For several mornings now we've enjoyed our favorite Illy-brand coffee at a little 18-seat Italian deli (Da Rocco) on the ground floor of our building, right beside our door. Already they bring our café crèmes even before we order, sometimes with an extra little pitcher of foamed milk as stiff as whipped cream. As in most neighborhoods, we shop often because you buy only what you can carry home to your little refrigerator. But at least it’s quick. A visit yesterday to the bakery four doors away and to the little supermarket right under us took but ten minutes. However, the choices are limited. Orange toilet paper, anyone?
An extra benefit with this flat is a brand new big television with 300-plus channels. Several offer ballet and nonstop orchestra concerts. Last week it was symphonies by Gustav Mahler three nights in a row with more to come, including the 2nd which we had heard live two nights before. There’s also a nonstop fashion channel and bewilderingly diverse programming from all around the world. As in Istanbul a year ago, the best English-language news coverage is on Al Jazeera. This new TV and new cable service also brought blazingly faster internet .. 162Mbps download and 43Mbps upload. That’s many times faster than my already fast Charter service in Nisswa. In a modest little Paris flat? Not too shabby!
Finally a week ago, as we have fondly anticipated, our 14-year-old grand-daughter, Sophia, flew in by herself from California for her spring break week. We’re eternally grateful that her parents let her join us even though they later booked this same week in London. An immediate benefit of her arrival has been eating in fancier restaurants like Georges atop the Pompidou and Angelinas on rue Rivoli. (My pants are getting tight.) Sophia’s favorite meal was those crispy sausages made from pig-feet meat at Les Cocottes. Playing by ear was sometimes good too, as wandering into this frozen-in-time vintage bistro at Passage Vivienne behind Palais Royale.
Sophia has been fearless in trying (and enjoying) lots of things she’s rarely eaten: the pigs-feet sausages, escargots, tastes of lamb’s knuckle and bone marrow, duck, smoked salmon ravioli, asparagus ravioli, tarte tatin, croque monsieur, spinach quiche, chocolate mousse, pepper sauces, chocolate/banana and other crepes, a huge Parisian cheeseburger, several kinds of beefsteak, eclairs and pain au raisin and various other pastries. She wolfed everything down.
It was equally pleasant to see how elegantly she wore several wonderful scarfs she brought from home .. très Parisian.
In the first two days, because we have no car, Sophia had already ridden in cabs (often big Mercedes), the Metro, city bus, RER (suburban train) and “Grand Lines” (the big trains between cities). To meet Sophia, Elsa and I for the first time have also taken the train to the airport, finding it a little quicker and far cheaper than cab, shuttle or bus. But it would be a hassle with a lot of luggage.
Sophia spent a night and a day with her friend Bertille who had visited her for a week last summer. Though the mother works and the dad, a pilot for Air France, was overnight in Africa, Elsa and I were invited to their suburban home for dinner where we were treated with overwhelming hospitality starting with champagne. During the evening (and the next day) several of Bertille’s classmates dropped by to meet Sophia. They certainly looked and dressed older than 14 and several smoked and (gasp) drank coffee. Bertille is a remarkably English-fluent 14-year-old who prepared the hors d’oeuvres, set the table with her little brother, helped cook the duck-and-apples main course, and served the wine, cheese course and dessert. They even gave us a ride back into the city to our flat.
Sophia stayed overnight. Then she and Bertille cooked all the next morning and in the afternoon shopped on the Champs Elysees where Sophia made a half-dozen smashing clothing purchases, including a fashionable white dress she’ll wear at 8th-grade graduation. Then that evening they brought Sophia to sit with us in row two center at Salle Pleyel for a moving Bach “St. Matthew Passion” But Sophia hadn’t eaten yet! So we got her a sandwich in the lobby before the concert and supper nearby at nearly midnight. That made it a very late night. So the next day she slept in and did schoolwork into the afternoon.
For a week we hurried everywhere in festive spring-break crowds. But the Pompidou museum wasn’t so busy;
its only line was inside for a featured set of photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, which we wanted to see but skipped. More fun was the street artist in the Pompidou plaza pretending to be a statue; he only moved ever so slightly and smiled when Sophia gave him a tip. (This is the first photo that's ours):
By contrast, the Louvre was a little crazy though we bypassed the ticket lines and used a ticket machine. (Like everywhere, it accepted our just-reissued VISA card which now has a European-style embedded chip.) Everyone knows that because the Louvre is open late on Wednesdays, crowds then are light. So we went at 5:30 and sure enough, we easily got face-to-face with Mona Lisa. But by 7:00 it was jam-packed. So much for conventional wisdom.
We had once taken the $42 hop-on-hop-off open-top city bus tour and thought it would be a good way for Sophia for get a first look at the city. But in Holy Week street traffic, it was far too slow. If you are in Paris for more than a day or two, you can get to all the same places much more quickly by Metro. After all, it’s the Metro which enables Paris each year to accommodate 27 million visitors, more than any other city.
Same with the priority access tickets to the Eiffel Tower, which in 40 years we had never ascended. Granted, waiting in line to buy normal $21 tickets can take an hour or two. But the $83 priority access ticket is “justified” only because it includes a “tour.” However it still requires waiting at security. And our tour guide (from Wisconsin) talked and talked not too interestingly for more than an hour at the meeting point, on the ground and on level two. Even with our priority access, from there you must wait in line for the final elevator to the top. By then, that line was so long that we gave up. Oh well, they say the best views are from the second level. And there are other options .. there are no lines for a ticket to walk up 674 steps to level two. Or you can go in advance to the Eiffel Tower’s own website and buy normal-price tickets for a no-wait entry at a specific day and time. But by the time we learned that, such tickets were all gone for this busy week.
So we take the bus whenever possible. The bad news: in this busy Holy Week the clock at several bus stops showed the next bus would be delayed for 30 or 40 minutes. That forced us to take many more cabs than usual. The good news: at home I had printed our apartment’s address on 3x5 cards so there was no chance a cab driver would misunderstand my French. We all carried one in case we got separated and had to taxi home. All went smoothly except for one slight trauma when Elsa got on a bus first while Sophia fumbled briefly for her pass. Voila, the bus took off. So she and I took the Metro home, choosing the long way around to explore the Champs. And just once we experienced the ultimate horror .. being separated and unable to find each other for an hour at Galleries Lafayette.
Sophia’s last day brought her two surprises. First (after waiting vainly for the bus) she and I took a cab to the Fat Tire Bicycle Company where their sign says they offer guided bike tours of the city. Then she noticed their smaller sign, City Segway Tours, and slyly asked if maybe that was an option? Which would you prefer, I asked? SEGWAY, of course. So, led by a likable mate from Australia we did that for three hours, from the Eiffel Tower to the Louvre and back, on both sides of the Seine, on sidewalks and bike paths, in heavy vehicle and pedestrian traffic. There were eight of us riding these amazing self-balancing two-wheeled stand-up scooters, all Americans. Three were age 14. Only one person fell off, the hot-shot kid from New York City doing this same tour for the second time.
Here's Sophia on her Segway at the Louvre. Her dad wondered if maybe Grandma Windh couldn mend those tattered jeans while Sophia was here.
Then we hurried to Galleries Lafayette for an afternoon fashion show in a rooftop ballroom called the Salon Opera. Sophia wondered if she was going to an opera? A saloon? She was delighted when six tall models, five of them females, came down the runway showing almost-reasonable fashion styles. What fun!
While waiting during the style show at my first-ever Starbucks in Europe, I visited with a thoughtful 13-year-old boy who grew up in Virginia but moved with his family three years ago to Germany. At that time he was already fluent in German, but the changes to his life, and his adapting to them, were most interesting. He now speaks English with a slight German accent and can imagine living in Germany the rest of his life.
On the way home, seeing we’d just missed the bus and there wouldn’t be another for 30 minutes, we asked three taxi drivers to take us the rest of the way .. and all refused. Too short a trip. So we stepped into a bustling corner bistro for our final Parisian dinner with Sophia, our Good Friday “last supper,” complete with escargots. Then home for her to pack her bag (she had only a carry-on) and early to bed for an airport shuttle pickup at 6:05am. Uff da. In the morning she was ready, bless her, when the driver called from downstairs, exactly on time. Though the airport teemed with European school kids on spring break, we ran into a girl who attends Sophia’s school in California (and her mom), so we were comfortable that Sophia would get through security, to her gate and through San Francisco customs. And she did, meeting her parents and brother coming from London a few minutes later. We were so sad to see her go but grateful she’d given us the time of our lives.
Thus ended our long-anticipated week with our lovely Sophia, delighting in her delights, our eyes opened by the things she saw, our hearts loving her anew and, in some new ways, Paris the City of Light. Then on the way home from the airport we booked Easter dinner at a nearby restaurant featuring, for just a few days, new white asparagus just sprouting from the ground. While watching them enter my reservation, I was amazed to see my own name pop up on their screen as well as our son Rolf’s name. La technologie française est merveilleux!
No comments:
Post a Comment