Paris. I wake up early, but stay in bed thinking how good the bed is and how cool to see the light coming in through the windows. There are three windows in my room and I love them all.
So many competing interests for the short while I am here! Where to start this day?
How about breakfast! Ah, time to return to croissants and pain au chocolat...
So, I have a ticket for the d'Orsay for the late afternoon, and I have a dinner reservation for tonight. In between? Walk the city! Where to?? The park? No, not yet. I'm a little curious to see how the city is faring with the Olympic Games just a few days away. Where would you find signs of the impending storm of people, festivities and events? How about the river...
But I have stops to make along the way. First - the Post Office. I read somewhere that it's a good place to pick up authentic Olympic souvenirs. My assessment? Meh. They have almost nothing. You'd do better at the airport.
I walk on. As does this gentleman. I have to smile: it's cooled down to the low 70sF/22C and out comes the scarf!
Next stop: Monoprix. I like them for standard groceries and for kid clothes. One of the few department stores that has affordable stuff, with quality fabrics and simple, delicate designs. Though look how gendered the baby department is! (I'm searching out things for a newborn. Not in my family this time!)
I'm walking around the Left Bank for all this and I do see that some shops have gone the Olympic route. Like Ladurée -- the place where you go to for the most authentic macarons. They have a window display saluting (in a modest way) the Olympics. But the vast majority (and I mean 99%) of the shops are just going about their business. Olympics? Really? Is that this year? Ah...
As I walk on, I feel a quietness on the roads. There isn't a ban yet on cars within certain Olympic zones (there will be, soon). But there are restrictions on cars within the perimeters of the city. In the 8am-8pm time frame, you need a sticker giving you permission to drive in this so called "low emissions" zone. The estimate is that this has pulled 100 000 cars off the roads of Paris during the day. Is that why it feels so quiet? It is, in fact, what I love about Paris -- it hasn't the crazy congestion of London, Rome, New York. In the side streets, it really is a very quiet city.
Okay, next stop: Monnaie de Paris. It's the government building where they mint money.
It's old! Founded in 864 A.D. Again, I am on the hunt for authentic Olympic souvenirs for the kids. And I do find them here! Finally, some choices. Not the t-shirt type, but coins. Commemorative ones. I spend money on money!
And now I am by the River Seine. Didn't the mayor of Paris promise she'd have it clean enough for swimming during the opening ceremony? I don't know, Madame Hidalgo... it looks pretty brown to me...
Time to take my loot back home. Yes, I call my room at the hotel Baume that!
As I pass the Ecole des Beaux-Arts (Paris' School of Fine Arts), I see that the doors are open to visitors today and tomorrow.
Student work will be on display and for sale. Why not look to see what these students are up to...
(ha! smart women, eating a lunch under the gaze of the greats...)
I spend a wonderful set of minutes there. Of course they're all immensely talented -- that goes without saying. And what they're selling is not big stuff. No canvases, sculptures. More like small sketches, cards and inexpensive decorations.
What's interesting, too, is their openness to outsiders, and especially outsiders with cameras. You have to be careful who you photograph in France. You can get a stern "no!" from someone if you do obvious street photography. But here, they welcome you as one of them (except without the talent!). I can take real pictures of real French young people. And their art. Which is impressive!
(art still in the making...)
I leave and continue my walk toward the hotel. I see some kids on lunch break. Yes, they're still in school here. Summer vacation is France begins on July 6th. (They have more breaks in the course of the school year than our kids do, but they sure push off the start of Les Vacances.)
(there are places in the city where you can fill your water bottles...)
(what do you know! another mirror!)
It's amazing how quickly time scoots away from you when you walk city streets. You pause, you look in a shop, you backtrack, you take a detour and suddenly it's afternoon.
I take a short break at the hotel and then I'm out again. Somewhere in there I should have squeezed in something that resembles lunch. Oh well, this "caramel and salty butter" ice cream cone will do.
I do need some caffeine. I pop into a bar for that. Just standup, at the counter. The French way.
And at 3 pm I am at the doors of the Musee d'Orsay. I bought a ticket a long time ago for their special exhibition and I totally forgot what it was that I wanted to see. But, the museum is always great and so I go in hastily, curious what got me excited a few months ago. (I have found that the d'Orsay is great if you pick the late afternoon time slots. No one wants to go in with only an hour or two before closing. But I do! And there is never a line.)
Here's what I'm looking for!
Turns out there's a whole story to this: about the clash between traditional art, traditionally displayed at a Salon, and the breakaway gang that formed the Impressionist group. I wont give you the details. But I will post (just) two canvases from the show. The first is by a traditionalist, and of traditionalists at the Salon.
The second? Well that's easy! You can see right away why there would be conflict between the two groups of artists.
There's a certain loud buzz to big museums that makes me want to leave after a while and so I decide not to stay at the d'Orsay after I'm done with the special exhibit. I want to squeeze in a park walk, and the d'Orsay is just across the river from the Tuileries Gardens.
I have mixed feelings about this park today: I love it and I dont love it. The shade, the trees, the chairs tucked in corners -- all good. But both ends of the park have succumbed to Game craziness. Both are shut off to the public so that opening ceremony stuff can go up.
(here's the western end that normally spills out onto the Place de la Concorde... Lots of fences and construction...)
The eastern end is equally bad. The flower beds are neglected, there are barricades everywhere. The open air cafes still look attractive, but I have a beautiful memory of sitting here with a young family and watching their two kids play in the gravel (last July). Sitting down now in this half obstructed park isn't tempting.
I come home for an hour or so. How quickly the evening comes!
Dinner? I surprised myself by picking a restaurant for tonight that is not a typical choice for me, in a neighborhood that I never go to (except when I want to peek into a small museum in its far corner). The neighborhood is too bourgeois, too staid, too snooty, to be perfectly frank. And everyone will tell you, correctly, that the most exciting food scene in Paris is exactly at the other end of the city -- to the east, in the more edgy, younger and certainly more diverse blocks of the city. The rents are cheaper there. The energy is explosive!
Yet here I was, sometime last month, thinking about where to eat in Paris. And I booked a table at Comice. Not too far from the river, right in the heart of that forgotten and forsaken by me 16th Arrondissement. Why, Nina, why?
Well, you remember perhaps that food used to be my thing. I took on a second job so that we could occasionally sample great food. Not at the level of the totally snooty French Laundry and three Michelin starred eateries of Paris, but still, the cheapest of the superb. And when the moonlighting wasn't enough, I organized tours to France, twice, so that they would pay my way there and I could join in on the good food. I came up with the name for my tours: "Field to Table," back in 2001, when no one had yet appropriated that term or its analogues.
It was a stressful way to eat well!
Then I shut it all off. Traveling solo and eating extravagantly aren't a good mix. And of course, I no longer can get second jobs to foot big bills. Travel is expensive enough. Eating at Michelin starred places just isn't in the books anymore.
But then I read about Comice (for example here). It's run by a French couple, though both are from Canada. He cooks, she pours the wines. And it's not pretentious -- it's your classic "best use of available produce" restaurant. It has one Michelin star. And I thought -- once every few years, it's worth it. Cut out a day in Paris -- come back June 30th rather than July 1st. Save there, and for once, have that meal of the past. The ones we strove to prepare when I worked at L'Etoile. The ones that taught me to be respectful of well sourced ingredients. I hesitated, to be sure, but then I read that little note on their website -- children are welcome so long as they also order the tasting menu. That clinched it. Children are rarely (ever?) seen in French fine dining restaurants. They first train them in schools to eat properly, they reinforce it at home (to eat all foods with good restaurant voices), and then let them loose when they are of voting age. Or so it seems. I remember when I first took my girls to a starred restaurant (just one star, but still, it was starred) after a year of working at L'Etoile and saving up for it-- they were teenagers and they did the tasting menu and I swear it was a turning point for them. They've been superb cooks and adventurous eaters ever since, and always respectful of the foods they work with. So, Comice tugged at me. And I actually purchased and packed a new (ironed!) pair of linen pants for the occasion of going there. (Unfortunately, I'm still in my Allbirds. I did not have room in my suitcase for extra shoes, nor do I own a pair of nice shoes to be perfectly honest.)
I put on lipstick, decked myself out with jewelry (all presents from daughters and grandkids) and set out on the M10 metro, all the way to the far western edge of the city.
(Once off the metro, I have to cross the bridge to the Right Bank. As you can see, I am way beyond the Eiffel Tower. Notice the Statue of Liberty -- one of a handful around Paris.)
Did I have trepidations? I did not. I have such inside knowledge of how these restaurants are run that nothing can intimidate me. Even if I am in my Allbirds, I feel just fine. (I did ask Madame Hananova -- the coowner-- if she objected to me taking photos of the foods. Snooty places dont like it when you do photos. It "detracts" from the eating experience (they claim). She laughed heartily at my question which immediately told me that this was going to be a very nice evening.)
I could have done the four course menu, but I chose the fiver. She said that they adjust the portions accordingly on the five course selection, so that you get more variety, but the amount of food isn't much greater. Besides, she said -- these are French portions. (She'd already found out I was from Wisconsin, which perhaps explained her apologetic tone when she spoke of portions.)
I wont run you through the courses -- what for. Roughly, there were gougeres, a tiny cup of tomato gaspacho, a spoonful of fish tartare with cucumbers as I recall, an eggplant thingie, then a bit of risotto with crab. For the final dish -- the big one -- you could choose veal, fish or lobster. Authentic (because June is the season!) Bretagne lobster pieces (not the whole thing, silly), poached and served with something or other. For dessert you could have a tart or a chocolate souffle and she really urged me to go with the souffle so I did. I also took the wine flight -- a tiny bit of wine with each dish. She said it would amount to a little more than two glasses, plus the sip of champagne to start the evening off. I hesitated (that's a lot for me these days!), but in the end I did what the French do -- I said biensur and she poured away. I had the presence of mind to refill my bubbly water even faster than she did my wine glass. The waitress was amused as I kept asking for more eau petillante. (fizzy water). It helps to drink a lot of it when you're having a meal of this sort.
Let's see... how about just one picture? Maybe of the lobster pieces. It surely was an exquisite plate...
As I was leaving, I told her how much I loved the meal. How it was absolutely genuinely perfect. How her wine pairings were out of this world (I had all whites and they were all uniquely different). How I admired the two of them for all that they did (funnily enough he had once cooked at French Laundry -- these chefs get around) and how I loved the fact that they welcomed children. She told me -- we have a three and a half year old. We're teaching him! Yeah, but as I said to her -- you have a whole country working to support you in this effort. We're on our own back home, trying to instill appreciation and respect for fresh and honest food against the pressures of the outside world.
I left just before ten and I thought -- great! I can walk over to the Eiffel Tower and see it in twilight, close up! (Remember: the sun sets here at around 10.)
It was about a half hour walk, and as I approached the Eiffel Tower, I began to understand where all the tourists had been hiding. No wonder the streets are all empty elsewhere. All of humanity has come to see this -- the Tower, with the Olympic circles. And why not! It is magnificent!
The closer I got, the later it was and still, the crowds swarmed.
So I didn't linger. I saw the transformed Tower. My day is complete.
From there, I thought I'd walk just a bit -- until the Place des Invalides maybe. That's the Square that links up with Place de la Concorde. Let's see how it's looking in preparation for the Olympics.
Um, the answer is -- awful.
Let's end with a better snapshot. There's always the Eiffel Tower, now lit up in its splendidness!
This is where I thought seriously about finding a cab for the rest of the distance. It is late. I am tired. A cab would be lovely.
But, as I got closer and closer to the hotel, the idea became less and less appealing. In the end, I just walked the distance. Nearly two hours long. I just glanced at my step counter. Funny. Same as my big hiking day in the Highlands: 30 000 steps for the day.
It's close to midnight by the time I reach home. Not that the streets are deserted. Where there's a cafe, there's a crowd. Of course, it's the weekend, you're young only once. Or, you could say too, among the more mature -- you're only old once. Me, I retreat to my room. To sit back and think about the foods I ate, the people who worked so hard to get them to the table, the two who were so brave as to move from Canada to Paris to take on the restaurant scene here. And, of course, I write here, late into the night. And finally, I exhale...
Avec tant d'Amour...
