Paris is soooo Paris. The grapefruit-pink blossoms have just come out on the trees, the gold trim glitters on the palaces and churches, and little dogs strut the streets and peek from the bags and armpits of their stylish owners.
Baguettes, cheese and wine are the three daily food groups.
On a Paris morning, a chill mist covers the newly washed streets; every morning water pumps out the drains to clean the gutters.
The smell of coffee wafts from the cafes. You also notice perfume so strong in some stores that your allergies send you packing, and the sweet scent of the multi-colored flowers from the parks and squares. (Plantings on the Champs Elysee are changed six times a year and never the same design twice. Paris spends the most per capita on parks and gardens per year than any city in the world, and the money comes mostly from the hotel tax. Tourism is their number one industry.)
Naomi and I entered that magic world for just one magnifique week on a flight/hotel package from Travac Tours. I could go on and on, but I’ve made some quick notes about some of it which I share with you...
Leaving Toronto for Paris, we took the airport limo which was the same price as the bus from the Royal York. Got there from Front Street in half an hour, and had no lineups at check-in or security so had hours to spend eating our dried tart cherries (which have melatonin and are supposed to prevent jet lag.)
“We should write a letter, to the woman who wrote about the tart cherries,” said Naomi. “They didn’t work.”
The Zoom airlines flight actually arrived in Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport a half hour early, about 45 minutes from Hotel Malte Opera on Rue de Richelieu. The small hotel is just as you would picture - thick drapery, historic-looking oil paintings, tall, narrow shuttered windows opening on the courtyard.
Neither of us slept a moment on the plane, so when we hit the beds in the afternoon we totally conked out. An hour later, heads spinning, we forced ourselves to rise and see the city. By the time we returned to the room our heads had cleared and we were Parisiennes, sitting on the same bed after our dinner and evening stroll, but this time drinking from our bottle of Bordeaux 2006 bought from the convenience store down the street where there was a huge and inexpensive selection of wines amidst the vegetables and the pastry. We complemented the wine with fabulous meringues and baguettes from “the oldest bakery in Paris - 1810”, a few doors down. We were instantly addicted and returned every day.
We’d had a light supper at Exki, a Belgian-based organic, mostly vegetarian cafe with wonderful lentil soups, quinoa salad and pastry. We went there several times; you can’t eat heavy French food all the time.
Sometimes for dinner we pooled our purchased food and spread it out on the table in the hotel lobby with others from our group and shared wine, cheese, bread and fruit, and stories from our day.
As is Paris, stores and even postcard stands shuttered early so workers could leave. The sidewalks and cafes were full of smartly dressed, black-clad men and women, all wearing perfectly knotted scarves, relaxing at the end of their work day. Many travelled in business clothes on bicycles and scooters.
(Two million people live in Paris, and about 10 million with the suburbs. There are 60 million in all of France.)
The every present beige rental bikes are used mainly by locals; foreign credit cards don’t work in them. The bikes are free for the first half hour and the price goes up each consecutive half hour to encourage turn-over.
The traffic lights and walk signals are so unobtrusive you can hardly find them, and traffic zips around in a frightening spaghetti pattern.
There was a Japanese restaurant and a hair salon on every block, not connected, but both busy. Also eyewear stores on every corner, which I started to notice after I needed my glasses fixed, and it was done cheerfully and for free.
I have the impression of so many people doing their jobs - more in the shops than we’re accustomed to, and so many special tasks at the museums, department stores, city workers with green brooms, police everywhere. The city core is the most dense in Europe and yet in the early 1900s there were 50 per cent more people living in downtown Paris than there are now.
Our Versailles tour guide told us she spent years looking for a suitable apartment. About 60 per cent of Parisians own apartments, 40 per cent rent. Prices are high but not as high as London. Most live in very small apartments - about 260 sq. ft., the size of a bedroom in North America. The least desirable neighborhoods sell for about $200,000 Canadian up, to over $1 million for the same tiny apartment in a better neighborhood. St. Germain is the most desirable, and there’s nothing less than $1 million.
The earning curve in Paris is very flat - someone with a basic job and no degree doesn’t earn much less than someone with several degrees, but people take a lot of holidays and have free health care.
Leaves had popped out on most of the 100,000 (according to the city tour) trees in Paris, and park gardens were filled with blooming tulips and spring floral, but it was freezing cold all the time we were there. Spring apparently had come in January when it was 14 degrees.
Friday morning as we did each morning, we had croissants, baguettes, cheese, jam, warm hard-boiled eggs in the hotel. There was also yogurt, and granola cereal with pieces of chocolate in it.
Afterward, we walked to the National Opera House with another mother/daughter couple from our group, Helene from Ottawa and her daughter Kathe from Vancouver. The Paris Opera was founded by Louis XIV in 1669 and the latest location (1860), a vision in red and gold, was filled with crystal chandeliers, marble mosaics and paintings and sculpture.
In the evening we took a Seine boat cruise, under all the bridges. There were recorded commentaries for those who didn’t speak French. The young host spoke excellent French and Spanish and incomprehensible English. Nobody bought the 6 euro booklet he was selling about what we’d seen. It would have gone with Naomi’s 6 euro can of iced tea she bought from a stand at the Eiffel Tower when she was thirsty. Wine really is cheaper than soft drinks in Paris.
Gray clouds, gray choppy water and gray buildings, but somehow still filled with color. Instead of taking the subway back from the cruise we walked with some of our friendly, well-travelled group. In one of the many parks we encountered the original giant spider Maman whose duplicate is in front of the National Gallery of Canada.
Saturday morning was the Course du petit dejeuner 2008 UNESCO friendship run a day before the Paris Marathon. It was so much fun to run with people from dozens of countries, one from each who carried a big flag of their country. I went with Sandy, who was on our tour, and works at the Orleans Running Room. We met the first day when our Travac Tours rep made introductions and she exclaimed that she had read my book. I told her about the upcoming run, and she was game to do it - to Naomi’s delight to be let off the hook.
In the afternoon Naomi and I walked to St. Germain and the Latin Quarter, and had cappuccino and salade nicoise shivering outdoors at Cafe de Flore, sandwiched between smokers at the little outdoor tables. It’s more expensive at the cafes to sit on a chair outside the restaurant than to eat inside. And it’s more to eat inside than to take away. Coffee in a cafe outside Paris is much cheaper. In Paris you pay for the space and the view.
Washrooms are unisex.
In the evening we attended a French play at Palais-Royal called Toc Toc, about “les troubles obsessionnels compulsifs”. It was very funny, and I could follow the body language even though I had trouble catching some of the specific French words.
At the theatre, you tip the usher who brings you to your seat, and there’s no free program; the usher will sell you one for 6 euros.
Most Paris shops are closed Sundays ( and whenever they feel like it) and so that was the day we chose to spend in the Jewish quarter, around Rue des Rosiers, with kosher bakeries and butchers, synagogues and falafel restaurants, packed with customers. We visited the Musee d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaisme which had very moving coverage of the deportation of 75,000 French Jews during the Holocaust.
Monday was our day at the Louvre. (It became the largest museum in the world in 1793, after being a palace. Louis XIV thought it was too small, so he built Versailles. It would take four months to look at each piece of art.) We were at the Louvre the minute it opened and straight to the Mona Lisa to get it over with. Then we moved slowly around looking at as much as we could until our lower backs could take no more. On a chill Monday morning the immense building was packed with tourists, art students painting in each salon, junior students in red baseball caps, and large Japanese tour groups. Everyone was taking photos of their companions in front of each work of art. There were flashes flashing constantly. I had left the camera in the hotel; I couldn’t imagine photography being permitted, and so we had a different perspective without thinking about posing all the time.
(And then in the evening at Moulin Rouge (the oldest night club in Paris, built the same year as the Eiffel Tower which was built for the World’s Fair) I brought the camera and then was compelled to check it.) The show is a story in itself - topless can can dancer numbers interspersed with such Ed Sullivan-type variety acts as a woman who swims in a tank of snakes, a ventriloquist and a balance act like Cirque de Soleil.
We were inside the Louvre oblivious when the Olympic Torch Relay protests were going on less than a block away. When the verdict came in on Princess Diana’s inquest we were outside the Paris Ritz Hotel she had left from, and we went under the tunnel where she was killed.
The subway in Paris, dating from 1900, is very complicated with 14 lines in all directions, but it’s very safe. Even on a Monday night at midnight coming back from Moulin Rouge the subway cars were bright and full. The latest line opened seven years ago and is automatic with no drivers. The union made them hire a driver anyway and he sits in the station and reads a book.
Wednesday we climbed the 400 plus steps up to the top of Notre Dame Cathedral (1365) for a beautiful view of the city. We also went to the Holocaust Memorial (Memorial des Martyrs de la Deportation) just behind the church, on Ile de la Cite. It’s a long corridor lined with 200,000 quartz pebbles and a small light flickering for each person who failed to return.
Then we marched confidently in the wrong direction looking for the fancy shopping district and ended up in the red light district instead. The prostitutes seem to keep longer hours than the shop keepers; they were hard at work selling their wares at 2:30 in the afternoon.
Even the fanciest department stores like Galeries Lafayette don’t have night shopping. They do have a champagne bar in among the designer fashions.
The day before we left, we were among the six million people who visit Versailles every year. Versailles itself is a rich suburb of 100,000 people. Versailles palace has 2,000 rooms, and took 36,000 workers and 8,000 horses and 49 years to build it. Louis XIV burned the bills near the end of his life so no one would know what it cost.
It was absolutely fascinating to learn about life at the times and I could fill this e-mail with just that. Just one item...Italian mirror makers were brought in from Murano Italy to work on Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors. The French ‘apprentices’ working with them were actually experts, and once they learned the secrets, they sent the glass makers home where they died in mysterious circumstances. That’s because the Italians were mad that their secrets had been revealed. We saw the same problem in Murano when we visited Venice. The Chinese are copying the glass and undercutting sales.
Nothing changes.
We also visited the village of Giverny to have lunch and walk around Claude Monet’s beautiful house and gardens. The cold temperatures kept the crowds away, and so we could see the flowers and water lilies more peacefully. I painted a quick postcard in the water lily garden; me and my buddy Monet, we have something in common.
The last morning just before boarding the bus for the airport, we walked to Monoprix and bought some jams, which I thoughtlessly put in a carry-on bag. Naomi did the same with her pricey Phyto French hair products. We were both stopped at customs and threatened with confiscation, but given the option of returning to the airport check-in desk and checking them in separately. The “police de frontier” were getting tired of seeing us go back and forth, but were very pleasant.
The trip was an enchanting melange of history, architecture and a different life.
Naomi says she appreciated my perspective of history and appreciation of beauty. I was grateful for her sense of direction and fluency so good that locals took her for one of them. We were both sorry to leave so soon.
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