The Metro stop there is "Gobelins" after the famous weavers in that neighborhood who've been serving the French elite for centuries. At their workshop during our first Paris visit in 1973, we saw them weaving (with mirrors!) tapestries so huge that they take several years to complete. Imagine what a lengthy (and expensive) project it was to do the six Unicorn tapestries mentioned in this first installment of this blog!
We're also catching up on a bit of housekeeping .. washing clothes, buying apartment things that we use up (washing machine soap, coffee, jam, a light bulb), and canceling a credit card after someone used it for $200 in spurious Walmart charges Tuesday (tho we haven't been in a Walmart for years except for one visit at Thanksgiving). Luckily, we have another card along. Luckily too, with our apartment phone we can call even the US for free, where I spoke with a delightful USBank rep in Fargo at 3:15am his time. He was clearly an upbeat we-can-help-you Midwesterner!
In the interest of good international relations, we had a pleasant "visit" yesterday with a shopkeeper in our village, an older gentleman who was tending the jewelry store over the lunch hour (about 2pm). After he wondered whether we were British and then possibly Canadian, he proudly told us that the store had been at that location since 1922, started by his grandfather and now run by his daughter. He spoke no English but we told him about our two grandchildren and showed him their photos on my iPod. He said some of his family also lived near San Francisco. He was thoroughly charming, cheered perhaps that we did buy Elsa a Christmas present there :-)
Would you believe, there's no baby Jesus in the big crèche at Notre Dame! Where did He go, this Journeying Jesus, this Missing Messiah? The crèche will be there till early February, so maybe the babe appears only on Christmas Eve, a Yearly Yesu? Other churches we've gone by did have a baby; one was a big blond-headed Swede, with sound -- a Jabbering Jumbo Juvenile Jesus.
So how is Christmas in Paris? Less spiritual and more commercial. No snow, of course. Finally this morning we heard the first seasonal music on an otherwise pleasing "public radio" classical music station. It was "Silent Night" in German in the style of Lawrence Welk, then immediately more Haydn. As far as we know, there are very few school or church Christmas concerts as we know them. But many store windows and even entire business blocks are elaborately decorated and lit, like it's a contest. Our neighborhood bakery (while displaying museum-quality Christmas pastries) does it right with a traditional manger scene hand-painted on its windows.
Elsa has just come back from the neighborhood Saturday market with exquisite treats for later this Christmas Eve. As she just wrote Rolf, "Honestly, how could anyone walk through that market and not want to rush home with goodies to cook?" This evening at the American Church there's a Service of Lessons and Carols at 7:30 and also at 11. We'll go early, we fear there might not be timely transit at midnight. Somehow the Parisians manage it, of course. When we sang there five years ago, that late service was packed. So we're off :-)
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Later .. our Christmas Eve lunch was wonderful. Tonight and tomorrow this restaurant offers their Christmas feast at 75 or 139 Euros per person ($100 or $180) but from their confusing game-filled menu we could also order a three-course price-fixed meal at just 26 Euros (35 at dinner time). For her appetizer (here properly labeled an "entrée" or "entry" to the meal), Elsa ordered delicious bone marrow like her mom sometimes had in North Dakota, but this was a big beef leg bone sawed lengthwise and broiled!! How wonderfully primitive. Can you take it home for the dog? It gives new meaning to the phrase (and how do you say it in French?), "May I please have a doggie bag?"
My appetizer was paper-thin Norwegian salmon doused with olive oil and topped with toasts, a mound of Chantilly cream and smidge of caviar:
Her plate was salmon, mine was beef, both in a pungent sauce reduction. Her dessert was the house specialty, a warm Grand Marnier soufflé (below), while mine was slices of pear in a thick warm crusty eggnogy sauce, topped with nutmeg and pear sorbet. Plus a kir royal, a better red wine, and two espresso coffees. All for $100. We'd go back.
Then we did the tourist thing and walked the street of the celebrated fashion-design houses (the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré) where Santa made another seasonal purchase. Ended up at the giant Ferris wheel just as the sunset sky was turning a lovely pink, but the lines were so long. We bussed to the other fashionable shopping street, rue Montaigne (below), window shopped, and then bussed to the nearby American Church.
But we were quite early, our friend the organist wasn't there yet, and we couldn't yet get in the church even to sit down. So instead we sat at the bus stop in front and quickly caught our regular two busses homeward, right on time and not packed. I was worn out anyway because last night I had the onset of a cold .. we had to skip dinner and the play with Richard (he said Scrooge was great). Our most moving observance of Christmas was watching "A Service of Lessons and Carols from Kings College" in real time at 11pm rather than listening to it on the radio in mid-afternoon at home.
Tomorrow .. "Magic Flute" at the (click) Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, "without contest one of the most beautiful places of spectacle in Paris."
It's just one Big Day after another. We're loving it and wondering how soon we can come back again :-)
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