The Parisian section of our trip was notable for the following: tiny hotel rooms, expensive food and drink, numerous sidewalk cafes, labyrinthine Metro stations with lots of stairs, and a curious lack of taxis.
Also, at least for me, there was a constant sense of fashion inadequacy. I felt like a toad next to all these petite Parisian women with their scarves and leather jackets and perfectly, artfully distressed blue jeans. As our friend K said (she’s studying in Paris for a semester) I probably should have been deported for not wearing boots.
I actually intended to buy boots but, as happens to me in these situations, I was totally overwhelmed, and did nothing. If there were one store and, say twenty styles of boots, I could probably choose something. But when there are thirty stores on one street and hundreds of styles in those stores, well, I stick my head in the sand and wear my Salomon day hikers everywhere. Even out to dinner. Oh, the horror.
Speaking of dinner. The first night we ate a three-course meal at a great little family-run place near our first hotel on the right bank, called Les Diables au Thym. The food was excellent, and the atmosphere fun, even if the petite, pink-suited proprietress ran around undoing and redoing everything our exasperated waiter did. We ate several meals at the brasserie Le Cardinal near the same hotel, mostly crepes, both salty (ham and cheese, salmon and cream) and sweet (Nutella, banana, vanilla ice cream with apples and Calvados). The last night with E’s parents we went to the Lobsteria, near our hotel on the left bank; I had, of course, lobster, as well as a few mussels pilfered from E’s plate. Our very last night I ate a delicious cheeseburger (with American cheese, and special sauce!) and fries. We even had ketchup, though I let someone else ask for it, in case the waiter sneered.
Oh yeah, we saw some sights too.
Musee des Artes et Metiers – This is not a common destination but there was an exhibit I wanted to see: Doisneau at the Joliot-Curies: A Photographer in the Land of Physicists. You may not know Doisneau’s name but certainly you recognize his photos. He was commissioned to photograph the two nuclear physicists, a married couple who had already jointly won the Nobel Prize in 1935, for a French propaganda project. Small but interesting exhibit which blended the science with the photographic reportage.
Centre George Pompidou – From the outside it does look like a Habitrail®. Inside it was massive, packed, and overwhelming, so we limited ourselves to one exhibit (D.Day: Design Today). Ironically, the first room had some inventions designed for developing countries, including an oven being tested in Mali, and there was a video of Malian women talking about the oven. There was a wide variety of interesting things to see: inexpensive temporary housing for homeless people; old alarm clocks and video games hacked with more modern technologies like wi-fi; rhinestone-studded cellphones, hypnotic videos with electronic soundtracks. Towards the end there was a kiosk where you could draw on the wall with electronic “paint” to create a picture and sound (which accompanied your motion as you painted). The kiosk would email the image and sound to you, and you could use the sound for a ringtone on your phone.
Notre Dame – You can go up in the tower, but we didn’t. We walked slowly around the inside (I was able to take some photos despite the darkness) and admired the stained glass, the chapels, etc. We had not yet become obsessed with Annunciation scenes, so I didn’t notice any; more on that later ...
Eiffel Tower – The only day we did two major things, after Notre Dame we took the Metro over to the left bank and had lunch at a brasserie around the corner from the tower (a delicious bowl of French onion soup and a goat cheese salad for me, if you’re wondering). I was pretty keen on seeing the tower, since I’d just read The Devil in the White City and learned that the Ferris wheel was invented for the Chicago World’s Fair, as a response to the elegant beauty and architectural marvel of the Eiffel Tower. After some deliberation, noting the long lines for the elevator to the summit, E and I decided to walk to the second level. It made me a little anxious to be high up in a not-totally-enclosed space—I couldn’t look up, had to cling to the railing and keep my eyes on the stairs—but it was totally worth it once we arrived at the landing. We walked around the outside and saw what we could see. We could have taken an elevator to the very top level but I’d had enough of heights, and E’s parents were waiting in the park below, so we walked back down. I noticed that descending the stairs hardly made me nervous at all, compared to climbing them. This knowledge would be useful later in our trip …
Musee d’Orsay – When we popped out of the Metro we saw a huge line on the plaza waiting to get in. But within a few moments a guard approached E’s parents, who walk with canes, and we were escorted us past the lines into the museum. Sweet! The museum is a converted train station and it’s a little confusing to get around but beautiful to look at. Avoiding, again, the compulsion to “see it all” we chose the special exhibit on Russian art from the latter half of the 19th century.
Sacre Coeur – The last day we were in Paris with E’s folks, we split up to do our own thing. I went to the cathedral at Sacre Coeur, with faint memories of visiting it in 1993, and images of its lovely, brilliant white curves remembered from the movie Amelie. Fortunately for the scenery, it was a beautiful, cloudless, unseasonably warm day. Unfortunately, about a million people had the same idea I did. Not just tourists but hordes of Parisians stunned by the warm sunlight so deep into the season. I walked from the Metro to the hill and up the steps to the top; from a bench, I took in the beautiful panoramic view of the city; I walked around the perimeter then back down.
(At the base of the Sacre Coeur hill were some African or Caribbean immigrants selling some kind of braided thread bracelets. Their gimmick was to get you to hook your finger in it while they finished making it, then sell it to you. They tried to catch me on the way out but I deal with this crap all the time in Mali and have NO patience for it anymore. When I did not respond to English they would try Spanish or Italian, which I also ignored. One of them stepped in front of me to block my path. I’m pretty sure laser beams of tourist rage were beaming directly from my eyeballs, because he jumped back out of my way just as quickly. Now, I’m sure hassles like that are annoying to everyone, but I felt it doubly so: one of the very reasons I was vacationing in Europe was to walk unharassed down the street, anonymously, without having to beat off pushy street vendors. Arg!)
In between every activity we sat at cafes. On the corner near our hotel, on the big boulevards, on the plaza at the Centre George Pompidou. We could have spent a week just watching the people. E’s mom is fond of a beer in the afternoon, which is always pleasant while it’s happening, but left us very sleepy and unmotivated after. The only thing that could make us move were the dreaded accordion, or worse, bagpipe players.
Well, I did see one more sight, the very very last day. That is, after E had gone to Charles de Gaulle airport to catch his flight to Washington, I had the morning to spend as I pleased. I walked over to the Luxembourg Gardens. I feel lucky to have escaped the park without being trampled by the joggers – seriously, there had to be a couple hundred of them. But the golden morning sunlight was beautiful, making long shadows of all the trees, which were shedding their leaves. I passed the time taking pictures, pausing to look at an outdoor photography exhibit mounted on the perimeter fence. It seemed like the right place to be on my last day, as the gardens were a gift from the Medici family, and I had just spent a week in Florence. Eventually I got chilled and, more to the point, ran out of room on my Compact Flash cards. Good timing.
