I am going to Paris tomorrow. This is just starting to sink in. I am so not ready. I did not lose 100 pounds like I planned. I do not have any fashionable clothes to wear. I have not spent any time using the French lessons I put on my iPod. I did not grow out my hair for a stylish-and-slightly-euro look. I did buy some walking shoes though. And I have read and reread The Sweet Life In Paris by David Lebovitz. This book has only reinforced my fear of being badly dressed and not knowing what to do in restaurants. There is a whole section on how to not eat salads and fruit. I am afraid. J'ai peur!
I also have absolutely no money to spend on this trip. I just spent $22,000 replacing the heating system in my house. I will be paying this off until 2074. Fortunately I already paid for the airfare and the apartment so all I have to do is eat.
Eating in Paris. That really is the major motivation for this trip I think. My trips to England, I mean the UcK, certainly were not about food, they were for work. Italy was glorious and amazing and wonderful. The scenery and the people were pretty great too. The south of France last year was fine, magic potatoes being a high point, but it just was not Italy. We had a few days in Paris at the end and I did not have one great meal. I had OK food, but nothing that made me leave my body and float around in the ether.
So I am of two minds on this:
Mind 1: We were rushing to hit museums and stuff last time so we really only had time to hit touristy places for food. It’s not like I gave Paris a fair chance on this whole subject.
Mind 2: Italian food is all about local and fresh and not messing with things to cover up their flavor. French food is all about messing with things to cover up their flavor. It’s fussy and saucy.
My little stereotypes were reinforced earlier this month. It was Mark's birthday. We had dinner and this new place called Toulouse Petit in Lower Queen Anne. We had pretty much classic French bistro food: steak tartar, duck rillette, steak au poivre, carafes of wine. All good, nothing bad, but nothing transcendent.
Friday we had dinner at Spinasse in the trendy Pike / Pine corridor. Oh my fucking god! Oh my fucking god! Little pieces of rabbit tossed with radicchio, anchovies covered in pesto, cippolini onions stuffed with salt cod, other little things that I have blanked out due to too much pleasure. And then the pasta. And then the pasta! Ravioli things stuffed with beets, thin long pasta with this ragu of meat, then these magic carpets of pasta with chunks of pork tossed about. I cried. I just cried and cried into my glass of Gavi. The waiter kind of got us so he brought out this not-really-tiramisu, magic ladyfinger mousse thing that was not on the menu. He poured fresh espresso on it and we cried some more. I could go on but you get the picture. Italian food is from heaven. French food is not.
I don't want to be like this, really. I want the food in Paris to be amazing. I want to be sitting in some little bistro and have food so good it makes me fall down and wet my pants. Thus the trip. Tomorrow…..Yay!
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I am in the first class lounge at Sea-Tac drinking white wine and waiting for my flight. It's delayed a couple of hours due to snow in Europe or something. Ca ne fait rien. I should be in Paris in about 11 hours or so.
So much drama in real life and at work recently. I cannot wait to get on the plane.
Getting on a plane. Hmmm…..It occurs to me that when the mermaid and I broke up almost four years ago I thought I would soon be homeless and would never get to go on a trip ever again. I was just thinking about all the times I have been on an airplane since then:
Maui
London*
London*
London*
O’ahu
Mexico
Maui
Santa Fe*
Italy
Maui
O’ahu
France
The Big Island
O’ahu
*Not flying first class, quite traumatic actually.
There is no * after Paris. I sure hope that * part of my life is over. That is probably not a safe bet however. There are more layoffs coming at the airplane factory just after the first of the year. Probably not the best time for a non * trip, but on the other hand I am way too fat to sit in coach for 10 hours.
Before we left Chris asked if I had room in my luggage. I'm like, "Room for what?" Fudge. She wants us to bring fudge to Paris. Basically, Chris, you want me to be a fudge packer. So many things I could say here....but most of all I just have to question the idea of smuggling chocolate into one of the world's chocolate-making capitals. This seems unwise at best.
I have been unable to find my shiny perfect Wallpaper Magazine for a while. I was afraid that it had succumbed to the same misguided corporate decisions to shut down other great magazines like Gourmet and Metropolitan Home recently. But yay! I just found one in the newsstand here. I kissed it even before I paid for it.
OK, that should be all for the pre-flight post unless we get further delayed by weather.
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What the fuck is that horrible sound? Oh my god, some kind of chainsaw trying to cut through cement. Oh. Wait. That is me. Snoring.
I am stretched out flat in my first class chair trying to sleep off the glasses of white burgundy and dinner.
Yep, I am on the plane now – for about 2000 miles. Right after we took off the purser came over to apologize to us. We’re like, huh? Apparently when they loaded up the plane they forgot the red wine. But they have lots of white! We laughed. No vile red oak liquid for 5000 miles. Yay!
Dinner was OK. Fois gras, salad, some little chicken-like thing cooked with vegetables. Then cheese. White burgundy. I skipped dessert.
I watched a really interesting documentary about Anna Wintour, who totally turns out not to be that much of a bitch, really. Then I rewatched this French movie called Les Chansons d'Amour that I like a lot. Very cute boys in that movie.
Guess I won’t be sleeping all the way to Iceland. I wake up Mark and make him go get me some water. He is too groggy to tell me to do it myself.
OK, off to watch more movies and drink more water now.
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England appears to be covered in snow and frozen solid. We cross the English Channel and head to Belgium where, as we learned last year, the Charles de Gaulle International Airport actually is.
The French do not volunteer that fact to you when you book your flight. We land at CDG and skip right through customs. Then we wait for our luggage, and wait, and wait, and wait. Our car driver calls from out front to say he can't wait for us any longer. We beg him to give us 30 more minutes and then finally the luggage comes. He is standing there holding a card with our name on it when we get outside. God bless him.
Michelle got here a week early and will meet us at the apartment. I call her to let her know we are here.
It takes a while to drive from snowy Belgium to the French capital, but soon we are in Paris! My heart is pounding avec excitement!
We get to our apartment. Michelle is waiting in a restaurant across the street. The place is tiny, but it has two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a small kitchen, and apparently one small heater. It's cold in here. Really cold.
On the bright side, and not to be too indelicate here, this apartment has the most amazing toilet paper. 14 ply and super soft. I am going to steal some to take home and sell.
Michelle has a bottle of champagne, some bread and cheese, and a small dead chicken. We devour all of it and then we go for a quick walk through the city.
For such a tiny woman she sure walks fast! Mark and I are soon exhausted and have to come home for a nap.
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After a quick rest we head out for dinner. Nothing opens till 7PM, so we have a glass of champagne at a bar and then head to a restaurant called Aux Charpentiers. This nearby place got several very good reviews in our guidebooks. They lied, the guidebooks. The place is overly bright. The kind of bright, intense light that is normally reserved for interviewing a suspect or drilling in a dentist’s office. It really overemphasizes my fine lines and wrinkles.
Our waiter is Chinese and seems to speak French about as well as we do. He is not a happy man. I start with some red fish on spinach, Michelle has salad with cow on top, Mark has this vile white thing that seems to be slivers of horseradish covered in mayonnaise. It was supposed to be some variation on a theme in celery, but yes it is horseradish covered in mayonnaise. All bad. Especially the horseradish thing.
For the main course I have some lamb, mushrooms, and roasted cauliflower. Not terrible, but not good either. Michelle ordered chicken with rice but it turns out to be the Indian dish Major Grey's Chicken Curry. Mark has beef with potatoes. They are not magic potatoes. This is all just wank.
I take a picture of French people sitting in the restaurant. Please notice how all their fine lines and wrinkles are emphasized.
For dessert we have a poached pear and some stinky cheese. This is good actually.
After dinner we walk down to the river and take some pictures.
It's just starting to freeze. Christmas lights are up everywhere. It's really pretty. It’s late and there are still lots of people out walking. This is the Paris I remember from last year. Thousands of people out all over the place all the time.
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It's getting dark out and I am drinking this amazing thick hot chocolate made with very dark and not very sweet chocolate. As you know I think chocolate is for girls, but this makes me feel funny. Wow. It’s really good.
We’ve had a great day so far. We got up around 8:00AM but didn’t make it out of the house till 10:00AM. No real jet lag so far. We walked over to the food hall at Le Bon Marche. And I really do mean Le Bon Marche, not Macy’s.
We had not had breakfast and there was no obvious place to eat there so we ran across the street to a little café called Le Weekend for coffee. Mark and I each have espresso but Michelle mistakenly orders an Americano which is a cocktail made with sweet vermouth and dry vermouth. She doesn’t like it, so I slam it down. Then she orders a Café Americano. It’s too late for breakfast now so we head back to the food hall. It is quite huge and stocked with everything – a bit like Harrods in London but more approachable.
They have that amazing olive oil from Provence that we got last year (and just ran out of). We buy bread, cheese, Serrano ham, wine, etc. About $300 later we wander back to the flat for a little indoor picnic.
After lunch we head to the Cluny Museum to see the supernatural Lady and the Unicorn tapestries again, but en route we pass by Rue Odeon so we have to find this little Indian import store I saw last time I was here. It was never open each time I walked by last year. It's open now. Turns out the owner is American. She’s wonderful. We buy cool stuff – a painting of an incarnation of Vishnu, a really old bell, an intricately carved old board used to make crackers. She tells us that she is closing soon to move to India – and she is not normally open on Mondays. It was a total fluke that she was open today. It’s like we were meant to come here. We talk for a bit about why she left America and what Seattle is like today. She gives us restaurant recommendations, but she is hesitant, as if there are no good restaurants here.
The supernatural tapestries at The Cluny are incredible just like last time. I cry. This time I notice how the silk on the inside of the lady’s dress shines.
Supernatural is the only way I can describe this stuff. How could someone have made this on a loom? Every time I come to Paris I will go see these.
Back at home we get hot chocolate next door and I try to listen to French radio on the stereo. I cannot find a station that plays French music. Everything is in English or it’s bad French rap. We watch this stupid reality TV show about French boys in Miami that are in a contest to see who can French kiss the most American girls. Any posturing by the French about the superiority of their culture is just that.
Then we head out for dinner at Le Comptoire which was recommended by the woman in the Indian import store.
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It was a hate crime.
At 7:00PM we walk up to the restaurant that opens for dinner at 7:00PM. There are at least 5 open tables and the minute the waiter realizes that we speak English he tells us we will need to wait 14 minutes, out in the rain. Not 13, not 15. What a conard, which is French for asshole. The owner / chef was standing there and saw the entire thing. Obviously our money is not needed or welcome here. We walk across the street to another restaurant called Les Editeurs, also recommended by the Indian woman. I am not optimistic.
Ultimately, good waiter, bad food.
We start off drinking Kir Royals then order some rosé and some Sancerre. I am really pissed off about how we were treated across the street so I am going to focus on alcohol right now.
I start with fois gras then have fish with this weird florescent green sauce on it, Mark has lentil salad and then really bad fatty pork belly sitting on sauerkraut. Michelle is not hungry so she has salad which she does not finish.
Dessert is great. We have apple and rhubarb tiramisu and this molten chocolate thing with ice cream. Again with the good dessert.
Walking back home we pass the hotel we stayed at last time with its 4 foot by 4 foot rooms. I am much happier to be in an apartment this time.
In the middle of the night I have to pee. I don’t want to wake anyone up so after an hour of moral justification I just pee in a glass and pour it out the window. It's pouring rain outside so no one will hear me. I don’t see what the big deal is. I was just hearing on NPR last week that all guys do weird things around peeing in the middle of the night. Michelle so does not see the humor in this the next day and goes out to buy all new glasses. God! I was just trying to be quiet!
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We are off to Montmartre today. We want to take the metro. I actually stop a woman on the street and say in French, “Pardon me madame, but where is the #4 metro?” Much to my surprise she actually smiles, understands and points and says in French to take a left. Yay for me!
On the metro I am standing up and this little swarm of French children are sitting around me. They try to talk to me but when I explain that I am American and that I don’t really speak French they burst out into laughter. “Yankee….Yankee….Yankee….” They laugh and laugh and say bad things about me that make the other passengers on the train laugh. Les enfants terrible. Their day care lady yells at them and they pout for a moment and then forget about me.
We walk out of the subway and suddenly we are the only white people around.
I announce to Mark and Michelle that we are not in Kansas anymore. They nod in agreement. This looks like any other busy neighborhood in Paris except there are no white people. Lots of wig shops though.
We have to hike this very long and very vertical stairs to get up to the Sacre Coeuer church.
The church is not as white as I thought it would be. There is a nice view the city. Michelle and Mark wank on and on about how the Nazis’ blew up most of Paris during the war. My eyes roll up into my head and I consider pointing out that they seem to have Paris confused with another city about 200 miles away over the English Channel, but I am polite and do not pick a fight. Fools.
We climb down the hill and head to the red light area. There are lots of sex shops and I am constantly throwing up in my mouth.
We find Moulin Rouge.
This makes me think of Ewan McGregor with his hair dyed black sining “Your Song” in the movie. My eyes tear up and my knees buckle.
Michelle buys a gay magazine for the 2010 calendar that comes with it.
There are just too many sex shops here. It’s not funny, it’s icky. We take the metro over to the Marais. This is another crazy Paris neighborhood that is packed with thousands of shoppers, homos, Jews selling pastries next to Arab falafel shops. Crazy packed streets everywhere.
We turn the corner and there is the Pompidou museum.
I suck in my breath. I have wanted to see this place since I was a teenager. We’ll be back later in the week.
We stop and get these donut things at a Jewish bakery.
They seem to be mostly made out of honey. Really good.
We keep walking and come across a big outside ice skating rink at the Hotel de Ville, which we learn is the Paris city hall after we try to go in and have cocktails. The building has sparkling Christmas lights on it.
There is music and everyone is having fun. This is really wonderful.
We stop for a glass of wine and learn that some café’s serve potato chips with drinks. These ones are soggy.
We walk down along the river on our way home. I am taking pictures when I see Michelle curled up into a ball and rolling around on the ground at the bottom of some cement stairs. For some reason it looks like she is laughing. No, not laughing. She fell down the stairs and is curled up into a little ball of pain. I think about calling 911, but those international data roaming rates from AT&T are a bitch so we just pull her to her feet and tell her to think of England.
Tonight we have dinner three doors down at Le Machon d’Henri, which is this cute tiny restaurant with ancient rock walls. The menu is on a chalk board and all in French...and I can read the whoIe thing. Ha! I have duck in pretty good sauce, Michelle has chicken that she does not eat, Mark has lamb shank that is flavored like a tagine. All come with potatoes dauphinoise. This is all fine but nothing special. Potatoes dauphinoise in Provence are life changing. Our waiter in nice, the restaurant is gorgeous, but I am underwhelmed. Am I ever going to have an amazing meal here?
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Today we are going to the Pompidou museum—or in French, CENTRE POMPIDOU MUSÉE NATIONAL D'ART MODERNE. As I said before I have wanted to see this museum since I was a kid. I can’t wait.
We take an escalator to the top through this glass tube. I make the comment that even if the art is bad, the view is worth the price of admission.
Prophetic.
The art inside......how can I put this. Pompidou? Pompous Don’t!
There are two main themes in the art here today.
1. Black: Rooms and rooms of canvases that are painted black. Just black. All black. Some have a little bit of texture. Some don’t. They are all black.
2. Vaginal torture: Macramé vagina baskets, small watercolor vagina paintings, vintage lesbian sex snuff films, Troy throwing up in the corner.
There are children all over in this museum. I cannot believe they were exposed to the black paintings.
Just when we think it cannot get worse there is another hate crime. We are all so traumatized and pissed off by the stupid art here that we go to the restaurant on the top for a drink. We are seated and then waiter after waiter in tuxedos ignores us for about 30 minutes. We can tell they are doing this on purpose as they smirk at us. Why are they doing this? It could be because every American who was in the museum today was equally repulsed by the artwork and we all need a drink at the same time. Some poor British woman who also found the artwork ridiculous and disturbing is mistook for being American and they ignore her too. We walk out in a flurry of moral indignation. I am almost in tears. I wanted the Pompidou to be good so bad.
We walk around the neighborhood and find a kind of a working class bar. We sit down and cry. A nice waiter comes over and says in English, “Oh no, you went to Pompidou didn’t you? I can always tell.” We laugh and order drinks. Mark says, “Golly, I really hated Paris for a little while there.”
Several drinks later we are better and head out to explore the Marais more. There are just crazy crowds of Christmas shoppers out all over the place. I run into Star Trek’s Leonard Nimoy on the street. He has a beard and looks good for his 78 years. I hate embarrassing famous people so I just make the live long and prosper hand sign at him. He smiles, makes the hand sign back to me and walks on.
OK, it was not quite that cool but I did run into Leonard Nimoy.
We go into the BHV department store to look at kitchen stuff. It’s just like Macy’s here exactly. Nothing special. I get a gift box of the Jean Paul Gautier cologne, Le Male. For some reason I like the bottle.
We head home and stop for dinner at a place called Léon de Bruxelles for mussels and French fries, or moules marinières and frites. As we sit down and are handed plastic menus, Michelle comments that we are at Denny’s. Yes, we are in a brightly lit restaurant holding plastic menus. I look down and see on the menu Moules over Miami for €15.
No, no I didn’t, but the moules were fine if a little over cooked and the Belgian beer was really good.
As I try to sleep tonight, the box from my Jean Paul Gautier cologne keeps lighting up keeping me awake.
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It’s Christmas Eve and I am in Paris. I am way too mean of a person to be worthy of this. To prove that, I send out snotty emails and Facebook posts to make people back home jealous.
I listen to Radio Nova, the French version of KCRW. I have been listening to this station on and off for years. The over the air version, 101.5 FM Paris is different than the online version. Unfortunately it seems to play the same English language music as KCRW and French Rap. Je n’aime pas le French Rap.
We head back to the Bon Marche food store to buy food for Christmas Day.
They are packed with people and are starting to run out of things. We buy a huge amount of food for tomorrow.
We have a fun lunch at a slightly middle eastern / north African restaurant a few doors down. I have a fish tagine which is less spicy and more soupy than I would make. I speak pretty good French to the waitress. It seems that in the less touristy areas, they are nicer and more willing not to pretend they don’t understand you.
I drag Mark and Michelle into this Buddha store I have had my eyes on for a few days. I started collecting Buddhas recently for no apparent reason. I buy a cool wind chime bell thing and a Buddha head on a stick. The store is run by this gay French guy and his sexy female friend who is dressed up like Santa. They are so nice. He asks where we are from and remains nice even when he learns we are American. He even gives me a discount on my purchases.
At a bakery on the corner Mark buys several packages of macarons. Oh macarons, how I love you. These are not the stupid little coconut covered macaroons of America. No, these are magic little cookie sandwiches. I decide to do a little photo shoot of the macarons.
This last one is pistachio flavored. My favorite.
As it gets dark we decide to walk to the Champs d Elyse to see Christmas lights. It’s pouring rain. The big park between the Louvre and the Champs d’Elyse is closed. All parks seem to close at night here. We have to walk around through a field of mud. In fact, the Champs d’Elyse seems to be built on mud. There are dozens of little white shacks set up to sell last minute tourist crap to people. It’s really raining hard and the whole scene is depressing. We head back to get dinner before we even come close to the Arc De Triumph.
It’s 7pm on Christmas Eve and we have no dinner reservations so of course we just walk into one of the most famous restaurants in Paris and except to be seated immediately.
We are. Seated immediately. At Les Deux Magots.
What a trip this place is. I thought this would be kind of a café or bistro like the other places we have eaten at. No. It’s a formal dining room with white table cloths and waiters in tuxedos.
Our waiter seems to be a rather humorless older French man who speaks no English at all.
The menu is very expensive but it’s pretty much standard French food. This is not exactly what I wanted for dinner but now it seems kind of perfect. We order a bottle of champagne and try to decipher the menu.
Sitting right next to us is this douchebag man from Canada who is visiting his sister and niece. He is hell bent on name dropping and pointing out how rich he is at every opportunity. He is in a serious moral quandary about what to name the guest rooms in his new house. “Should we call the room with the bunk beds Aspen and the room with the fireplace Whistler?” His poor sister is in hell. He just yammers on and on about what ski resort to name the guest bathroom on the third floor.
Across from us is a wonderful scene. This attractive young man who is very well dressed is having dinner with his gorgeous Egyptian girlfriend and his elderly mother. Mom is all dressed up in her best fur. These are rich people who have a pied-à-terre in Florence and an old house near Nice. Mom goes to the bathroom and the boy kisses his girlfriend's wrist and makes lovey eyes at her. I know he is thinking about his big hairy Arab boyfriend waiting for him in London.
Every table has some kind of drama like this going on. Ours included. Mark has started sneezing. Serious sneezing. Every 13 seconds. He is now up to 55 sneezes in a row. When he is not sneezing tears are running down his face. He’s not sad, just starting off what will be a bad cold. None of us have ever seen this much sneezing. We look around to see if we should be embarrassed by the sneezing, but in actuality it just adds to the overall quirkiness of the whole experience. No one even notices. Least of all Canadian douchebag, who has just named his garage Gstaad.
I order smoked salmon as a starter and then doe as a main course. Doe. A deer. A female deer. Rare. I am going to hell.
Mark orders beef and Michelle orders scallops. Our poor waiter is trying to figure out what wine we want with dinner. We just order more champagne which makes him happy.
The food itself is fine I guess. Maybe I am just not going to have a definitive dining experience in Paris that makes me fall down and wet my pants. It’s OK tonight. This is all about the experience and the setting, not the food.
I get chestnut ice cream for dessert and Mark sneezes through a large macaron made with rose and raspberry from Pierre Ferme.
What a crazy, expensive, fun wonderful Christmas Eve dinner. I am so glad we did this.
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I am awoken at midnight by what sounds like thousands of bells ringing all over Paris for midnight mass. I open up my bedroom window so I can hear better. All the other people in the building have their windows open too. So cool.
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It’s Christmas morning and here we are in Paris drinking Veuve Clicquot and listening to Bette Midler sing Melekalikimaka. This does not suck.
Church bells start ringing all over Paris again at 10am.
It’s probably best if we have more than Veuve for breakfast so we make a little picnic of fois gras, French butter, eggs, Serrano ham, and baguettes.
Later I am going to try to cook Christmas dinner in this tiny kitchen so I brine some tiny little chickens we bought yesterday.
We end up just kind of spending Christmas day drinking champagne. I highly recommend this.
Eventually I cook the little birds with some stuffing, some potatoes, and some green beans and radishes in butter. Everything turns out great. Why do I always cook better in a little kitchen with limited ingredients?
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It’s morning now and I cannot quit sneezing. It’s our last day here. The would-be air bomber in Detroit is the top story on all the cable networks in Europe. You might think that the BBC News Channel or France 24 would take a more grown-up approach to reporting this than Sky News, the British brother of Fox News, but no, all three channels are just screaming their heads off just as their American counterparts are undoubtedly doing at home right now. Depressing. And scary since we have to fly home tomorrow. We are heading out to the Eiffel Tower today.
It’s a beautiful sunny day. We head first to Rue Cler, the slightly famous shopping street that Rick Steves tells everyone about.
It’s a little smaller and less intimate than I expected, but it's fun. So many gorgeous mushrooms.
Why do they have such amazing mushrooms in Europe all year long and we don’t?
It’s a short walk to the Eifel Tower. Across the street from the Champs De Mars park is a restaurant on the corner called La Terrasse.
This restaurant is on a street corner in a high tourist area. This place should be bad. I have absolutely no expectations for anything here so I just order a glass of rosé wine and some sautéed artichokes and mushrooms to start off and then a duck breast. Our adorable waiter kind of stares as me for a second and then smiles. Hmmm.....maybe I ordered well?
The artichokes and mushrooms come out.
They are just......perfect. My mouth drops open. Did I just taste that? I need to get more on my tongue right now. Oh my god, this is amazing! There is nothing fancy here; just artichokes and mushrooms sautéed in butter with some herbs, but the artichokes are just cooked to the point where they still have a tiny bit of crunch. The mushrooms are also cooked perfectly. I am speechless. This is the best thing I have had all week and it is so simple. I don’t really say anything to Mark or Michelle because I have no intention of sharing this.
I wipe away a little tear as I finish up my last bite. The waiter comes back over and I just smile and nod. He does the same. He brings me another glass of wine.
Then my duck comes out. It’s just a duck breast with a wine reduction sauce and some sautéed squash and radishes on the side. This too is......fucking perfect. The duck is rare as I asked. The sauce is very light, salty and sweet at the same time, yet subtle. It does not overpower or cover up the duck. The just crunchy vegetables are cooked perfectly in butter.
I am lost in my own little world of lust and joy here. I have no idea what Mark and Michelle are eating. French onion soup or something. Waiter smiles at me again. This is all so freaking good and it should not be possible here in the busy tourist restaurant in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. I was so lost in the moment I forgot to take a picture of the duck. Did we have dessert? I don’t remember. I am in a happy fog.
As we get up to leave I know this was it, The Meal. There is pee under my chair. I can go home now.
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The line to get into the Eiffel Tower has over an hour wait so we decide to walk over to the Tour Montparnasse instead and go up to that observation deck.
Everyone in Paris claims to hate this building and they actually passed laws to ban new skyscrapers in Paris proper after it was built in the 1970’s. I like it. From a distance it has this very sleek sexy silhouette. Up close, not so much.
It costs $20 or something to go to the top. The observation deck has a horrible gift shop and a sad bar. It’s loud and crowded, but the views of Paris are incredible. People say the view here is extra good because you cannot see this tower when you are in it. Ha! The best part is going up on the roof. The views are better in the open air. It’s really cold up here!
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Tonight we try to go out for Lebanse food. A guide book mentions one down near the river so we head out. After a very long walk we arrive only to learn it's really a take out place. We want a proper dinner. After much more walking we end up at a Provencal place across the street from our apartment. The place is tiny and fun, but the food is just OK again. I have this hilarious beef skewer that comes out to the table hangng from a pole like someone who has just been executed.
Back at the flat we see on TV the entire world is still freaked out by the plane bomber in Detroit. We are supposed to get picked up by our car at 6:50 AM. Lynnette calls from Hawai’i at 1:00 AM. It's 1:00 PM there and she sounds drunk.
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Mark and I are on the corner at 6:50 AM when a herd of very drunken zombies in their early 20’s heads towards us. A bar has just closed and they have been up all night drinking. They are all headed to the back door of a bakery so they can stand there and eat baguettes in order to soak up all the alcohol. As they move up the street they are destroying Christmas decorations in kind of a slow, lumbering, methodical way. I don’t know if we should be afraid or amused. Both probably. As they approach, one zombie lunges for Mark’s suitcase, but he is too drunk and missed and falls. He laughs and says “Bon voyage!”
Our car is late. We start to freak out. I dig out my phone to call a cab when it arrives finally. The drive to the airport is fine. We are 3 hours early as we knew that getting through security will be tough today.
The woman at the counter explains that we cannot have any carry-on luggage today due to brand new American security policies. I am OK with that but I don’t want to check my laptop. She says that is fine, so all we are allowed to carry on is our laptops, wallets, passports, and phones. It’s obvious the policies are changing by the moment, but we just go with the flow.
We are patted down but unfortunately not strip searched by cute French security boys and then we head to the first class lounge. The cable TV news is still screaming at the top of its lungs about the thing in Detroit.
Eventually we head to the gate. It’s at the end of a long concourse. Our flight is the first of the day and the first with the new security measures. They have the area roped off and men in black leather jackets with devices in their ears are running around looking nervous. We are told they are not ready for us yet and to come back in about 15 minutes. Eventually they wave us over and we are the first to go through. We are searched again. Some people do have carry-ons for some reason and each bag is fully emptied and searched.
The flight home is fine. I watch four movies instead of sleeping. An hour out of Seattle they tell us we have to give back our blankets and pillows and that we have to stay seated. Other people in first class just ignore this and the crew does not seem to mind.
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I guess I was right and wrong about the food thing here. The bread, the wine, the cheese, the desserts, the macarons were all amazing.....but the cooking just didn't do it for me until La Terrasse. Everything there was simple and straightforward. Not fussy at all. There was sauce, but it was a compliment to the food, not a cover. Maybe there is nothing inherently good or bad about French cooking, and I suppose by inference Italian food as well. If you have good ingredients and a good cook you will have a good meal. Maybe it’s just hard to find that combination in Paris. Maybe we were just really lucky in Italy. Maybe that is a good excuse to try again next year.
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I have been home now for over two weeks. Just getting back into work and trying to finish up this blog. I have used up all the 14 ply French toilet paper.
Last night I could not take it any more, not having a trip booked. The next Eurpoean vacation will probably be to BarceIona with a day or two in Paris on the way home. That will be a while unless I win lotto. No, I need a trip booked now. Where?
Oh please.
May 25th, 2010, Maui!
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