Where the White Things Are: Dimanche dans Paris

Sunday, February 17th was the last full day of our blissful week-long sojourn in France. I was sad about it, but also starting to feel quite tired from all of the intensity of the week. My fatigue didn't stop me from taking another soul-lifting stroll along the Seine to Notre Dame before church. The novelty of experiencing actual sunshine and blue skies on a trip in February never got old. I strolled around the peaceful Sunday morning streets, took a few pictures, listened to the bells of Notre Dame ring, and then walked back to our apartment to finish getting ready for church.

We had just a short half mile walk to the nearest meeting place of our church. We attended the same Paris ward that we went to on our visit last year. Going to church on day seven of our trip turned out to be tough. Since I was feeling so tired from our long week of activities, my brain wasn't up to the task of processing nearly as much of the rapid French spoken at church as I thought I should be able to. Jeff has rated my French abilities at intermediate, but I spent an entire talk at church trying to figure out what the topic was exactly. (Le bonheur?? I racked my brains, listened for context clues, understood isolated anecdotes, and had a peripheral understanding of vague general idea, but I simply could not remember what le bonheur meant! All I could think of was that there was a hospital back in my hometown of Jackson, TN called Le Bonheur. Hah. Jeff helped me out after church, because of course I preferred to attempt puzzling out the meaning on my own during church. Le bonheur means happiness. Huh. What kind of ironic name is Happiness Hospital?)

After sacrament meeting ended, Sunday school began and I was even more at sea with my French comprehension, having blown a critical cranial fuse with my le bonheur conundrum. I really did not follow the discussion at all. Then church ended, and I was forced to acknowledge that even two hour church can feel quite long when it's all in French. But it's always worthwhile to go to church, and full disclosure demands that I mention that there was an English Sunday school class available, but I chose to stay in the French room, fried fuses and all, because how else am I supposed to learn?

We walked home from church and had a lunch of stale baguettes, soft cheese, paté, and red grape juice. I found a new favorite soft cheese: Saint-Felicien, which is somehow creamier than Brie and Camembert. Jeff enjoyed the paté more than I did (it is shelf stable minced seasoned liver after all), but it was ok. Jeff still relishes being able to buy foods that he could rarely afford when he was serving as a missionary. Paté only costs 5-ish euros per jar, but the tiny portion in each jar made it cost prohibitive for a missionary budget. (The exchange rate during our trip was friendly: 1 euro = $1.11)

We rested in our apartment for an hour after lunch, then at 2pm we embarked on a nice long 6 mile stroll up to our favorite neighborhood in Paris, Belleville. Before we left, Jeff declared that I should be the navigator during this walk. So I studied my map and got my bearings carefully before heading out. As we crossed Pont Saint-Louis to leave our island (Ile Saint-Louis), we paused to admire the CHARM bursting forth from the place. Over the weekend, the bridge was blocked off to vehicles and troubadours set up in the middle of the road on the bridge. My favorite musician was a guy with a PIANO. He somehow wheeled his piano out to the middle of the bridge and played beautiful music that echoed and flowed over the buildings and water, competing with the sunshine for endorphins. It was unexpected to see a piano parked in the middle of the road with a scruffy guy playing his heart out on the keys, but it worked and added to the unabashedly joyful carefree ambiance of Paris preening in the Sunday sunshine. Paris knows how to exude charm like nobody I've ever met.

Back to our walk: We stayed in the family-friendly Belleville neighborhood on our last visit to Paris, and I fell in love with the two nearby parks: Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, and Parc de Belleville. On our Sunday stroll, we visited both parks and enjoyed the panoramic views from their hilltops. We even stopped and lounged in the afternoon sunshine on a grassy hillside at Buttes-Chaumont along with dozens [hundreds] of Parisians. Then we ambled over to check out the city skyline from Parc de Belleville, and got caught up watching a juggler down below our viewpoint. Eventually we walked past our "last year's hotel" just because it was nearby, (it was fun to tread familiar streets in such a big city), and then turned our toes downhill back towards the Seine, our island apartment, and dinner.

On the way, Jeff kept tugging us over thataway, when my internal compass told me to turn more thisaway. We stopped, recalibrated, and discovered that I was right. That is nearly unheard of when it comes to directions, especially in foreign cities. Jeff is not always right at first, but he can always get us where we need to go eventually, and usually I don't bother to question him or even worry too much about our route, since he is so good with directions. But this time he had encouraged me to know where I was going, so I did know where we needed to turn! Jeff purposefully did not look at a map before our walk, both to test himself and me. The role reversal was amusing, because Jeff automatically guided us and when I balked, he had to acquiesce and follow my lead. I may have been a tad too smug about my one and only directional triumph of the week, but Jeff bore it stoically enough and even congratulated me. In my partnership with this genius man, walking in his territory with his fluent language, my victories were few and far between and therefore well worth a certain amount of spousal smugness.

Illustrative tangent: One of my favorite book series is about a girl named Mary Russell who marries the retired Sherlock Holmes in the 1920s. He is 60, she is 24 (don't gag, it was post World War I England--most of the young men were killed in the trenches and vast age differences in marriage were far more common during that time than they are now). Although Mary Russell's intelligence and brainpower are plenty quick enough to match wits with Sherlock Holmes, he still has over 30 years of experience more than her, and she constantly feels that he is two steps ahead of her in everything from speaking obscure languages to braiding her hair. While Jeff is neither 30 years older than me nor an expert coiffure, I still relate to Mary Russell on so many levels. It is a delicious challenge being married to such a highly intelligent, confident man, but it can also get a tad discouraging at times. I write all of that to illustrate why my one tiny directional victory on our walk had my spirits soaring. It's not that I want to beat my husband; it's more the rarity and satisfaction of finally besting a worthy opponent.

We arrived back at our apartment just after 5pm--another nice three hour walk done. I slipped out to peek at the sunset half an hour later, although it was not very vivid that night. We had a box of pureed veggie soup labeled Moulette des Legumes with our stale baguettes, cheese, and grape juice. I noticed that the toaster in our tiny kitchen had a sort of rack on top of it, so I broke a baguette in half and laid it on the rack to warm in the hot air from the toaster (there was no oven). Toasting stale baguette did wonders for its rubbery exterior, and we enjoyed warm soup in mugs with the crispy bread, followed by a few decadent squares of chocolate.

We stayed in for the rest of the evening.

Pictures:

Possibly the only picture of Notre Dame that I hadn't taken before: done.

Peeking under a bridge at the dreamy riverside cathedral.

This riverboat restaurant seemed so quaint.

Seine-rise, I mean sunrise on the Seine.

Pretty bridge catching sunlight underneath

Two bridges

I always like seeing the contrast of regular buildings and the historic sites. Notre Dame is surrounded by regular buildings: shops, cafes, apartments, etc. It's just so nifty, having these random historic treasures scattered throughout all of the paved primped modernity.

I love the dimension and depth on the exterior of Notre Dame's towers: the facade is not even close to flat!

Sunlight streaming down a side street. The gutters have these grates in them that must be set on a timer, because every other morning or so, they gush water and wash away the gathered debris from the previous day. It kind of works...

On our way to church, we walked past the opulent Hotel de Ville, office of the mayor of Paris. We took a selfie there to show our kids because this building is often featured in the cartoon Miraculous Ladybug. The decorative stonework is almost too much, it's so fancy!