way –>

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Photos from Sunday–the bird market, the Marais, Bateaux Mouches tour, and the Eiffel Tower–this way –>

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Photos from Monday, this way –>

(Pere Lachaise cemetery and me feeding birds)

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We were supposed to go to Centre Pompidou today, but the museum there was closed for installing a new exhibit. We will go back on Wednesday.

Instead, we went to the place in front of Notre Dame. I took a photo of my feet at Point Zero, and fed birds:

Then we picked up lunch combos at a boulangerie/patisserie/traiteur near Pere Lachaise. I am sorry I didn’t write down the name. Long sandwiches of buttery Camembert on different kinds of bread. I had an Orangina — yum. Desserts were included. I had an apricot tarte, and Will had some thing made of two large choux pastry puffs. One was filled with coffee flavored cream, the other with chocolate cream. They had matching glaze on top and were joined with a glob of vanilla cream. Tasty!

We had lunch in the cemetery and then walked around for a long time–until it closed, in fact.

Had coffee and hot chocolate at a cafe across the street. I read, and Will people-watched.

There are huge promotions and signs and marches and things going on here for trying to get the 2012 Olympic Games here. A sign across from the cafe was displaying what looked like text messages from various people mainly saying, in various ways, “Olympics in Paris, make our dreams come true.”

Then, home to rest for a bit.

Then a wonderful dinner at Le Grenier de Notre-Dame, a vegetarian restaurant at 18, rue de la Bucherie.

For the appetizer, we each had fried vegetable fritters which tasted like they had been roasted before battering (in a light, but not quite tempura-light batter), to bring out their sweetness. They were lightly spritzed with lemon, which brought a brightness to the flavor.

For the main course, ratatouille, served with a green salad with mustard dressing, and a skewer of fried seitan chunks separated with deliciously sweet onion slices.

For dessert, Will had a creamy sweet chilled cheese dish that was the consistency of yogurt–maybe a little thicker. I had apple tart. Will won on this round.

A 50cl carafe of wine with the meal. Cafe espresso after. And the waiter complemented me on my french, at which I laughed and said, “Is that a joke?”

Then we came home and I watched French tv as a cultural experiment. And now I’m up far too late. Oops.

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The trip is nearly over and I am finally getting around to my first post here. Then again, it is not after midnight already, and Kristina is watching a french game show on TV instead of attaching tags to photos. For those of you reading from home (or work!), feel free to comment on anything in these posts. Here are a few of my (Will’s) thoughts and impressions so far…

… there isn’t as much dog crap, smoke, or pollution as the guide books warned. There’s some of each, but nothing out of my normal american experience.

… unlike NYC, it is hard to find a good, cheap meal, much less a vegetarian one. There are a few quick options that are easy to find, but they don’t really make a meal and they get old really quick.

… Paris is compact. It is often easier to walk to the next metro station than it is to descend and ascend the stairs to and from the tracks. Five stops on the metro only takes a couple of minutes.

… the metro is the best subway system I’ve ridden. If it is a 10 (even though it is not perfect), NYC’s is a 7 and Atlanta’s is a 2. Stations are all over the place, the trains are quick and quiet, the people in them are largely very considerate, and the time between them is incredibly short! Besides the one night train we caught, the longest we have waited for a train is 4 minutes. A lot of stations have signs telling you when the next train will arrive, and the train after it.

… eggs are as popular as cheese.

… everyplace is someplace. With its long history, just about everywhere we go is something significant to some historian.

… gratuity is included in the price, so credit card receipts at restaurants do not have ‘tip’ lines.

… when and where you get a drink at a bar or brassiere or tabac matter a lot in price. Get them at the bar for the cheapest price, or sit to get the higher price. More than once the price lists had gin & tonics and other cocktails for $13 and beers for $10. During happy hour at more out of the way places we could get the same for $7 and $4. Getting a decent bottle of inexpensive wine (around $5-7) makes a lot of sense, especially since it is perfectly acceptable to take it to the park and drink in public.

… a ‘martini’ is just plain vermouth. A ‘dry martini’ supposedly is the proper cocktail.

… as everyone said, finding vegetarian food is not easy. Places that are veggie friendly really are like little gems: valuable and easy to lose again! By keeping careful track (and reading lots of menus), we’ve been able to eat better the second half of the trip. Picnicing is a decent alternative if you don’t want hot food, but…

… how the hell do you buy produce if you aren’t supposed to touch it??! I read in one book that you should not touch the fruits and veggies, and I saw signs that asked customers to refrain from doing so. One place’s sign said it was for hygiene. But how do you know if the avocado or pear is decent without feeling it? Besides, no matter what everyone should wash their produce before eating it, so what is the deal with hygiene?

… unlike my parents, we have not seen giant rats eating small tourists. In fact, the only rats we’ve seen have been people’s pets. One riding on someone’s shoulder, the others at the bird market.

… very local touristy greek restaurants have a habit of breaking lots of plates, and sweeping them up at 3 in the morning.

… if going to Paris, pay attention to whether your room faces a busy street, and whether or not you are sensitive to noise. I’m just saying, that’s all.

… hot chocolate will never be the same again. Not after having it delivered on a platter with a cup, a small pitcher of melted chocolate, and another small pitcher of hot milk. Wow.

… MP3 players and speakers the size of size of a paperback book are wonderful traveling companions.

… there is a lot to do here. It has been easy filling everyday with things to see and do, and it has been easy getting worn down. The ‘next!’ imperative is a strong force indeed. Two weeks is not enough time to also fit in so-called down time.

… you really can get a tiny cup of cafe express at a relatively busy cafe on a busy street and sit there for over an hour without incurring the disdain of the waiters. It took a while to believe that. But beware the cost! Most places have that coffee for $2 or so, but there were a couple that wanted $7 for it.

… the automobile population is very different here. It seems that nearly half of all cars are what the US considers to be of the sub-compact variety, and some of them are much smaller than any car in the US. Take a mini cooper and reduce it by about a third and then you have something approaching the Smart car. There are some pictures in the earlier galleries. What would be a mid-size in the US is a large car here, and the dreaded SUV is rarely seen. It makes sense that so many are small, too. Gas is way more expensive than in the US, so better fuel economy is a good thing. Parking is always tight on the streets, and these cars fit in tiny spaces, sometimes with only 3 inches in the front and the back. There are some mad parking skillz here! We watched one guy go forward and backward at least 10 times, on a hill & with a stick shift to ease his way out of his tight spot. I think we’ve heard one car alarm since we’ve been here, which also makes sense — with the tight parking, bumping your neighbors happens all the time and isn’t cause for confrontation.

… driving is pretty chaotic. Lines and lanes are mere suggestions, and motorcycles and scooters shoot straight to the front of the line. Despite this, everyone just merges and lets in and generally gets along. The metro Atlanta area population would drop drastically if this driving style was implemented overnight. (Good job making it through, Mom!)

… and speaking of which, the people of Paris have been great. People just flow. The everyday interruptions that anger so many people at home - like a car stopping in front of you, someone not knowing where to go, a slow person in line in front of you - don’t phase people the same way here. People just adapt. They step around. (They don’t try to run you off the road.) They try to help with whatever means they have. They acknowledge the little things like moving your knees out of the way. They smile and say bon jour and au revoir. Most seem more apologetic they do not speak english than the tourists are that they do not speak the local language. And they are patient. What I think is most often interpreted as rudeness is their bluntness, sort of like NYC, and that most often happens in busy restaurants. Your order is taken, and that’s that. No chit chat, no laughing at awkward exchanges. But that isn’t rude. On many occassions, we have been the recipients of some very kind and generous actions from strangers. (And for what it is worth, while there are some people who smell offensive to our American noses, they are few and far between. That myth has been way overplayed.)

… last, the myth of the American Tourist. We have no idea how many americans are around, so we can’t say what kind of percentage they are, but it is true that most of the loud people (which pretty much includes obnoxious as well) have been Americans, as can be told by their accents. Most groups of people speak quietly amongst themselves, but these other people stand out with their volume. The other thing that causes them to stand out is that some don’t even try to broach the subject of whether their target can speak English — they just bust out with things like “Is that a new arch they’re building down there?” No “excuse me”, no “parlez vous angles” (and pardon my spelling!), just loudly blurting out their questions to unengaged people. I wonder if it is these people that claim the french are rude. But like I said, I have no idea how many americans are here that don’t act that way. Good thing it isn’t all of them.

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