My account of our trip to Paris is not all chronological. I find writing to be easiest and most enjoyable when I write what I'm in the mood for in the moment rather than following a schedule or calendar. Paris-post number three is about day one.
Let's start this off with an excited airplane selfie:
The way the timing of our flights worked out left me wide awake for the entire 14 hours of travel. That was close to fourteen luscious hours of reading time, and I used it well. I love having a Kindle full of fun books that are more interesting than the airplane movies! While I am hesitant to admit what I read, I was glad when a friend told me about these books so here's my bubblegum travel reading list: everything by Nichole Van. Humor, solid command of the English language, unapologetic time travel, clean romance, mild PG swearing, spunky writing style--in short, the perfect airplane read. I'm halfway through her last book, and I'm a little bit sad about it.
Soaking it all in. I have a thing for old cobbled streets. They add so much to the rustic, historic ambiance! Not to mention, they disguise a whole lot more city filth than plain old concrete or asphalt.
Restaurant-shopping. I was too dull-witted and tired to take any pictures during our 3 hour walk before lunch, but trust me, it was scenic and Parisian, if a tad cloudy.
Yum.
We browsed a blessedly warm cozy bookstore while waiting for noon when the restaurants would open. At the stroke of noon, we selected a rustic restaurant in the ever-affordable Latin Quarter and sat down to a classique 100 minute 3-course French luncheon. FYI, the Latin part of the Latin Quarter is not taco trucks; it refers to Latin the language, which the original scholarly inhabitants of that section of Paris spoke and studied at university. I still find it all very confusing/misleading.
After navigating lunch with a surly gray-haired French proprietor, we metro'd it back to our hotel and checked in at last. Jeff says the key is not to let the surly French people intimidate you, because most of them are automatically surly to linguistically inept English-speakers. But I am automatically intimidated by surly-ness in general, especially in a different language, especially especially in my third language, so I sat quiet as a mouse in my too-small chair while Jeff did all of the talking/asking/ordering/paying. I also felt only half awake, and my fuzzy jet lagged brain was not up to the challenge of attempting to make sense of my weakest language. It wasn't till the last day of our visit that I finally decided to try speaking a little more French myself, and even then, only in the safe-zone of church.
This little restaurant was quite quaint with stone walls and rough wooden ceiling beams. We usually order the menu, which is three courses, quoted with a specific exact price--all gratuity and any tax is included in the quoted price, so if you order the 10 euro menu, you pay exactly ten euros. It is so nice and non-mysterious. The restaurant provides 5-10 options for each course so you can mix and match what looks good. Maybe this explanation is redundant to some, but it's different than what I'm used to, and I love the menu system!
Jeff always likes to try interesting foods, and this time he had oysters with some sort of cream sauce for his first course.
A steaming bowl of French onion soup with baguette and Emmentel cheese broiled on top is my absolute favorite antidote to that damp seeping cold. It's literally the ONLY time I ever like anything soggy. Baguettes were made to be soaked in that rich broth!
The main course. Yum. We were crammed into this itty bitty nook of a front window. My chair was pressed against a wall and I got slightly stuck when I tried to get up at the end. I was so cold it was all I could do to take off my hat and gloves. My bulky coat and scarf stayed ON. The front window that we were pressed up against was so drafty, my legs stayed icy the whole time. I tried putting my hat on my knees but it didn't help.
Upon depositing my backpack by the bed in our hotel room, I immediately laid down and fell into a scary-deep slumber. There was no transition: one minute I was awake, the next I was OUT. Staying up for 25 hours straight is hard! Jeff forced me to wake up at 4pm (I remember being really peeved about it). We video called our children and then walked up the street to the nearest little grocery store for some beloved French pantry staples: baguette, Camembert cheese, Yop yogurt, and Kellog's Extra (the most heavenly granola with toasted hazelnuts and chocolate pieces mixed in. I could write a love sonnet to Extra. Oh how I miss it!) After my four queasy ultra-barfy pregnancies, food in general does not interest me much. I don't really enjoy eating very many foods. I still eat, but it's annoying because I'm annoyingly picky after repeatedly puking up nearly everything available in our giant country for so many months. It's getting better with time, I suppose, but in general, food is not too exciting to me. But I get excited about Kellog's Extra with strawberry Yop on top. YUM. (and that French onion soup!)
France still uses plastic bags, by the way. I read a bunch of articles a few months ago about how we need to be more awesome like France and ban plastic grocery bags. Plastic bags were available at every store we went to in Paris. Another fun oddity we discovered: when a restaurant claims to sell tacos, they really mean their regular sandwich food, like kebab meat, will be wrapped in a tortilla instead of bread. Jeff and I got a kick out of that. In France, taco means the vehicle the food is wrapped in, not the style of food inside the tortilla. There was not a drop of salsa to be found. In the name of an authentic cultural experience, we steered clear of "tacos."
When planning this trip, our priorities when we searched for lodgings were location and availability of a kitchenette in the room. We struck GOLD this time around. The Hotel de Residence de la Mare was everything we could hope for in a relatively affordable European hotel--an enormous step up from our past situations. It was on a quiet dead-end street and our room opened up onto a private interior courtyard so it was even MORE quiet without any street even touching our walls. And the bathroom was over twice the size of our bathroom at home, which admittedly is not too hard to do, but felt luxurious nonetheless.
Back to day one, post-grocery shopping: we deposited the food in our kitchenette and took the metro over to the Eiffel Tower for a pre-dinner evening stroll.
The evening sky was an interesting bluish color, and the wet pavement was artistically reflective. There were also quite a few people milling about, as usual.
After sufficiently admiring Monsieur Eiffel, we hopped a metro and hiked back to our hotel for a quiet Valentine dinner of baguette, soft cheese, grape juice in wine glasses, and fruit:
We went on our very first date on Valentine's Day twelve years ago. Our twelfth Valentine's Day this year was easily the best!
1 comment:
I lovelovelove reading every word you write! Excellent descriptions and photos -- it's like being there, without the jet lag (yay) . . . or the pastries (boo).
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