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.

April in Paris - II

April 20, 2014

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! 

April in Paris - III

May 1, 2014

That 2½ hour Easter dinner was really something. The elegant Chez Francois, featuring quiet piano and accordion music, offered only two choices .. a three-course menu for $69 and another (with champagne) for $81. Both included a creamy little egg quiche follow by our choice of three entrées, main courses and deserts, plus coffee and wine. As entrées we chose foie gras (with rhubarb sauce) and white asparagus. Our main courses were beef (with béarnaise sauce with meat glaze and a molded gateau/cake of artichokes and potatoes) and lamb (on grilled vegetables, bulgar and pine nuts). Then chocolate for dessert (with praline cream and pear in Amoretto) and a cheese course (hard white, soft goat cheese and Roquefort), plus a bottle of Bordeaux (of which Elsa had just one glass) and two types of coffee. As much as I can recall after all that wine, it was a riot of subtle and contrasting tastes, colors and textures.

After Sophia left, we made a list of Paris sights we enjoy but hadn’t visited yet .. perhaps the world's most spectacular stained glass at Sainte-Chapelle, the medieval Unicorn tapestries at the Cluny (Museum of the Middle Ages), earth-shrinking navigation instruments at the Institute of the Arab World, the impressionists at the Musée d'Orsay, the raw North African Aligre market (video), and, if good weather holds, several lovely parks. 

Because we were there so long, we could roll with the punches. One morning we took a bus to the Musée d'Orsay but found an endless line (the longest we'd seen) with waits of probably a couple hours. And it was starting to mist. No problem, we could come back the next week when maybe the spring breakers have left. Instead we were soon on another bus to a threadbare little four-screen movie complex on the busy Boulevard Saint-Germain (where we once lived) and caught a matinee showing of the wacko/delightful "Grand Budapest Hotel." Luckily it had the original English sound track with French subtitles (except when they spoke French). Then lunch at 3:00 in a nearby restaurant we know. Then a bus to shopping and another one home. But in front of the Louvre the driver loudly ordered everyone off. It's happened before, I have no idea why. But soon a following bus came by and carried us homeward, where we bought deli lasagna and salad downstairs for our supper upstairs. A day with six bus rides, nothing special perhaps, but adapting like locals and enjoying Paris without getting caught up in must-see-the-d’Orsay-today tourist crazy-ness. 

Meanwhile the visiting hoards were gamely riding those windy open-top busses despite impending rain. One of them, a rotund clueless American, blustered onto our bus and swung his over-size backpack wide as he sat, mindlessly bashing a prim little Parisienne. So thoughtless. Like the 26 eighth-grade French students from Connecticut in Paris for spring break, yelling at each other from front to back of the bus. We never saw European kids do that. Actually, very few of the tourists we saw (i.e. people carrying cameras) were Americans. But those camera-carriers who were noisy (and overweight) often were.

Many American tourists seemed to headquarter in the nearby Rue Cler area so popularized by Rick Steves. While his books can seem simplistic and superficial, they do provide lots of practical advice. We had his Paris 2014 book on our iPad and referred to it for directions, admission prices, and the hours and days the museums are open.

We celebrated Elsa’s birthday by going first to the Museum of the Middle Ages for a noontime concert of Gregorian chant and 12th-century polyphony. It was in the part of the museum that was once a Roman bath. There I made my customary pilgrimage upstairs to my favorite room in all of Paris, sitting for perhaps the last time (with a lump in my throat) before the six incomparable 15th-century tapestries known as "The Lady And The Unicorn." Of course we then spent lunch wondering where next to spend a month  :-)

Elsa’s birthday lunch was at a Lebanese restaurant we’d once visited with our son Rolf. We each chose sampler meals of four mezes (tapas) and a main course served in an ornate hammered "muffin tin" with indentations for the glass bowls holding our food. All at an ornate hammered tin table. Between us we enjoyed a falafel ball on pumpkin puree with yogurt and lemon, chicken rolls with garlic cream, hummus with sesame paste and lemon, pureed eggplant/parsley/mint/radishes/tomatoes, artichokes sautéed in olive oil and tarragon, smoky grilled and pureed eggplant with yogurt and chives, a lamb confit served over cinnamon pilaf and chickpeas, and a stack of thin-sliced potato rounds grilled with yogurt and coriander alternating with grilled fish rounds served over a salsa of tomato and pomegranate syrup. They even surprised us with the “happy birthday” song and little baklava cakes and a candle! Such diverse eating opportunities are another reason we like it here.

Although we anticipated both warm days and rainy days, we got neither. I always wore a sweater and a jacket. And it wasn't till April 26, and only that one day, when  we might have needed umbrellas. Instead we stayed home and read after morning coffee downstairs at our usual window seats.

My book that day was an unusual "traveller's guide" to the D-Day invasion. It takes you through the intense combat at the Normandy beaches and then, after each one, devotes a few pages to your actually visiting those beaches today by car .. pointing out battlefields, remaining German gun emplacements, key bridges, rebuilt church steeples, parachute landing places, etc. complete with landmarks, hiway numbers and mile markers. It includes thoughtful quotes from soldiers on both sides. Surprisingly, it is available at amazon.

France may have no Silicon Valley but our flat was surely inter-connected. Shortly after we arrived and the television service was upgraded, we also got new phones. Though they're cordless, they don't connect to their own base station but rather through the flat's wi-fi network. I'd never seen that before. As I said, we got SO many international channels, from the US to China and all over the Middle East and Africa. And our internet service was 10x faster than at home. And our own just-for-France cellphone (which we never used) was so cheap. Not only is this TV/internet/phone package faster, more integrated and more imaginative than at home, but I'd wager it's cheaper as well. Why is that, in a country where there's undoubtedly more regulation, not less?

Often the TV programming was so thoughtful. Like an Al Jazeera feature about a controversial Serb general leading a Bosnian army unit in that 1990s war. Or German TV exploring Istanbul and a famous writer there a century ago. Or non-stop classical music .. like Minnesota Public Radio .. except these were all video performances. Some nights two or three operas at once. Somehow they covered the weather in just 30 seconds. What’s behind such sophistication? Economic reasons? Cultural reasons? Who watches all this anyway? Do such challenging and educational offerings just reflect the culture? Or perhaps help shape it?

In our last days, a little more exploring. Final shopping at Longchamps. A leisurely late-afternoon coffee and people-watching on Saint-Germain waiting for an overdue bus to come around the corner. 

But it's increasingly irritating to sit outdoors like the people in the above photo (not ours). Since France very successfully banned indoor smoking, the air can be really blue out there. You now must go INSIDE for a breath of fresh air.

Then back to Giallo Oro below us for our third feast of smoked salmon ravioli and rigatoni all’ amariciana. And Carla’s parting embrace and a full three-cheek kissy-poo, not just two. Then we got up early, stripped the bed, turned off the lights, locked the door and boarded our airport shuttle exactly on time at 6:35am. At the airport we again avoided Starbucks for a place that looked more French, but we left it, and  Paris, with the taste of the month's worst coffee lingering on our tongues. C’est la vie.

Back home, our own comforter and mattress never felt so luxurious.

Why so few of our photos in this blog? Don’t know, it’s like we’d taken them all before. Only twice did I carry my camera .. once up the Eiffel Tower: 

and with our German friends to Versailles (which again struck us as Louis XIV's arrogant excess).

So why do we travel this way, staying a month in one place? Because we like the way it makes us feel. Not smarter or braver or more elitist. Just more alive, alert, eyes wide open. This time, however, we moved a lot slower. So will we do it again? Maybe to Como or Montreux or Ravenna or Croatia or Palermo? You’d better watch this same blog spot in six months or a year to find out. So will we   :-)