coexistapart's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- tomato trees & philatelie I don't think that I'd ever recommend to anyone that you could "see" Paris in four days--especially seeing as I simply cannot stand those students that do a grand tour hostel-style during the summer with a Eurorail pass and then insist that they have "seen" Europe like a true traveler--but *I* am certainly making a valiant effort. Last night I slept for 10 hours and now I seem to be over my jet lag, not really having ever experienced it, and then just woke up now at 5:20am. That suits me just fine as I called Big who's on his way to the bar (it's 6pm) and I can run through some writing, photo editing, and business-related issues on the internet downstairs before I leave for Notre Dame this morning; I'm going to stand in line to get up to the bell fry. Yesterday I walked down the hill, towards the Seine along rue des Martyrs. It's a fairly straight shot from here. The scale in all of these tour books and maps I have is just astounding; I was becoming increasingly disillusioned by EyeWitness travel guides, and this just completes it. The photos are outdated, the maps are not to a standard scale, and sometimes the orientation is just plain wrong or confusing. When Melinda sent me to the store in NYC to pick up a tour book for New England, she said not Lonely Planet because it's typically "budget." While that may have been the case originally, I'm not sure that it's the case now; and the bottom line is that their grey & white maps cannot be beat. I have used those books all over the world, on multiple continents all with great success. The only reason I don't have one for Paris is because Big bought this DK book last winter. So I walk down rue des Martyrs which has all of the shops for this neighbourhood. I pass boulangeries, maisons de fromage, patisseries, banques, Nicholas (wine chain), poisonniere. Of course by the time I'm hungry, I've passed all the best patisseries thinking that they must be ubiquitous in Paris, but I never seem to use my logic: there are never reasonable, local stores or cafes "downtown." The rent is just too high and people want to upsell to tourists who don't expect to be able to get anything overseas on the cheap. I stopped and had a cafe au lait at a little etoile where five streets criss-crossed. Everyone does the cafe au lait differently; none of them are in a giant, hand-held bowl anymore because I guess everyone has gone Italian in the last ten years? At a cafe on the rue St. Honore it was basically a cappuccino, but lighter and some milk stirred in; yesterday morning it was a shot of espresso in a regular coffee cup with a little pitcher of hot milk and almost no foam; then last night at le cafe Sarah Berhnhardt opposite the Conciergerie it was somewhere in between. I did some writing in my notebook and the NYT crossword I had saved. It started to pour. I started walking east through what turned out to be an antiques quarter: lots of stamps, manuscripts, and coins. La philatelie. Such a cool word. Too bad I have no idea what's Big's BIL's collection is like.... I passed la Bourse (old stock exchange), and the mall they've put over the old markets les Halles. I saw St. Eustache, but did not go inside because somehow I only went around three sides and did not find the door. At this point I was severly lost--not that it really mattered but in the sense of where I was trying to go--until I walked down the rue to Rivoli and then to place de la chatelet where you can see l’ile de la cite, le Pont Neuf, and Notre Dame. I stopped and had lunch. I was at the point of no return where I was so, so hungry and somehow did not have any food in my bag and I could not find any boulangeries selling croissants. The restaurant was not bad, but I could have done better; that's always the case when you travel...you feel like you've wasted the hunger of a meal at a mediocre restaurant having passed a million other options before you realized you were starving. There was English on the menu. That's really the only way to describe it. None-the-less the food was fine, so I don't really have any basis to complain. I had moules frites in a white wine-vermouth sauce with lots of crusty bread and some large fries. The mussels were very interesting; I must have had almost 100 of these tiny, farmed mollusks. And I suppose despite the work, the makes more sense as there is little-to-no time for them to grow large enough to catch sand in their shells. The whole thing came out in a pot with the lid. I also had the most amazing baba au rhum, which was the point of ordering it in the first place. I was prepared to hate it (it's basically like a treacle or pudding of dried bread soaked in, um, rum) but it was delightful. This little buche soaked in rhum and honey with whipped cream on the side. I normally just ignore whipped cream altogether these days but it actually added a lot to the desert. The rum was only too much in the layer on the bottom of the plate. Left lunch and stayed in the area, on that side of the Seine . I saw one of the most beautiful churches I have ever seen in my life, and that's saying lots considering I've seen hundreds. (Although, I guess, honestly, St. Vitus in Prague is still #1 in my heart). L'eglise Saint Merry. It was beautifully old and in terrible disrepair, the stone filthy and totally unsalvaged from the ravages of exhaust and smoke pollution. There was Hebrew on the sun-burst behind Christ, which I thought was in interesting. It put Notre Dame and Sacre Coeur to shame in its own little way. Continued along cobblestone streets (I always wonder why few countries opt to use these nowadays; they’re just so pretty--but SO TREACHEROUS AND SLIPPERY WHEN WET) and over to the controversial centre George Pompidou. I don't know if it's still controversial in 2008, but I just remember it constantly being one of those "France features" in the hokey French textbook we used in Kyiv--that its design infuriated and astounded cultured Parisians. I didn't go in, but from the outside I didn't really have any opinion; they've made a whole modern art square around the building, so in theory it does not appear so out of place.... Otherwise, there appear to be some really nice cafes and brasseries in that area, that I plan to go back to today. I went over to the musee de l’histoire d’art de Judaisme. There was embarrassingly ridiculous security to get in. It's so sad that anti-Semitism is what it is these days, though France is generally in it's own little boat in terms of specific practices. You get buzzed into an outer room of shot-proof glass, then buzzed into a cubicle where you put your bags through an x-ray scanner, then buzzed through to retrieve them while the security guard is behind glass; then you walk through the courtyard and pay for your ticket to the museum. It's not very large. It's also fairly new; I think it was only inaugurated in 1997, so they don't try to do too much. I thought it was going to be mostly about the Shoah, the Nazi invasion of Paris, but given that so many other museums do that on such a larger scale, they simply had a little area with photos of life in the Jewish quarters before l’hitlerisme (another neat-sounding word, obviously though not in principle...) and then scattered throughout the art exhibit was photographs of jews, both holocaust survivors and others, telling their story about what France and being Jewish means to them. They had probably 150 artefacts in all, with item descriptors (only in French) and then placards every 20 feet or so of Jewish precepts or practices, say 'haggadah' or 'purim' or 'laws of kashrut'. I skipped those, but some of the artefacts they had were just amazing. Including a Succoth hut and the most amazing collection of wall-mounted channukah lamps, such as a little triangle with a row of pots that you fill with oil and add a wick--personalized with the trades of a family, or animals, or Bible story. They also had some beautiful candle lamps. And tiny, tiny little scrolls of the Book of Ruth smaller than a book of matches, where the Hebrew writing was incredibly clear to my naked eye, probably written with a single thread. And a huge collection of wedding rings (bagues) with intertwined bush that is popular (like the modern Tiffany design), or 3d houses (to recognize the new home). Just beautiful, beautiful stuff. They had other things like prayer shawls, scrolls holders, hanging murals, marriage certificates, that sort of thing, but relatively well done. It's right next to the National Archives building, which is quite beautiful, as well as the old (rebuilt) Hotel de Ville. That square was the site of many public deaths, including the live quartering of a king's killer; what I don't understand is how four horse could pull a guy apart without some cuts to relieve the pressure, it's just gross really. All of it was just long enough for me to start to get tired on my feet. I went over to Notre Dame and popped in before it got too dark; it was INSANELY busy. Whereas at Sacre Coeur they say "no photos" and two stewards DO successfully manage to keep 100-150 people under control so that you can go in and pray in silence, at Notre Dame they're must be 10,000 plus people a day traipsing through there. It's a total farm. And not as impressive in my mind, though it was built during the 1100s so I guess that made it more challenging. Big asked if I saw Quasimoto, but no joke there was a very blind man with a small stoop begging at the entrance. I saw the Hotel Dieu (famous holdout during WWII) and the rue de Lutece leading up to the Palais de Justice. Today I plan to go back and see the inside of St. Chapelle and the Conciergerie (prison) where Marie Antoinette, amongst others, was held. Took a little rest and finally bought a crepe sucre. I guess the stands are not as popular as they used to be, namely they're just there to satisfy tourists--most people would just order one in a restaurant. I've delayed until now because all the places I passed where just reheating a crepe off a stack and then folding up when you order, when really how hard is it to pour some batter around a griddle? But there was a really nice guy in a stall attached to the cafe Sarah Bernhardt at la place chatelet for 2E. I will go back there today. Next I walked rue du Rivoli to the Louvre, walking through the various courtyards to take pictures of the glass pyramids. Then I came to the Tuileries, which are sadly not as exciting at night except for this strange statue of this fat, naked woman on her side who looks like she's having a tantrum. I walked up the Champs Elysee on the other side which has huts with a weird array of international products: maple syrup from Canada, tunics from Nepal, dolls from Russia, aromatherapy creams, German bratwurst and stew. There were some huts selling hot Christmas punch, macaroons, and crepes or gaufrettes, but it's just a weird mix of thing to be selling and some sort of weirdly corporate Christmas market ripped off from Germany. The cops were out in full force (I guess because it was Friday?) to take care of the traffic. Drivers here are generally ok; my only problem is remembering to look for the bicycle lane when I cross a street, because a crosswalk may include one small island (to stop, if the light changes) and then a bicycle lane for cyclists embedded in the sidewalk, once you get to the other side. I.e. you get off the street, away from cars just as the light changes, and then you still have to remember to look left for the next four feet so that you don't get run over by an angry, clanging cyclist. And it's annoying too because it will be green a ped crosswalk, but cars will make to turn and approach the crosswalk (a right on red kind of scenario) with complete disregard for the pedestrians' right of way; they still have the right of way, but not as much. And although people are largely polite and follow the rules, people more frequently run through a red on a crosswalk then just on a normal red light at an intersection. There is no warning or flashing either, so you could set out to cross the street right after it turns green, not knowing that it is a short light, and suddenly it turns red when you are half-way across the street, but the second it turns red the street light is turning green for the cars so you have to run to the other side. I got a ticket to see The Duchess in French. I picked it over the Changeling because I thought it would be a happy, joie de vie period piece. But it was actually pretty sad. It made me tired, but it was enjoyable and I actually think I would watch it again because I didn't see everything. The movie was pretty, though I thought the extended sex scenes were unnecessary--I can see that the point was to emphasize Georgiana's relationship with her husband. Seeing this moving reminded me that I love Ralph Fiennes; he was just fabulous in the Constant Gardner. I wasn't feeling too good (severe dehydration I think) so I just got an AMAZING greek-style chicken shawarma at a to-go bar near the red light district, two subways stops west of my hotel. I can't believe I still have two full days, tomorrow, Sunday, and part of Monday if I want to get up early and see things before I leave around 10:30am. Paris is just amazing; I had forgotten how the rest of the world just pales in comparison. 6:02 a.m. - 2008-11-22 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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