April in Paris - I

April 7, 2014

So here we are in Paris for the month of April, arriving the 1st and leaving the 30th. It's our fifth stay of 1 to 3 months in five different Paris apartments in seven-plus years; it's perhaps our 15th visit here overall. But despite smooth flights and quickly reaching our flat, it’s taking longer this time to recover from the travel .. sleeping till 10 and 11 the first mornings.

As usual, you can click on any of the few photos below to make them larger, or on any words in red, which are links.

One thing we did better this time was to leave Minneapolis a bit later and arrive in Paris later the next morning. That required us to stop briefly in Detroit, but the traffic into Paris from the airport was far quicker this time and it left fewer jet-lag hours to endure until bedtime. Also this time we had an Air France plane instead of Delta, which gave us slightly tastier food and wine (which we chose from a real menu), a more stylish flight crew, and somehow a quieter sleep.

Our second-floor walk-up flat is on an old street in the 7^th right beside the Invalides and Napoleon’s tomb. We’re surrounded by what once were 2-3 story mansions of rich families, hidden behind high walls. Those buildings are now embassies and government offices. The Korean and Swiss embassies are almost next door, Poland and China nearby. The ministries of Defense, Agriculture, Education, Labor and the Rodin Museum lie a stone’s throw away. Still, there’s a small supermarket across the street out our window, a fresh produce market and a deli right under us, a wine shop, two bakeries and a butcher near our corner. Grocery shopping usually means stopping at several of those places. Even in the afternoon, the baguettes are warm right out of the oven, made by a fellow we can watch in the window. There are also a dozen bistros, creperies and classy little restaurants within ten minutes, including even Vietnamese and Italian. Two of them may be exceptional.

It’s so nice to be on familiar ground. In fact, we’re so familiar with the bus routes in this quarter that we chose this flat accordingly .. right at the bus stop which takes us where we want mostly to go. We so prefer the bus to the Metro; we get to see where we’re going and our knees are spared all those stairs.

Immediately we loaded a month onto our transit passes, tried a morning coffee place, figured out the heat, lights, radio, washing machine and brand-new Samsung television, and settled in. But NCAA Final Four games don't seem quite as exciting in French.

This time it seems more people speak English to us even before we open our mouths. Is it SO obvious we’re Americans? Yet already on the first day people also approached us on the street with incomprehensible rapid-fire questions in French, to which I can only put my hand on my heart, smile, and say, "Je suis désolé, je ne parle pas votre belle langue" (I’m so sorry, I don’t speak your beautiful language).

Soon we were joined by long-ago friends from Germany, a retired Lutheran minister and his wife. My college choir sang more often in his church near Salzburg than in any church in the world except the Carthage chapel. In the 1980s they sent their two teenage girls, through us, to a summer camp in Wisconsin to improve their English. From 1979 we stayed in their home at least every three years .. but we've seen them only twice since the last choir tours in 1997 and 1998, and not at all since Christmas 2006. Still, those memories are precious and we immediately re-connected. What a fine man he is (and so funny); in retirement he’s busy helping displaced Syrian refugees who somehow end up in Germany.

He had never been to Paris though his wife was an au pair here for a year as a 21-year-old (and still speaks remarkable French). By then she'd already escaped at age 9 from East Germany with her parents and had been to New York by herself as a teenager. So here we were, showing Paris to Germans whose fathers fought in WWII and whose countrymen somehow killed 6M Jews. But Hartmut and I have often talked about the problem of Hitler .. so I was comfortable taking him to the starkly silent Memorial to the Martyrs of the Deportation of Paris' Jews behind Notre Dame. He quietly removed his hat as if entering a sacred shrine. But the nearby Holocaust Museum would have been a step too far.

Instead we went to Versailles and Sunday to The American Church in Paris, where Elsa and I once sang in the choir for several months, connecting with our friend the organist there. But there’s always something .. this time the thousands running the Paris Marathon prevented us from reaching the church by taxi because the driver said the runners were blocking the street. But of course that wasn’t true. Later, however, as we got on the Metro to Montmartre, they all tried to squeeze into our car.

It is ever more expensive here. Two coffees the first morning cost $14, and then it got worse .. up to $8.40 for coffee or coke or wine or beer, which are often the same price. We had a terrific dinner, however, at a little Italian restaurant (Giallo Oro) right below us with seating for only 20,

where wine was only $5 and the best-ever rigatoni and smoked salmon ravioli were only $22. Because the owner spoke Italian, in Paris, to us Americans and Germans, we hadn't enough dictionaries. Same for our housekeeper who came from Columbia at age 15 and now speaks French, Spanish, Italian, German and fluent English. By now we really should have learned more French.

Since our German friends left we’ve been getting ready for the arrival of Sophia, our 14-year-old granddaughter, who’s flying by herself from San Francisco to spend her spring break with us. We’ve already located the departure points for several tours we’ve booked, the train to the suburbs where Sophia will spend a night with a French girlfriend, the fashion show she’ll attend at Galleries Lafayette, and, because she’s curious about food, a favorite regional restaurant where everything is cooked in your own little iron pot, featuring the tender scrapings from a pigs foot! With her in mind, we’re testing a wider range of menu items ourselves .. duck, smoked salmon, roast beef, crépes, paté, goat cheese salad, tarte tatin, chocolate mousse, crème caramel. (Obviously we like desserts.)

Returning from one of those "locating" journeys I happened into a splendid neighborhood church where an intense young organist was practicing thunderous Dupré and playing four-note chords just with his feet. Magnifique! Such is the beauty of a long visit .. there’s time to stumble upon unexpected pleasures. Tomorrow we have morning coffee with the American Church organist and in the evening a Mahler Second Symphony in a major Paris concert hall. But earlier we did too many stairs with the Germans, we rode too many Metros and too few busses. So we’re also washing clothes and recharging a bit before Sophia joins us. Life is good. We like it here.