Paris Journal, Part 4
6/11 Wednesday
Suzanne took her students to the Musee D ' Orsay today. But Nicholas and I were pretty tuckered from the big expedition yesterday, so we took it easy . This gave Nicholas a chance to do some of his "work" at home. He plugged away on the "code" for his rock collection (he labels each rock with a letter, and has made a list of what the letters stand for), and also started on a list of French words and their translations. I also read to him from the Hardy boys book (The Clue in the Embers) we got from the American library--he's quite enraptured by the action, so the interval between evening story-times is proving too long.
Anne, who is a classical violinist, dropped by this morning and invited us to a concert at Ste. Chapelle this Saturday night. They will do Vivaldi (can't remember the piece) and there will be a children's choir. Sounds like it should be lovely.
6/12 Thursday
Tonight we met up with Suzanne's students for dinner at Cafe Delmas. The attraction here is not so much to the food (which is just average) as the location and the history. It's one of Hemingway's old haunts, in the Mouffetard neighborhood where he had an apartment with Hadley (the Rue Mouffetard is one of the old Roman streets, and some of the buildings date to the 12thC). Suzanne had assigned a group of her students to put together a tour for us, but because of a rainy afternoon (that ended up clearing by dinnertime) it was postponed. Instead, we just trotted quickly over for a glimpse of the building where Hemingway lived. The Mouffetard neighborhood has serious character, and I can understand why Hemingway liked it--though they lived in a cold-water flat with no toilet. Apparently, he didn't mind the accommodations (or lack thereof), preferring to save their money for travel rather than everyday living expenses, and making good use of the local cafes.
We had a nice relaxing dinner (sort of a relief to be in a more casual place without a haughty waiter overseeing things), with a large-screen TV off to one side showing the Germany/Croatia football (soccer) match. I enjoyed meeting Suzanne's students--she lucked out with a very nice group of kids, smart and amiable, and clearly reveling in the opportunity to spend five weeks in Paris. And Nicholas really liked meeting them too, especially Tania, a dark-haired beauty with whom he kept up an animated conversation for much of the meal. She was a good sport, explaining that she really likes little kids and has two much younger siblings at home. With me as go-between serving to elucidate some of Nicholas's more obscure allusions, they covered all the Disney movies they had both seen, all the books they had in common, the names of the rocks in his rock collection (Asteroid, Skeleton Face, Baboon Face, Crab Claw, Arrowhead, Rotten Wood), etc. etc.
6/13 Friday
Julia came to take Nicholas to the park for a few hours (they had a great time again). And Suzanne got to do some further exploration of the Mouffetard neighborhood on foot--it's a really funky, interesting place, with lots of arty cafes and shops, narrow winding streets, charming buildings, etc. It's simply astonishing how many great--and different--neighborhoods there are in Paris. It has to be the best city for walking in the world. I went to the Musee D' Orsay for a couple of hours. Quite apart from the paintings, the place itself is fantastic, a renovated 19thC train station featuring a huge central space with a ceiling of glass and steel. There are a couple of observation decks from which you can survey the the people wending their way among the sculptures on the first floor far below. But the paintings, too, are marvelous, the main attractions being the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists on the upper floors. Many of the canonical works are here--Whistler's mother, Van Gogh's bedroom and self-portraits and "Starry Night," Monet's water lilies, Cezanne's apples, and the list goes on and on. I also came across many gripping paintings that were less familiar to me, or that I hadn't known at all. We've been here nearly two weeks, and today is the first time I've made it to a museum, so I was really hungry to take it all in. We're planning a family trip to the Louvre soon, and I'm hoping Nicholas will like the Picasso museum as well (it's fairly small, for one thing), but in general it's just trickier to get to the museums as often as we once would have.
We have a fairly restrained plan of going out for full meals, but tonight was one of them. We went to La Cagouille, which is one of the restaurants designated a true "temple of seafood" by our guidebooks, and it certainly lived up to its billing. The day's menu was handwritten on a white board (no English translations) and, except for dessert, featured nothing but seafood. They automatically bring you a bowl of tiny, delicious clams before you order your meal, and both the entrees and the plats were seafood--mainly different kinds of fish in one form or another. One appetizer was rather salty mackerel on a bed of greens, and wasn't a favorite with me, but the other appetizer was a tasty little fish (I've forgotten the name) accompanied by a little boat of truly mouth-watering sauce that all three of us enjoyed. My main course was filet de mulet (red mullet, I think) and was very good, as was Suzanne's salmon. Both of the main dishes came with wonderfully prepared vegetables--potatoes in butter in my case, and mix of potatoes, haricots vert (French green beans), carrots, and potatoes for Suzanne. Nicholas held on valiantly through the long meal to be rewarded with two scoops of glace (ice cream), one vanilla and one chocolate. The ice cream here seems to be pretty consistently fantastic--the vanilla in particular tastes less "processed" than our version, with a much richer flavor of vanilla bean. Suzanne and I (and Nicholas) shared the mille-feuille des fraises, that is, layers of puff pastry with custard and fresh strawberries. Wonderful. It was after 10 o'clock by the time we made it home from the restaurant and got Nicholas in bed.
We've been resisting, since we have to keep on schedule for Suzanne to teach a 9am class, but it's almost impossible not to shift later here. The restaurants don't start serving until 7:30 and it doesn't get dark until after 10. Little by little you get seduced into later and later bedtimes (a seduction to which I am especially susceptible anyway).
Suzanne took her students to the Musee D ' Orsay today. But Nicholas and I were pretty tuckered from the big expedition yesterday, so we took it easy . This gave Nicholas a chance to do some of his "work" at home. He plugged away on the "code" for his rock collection (he labels each rock with a letter, and has made a list of what the letters stand for), and also started on a list of French words and their translations. I also read to him from the Hardy boys book (The Clue in the Embers) we got from the American library--he's quite enraptured by the action, so the interval between evening story-times is proving too long.
Anne, who is a classical violinist, dropped by this morning and invited us to a concert at Ste. Chapelle this Saturday night. They will do Vivaldi (can't remember the piece) and there will be a children's choir. Sounds like it should be lovely.
6/12 Thursday
Tonight we met up with Suzanne's students for dinner at Cafe Delmas. The attraction here is not so much to the food (which is just average) as the location and the history. It's one of Hemingway's old haunts, in the Mouffetard neighborhood where he had an apartment with Hadley (the Rue Mouffetard is one of the old Roman streets, and some of the buildings date to the 12thC). Suzanne had assigned a group of her students to put together a tour for us, but because of a rainy afternoon (that ended up clearing by dinnertime) it was postponed. Instead, we just trotted quickly over for a glimpse of the building where Hemingway lived. The Mouffetard neighborhood has serious character, and I can understand why Hemingway liked it--though they lived in a cold-water flat with no toilet. Apparently, he didn't mind the accommodations (or lack thereof), preferring to save their money for travel rather than everyday living expenses, and making good use of the local cafes.
We had a nice relaxing dinner (sort of a relief to be in a more casual place without a haughty waiter overseeing things), with a large-screen TV off to one side showing the Germany/Croatia football (soccer) match. I enjoyed meeting Suzanne's students--she lucked out with a very nice group of kids, smart and amiable, and clearly reveling in the opportunity to spend five weeks in Paris. And Nicholas really liked meeting them too, especially Tania, a dark-haired beauty with whom he kept up an animated conversation for much of the meal. She was a good sport, explaining that she really likes little kids and has two much younger siblings at home. With me as go-between serving to elucidate some of Nicholas's more obscure allusions, they covered all the Disney movies they had both seen, all the books they had in common, the names of the rocks in his rock collection (Asteroid, Skeleton Face, Baboon Face, Crab Claw, Arrowhead, Rotten Wood), etc. etc.
6/13 Friday
Julia came to take Nicholas to the park for a few hours (they had a great time again). And Suzanne got to do some further exploration of the Mouffetard neighborhood on foot--it's a really funky, interesting place, with lots of arty cafes and shops, narrow winding streets, charming buildings, etc. It's simply astonishing how many great--and different--neighborhoods there are in Paris. It has to be the best city for walking in the world. I went to the Musee D' Orsay for a couple of hours. Quite apart from the paintings, the place itself is fantastic, a renovated 19thC train station featuring a huge central space with a ceiling of glass and steel. There are a couple of observation decks from which you can survey the the people wending their way among the sculptures on the first floor far below. But the paintings, too, are marvelous, the main attractions being the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists on the upper floors. Many of the canonical works are here--Whistler's mother, Van Gogh's bedroom and self-portraits and "Starry Night," Monet's water lilies, Cezanne's apples, and the list goes on and on. I also came across many gripping paintings that were less familiar to me, or that I hadn't known at all. We've been here nearly two weeks, and today is the first time I've made it to a museum, so I was really hungry to take it all in. We're planning a family trip to the Louvre soon, and I'm hoping Nicholas will like the Picasso museum as well (it's fairly small, for one thing), but in general it's just trickier to get to the museums as often as we once would have.
We have a fairly restrained plan of going out for full meals, but tonight was one of them. We went to La Cagouille, which is one of the restaurants designated a true "temple of seafood" by our guidebooks, and it certainly lived up to its billing. The day's menu was handwritten on a white board (no English translations) and, except for dessert, featured nothing but seafood. They automatically bring you a bowl of tiny, delicious clams before you order your meal, and both the entrees and the plats were seafood--mainly different kinds of fish in one form or another. One appetizer was rather salty mackerel on a bed of greens, and wasn't a favorite with me, but the other appetizer was a tasty little fish (I've forgotten the name) accompanied by a little boat of truly mouth-watering sauce that all three of us enjoyed. My main course was filet de mulet (red mullet, I think) and was very good, as was Suzanne's salmon. Both of the main dishes came with wonderfully prepared vegetables--potatoes in butter in my case, and mix of potatoes, haricots vert (French green beans), carrots, and potatoes for Suzanne. Nicholas held on valiantly through the long meal to be rewarded with two scoops of glace (ice cream), one vanilla and one chocolate. The ice cream here seems to be pretty consistently fantastic--the vanilla in particular tastes less "processed" than our version, with a much richer flavor of vanilla bean. Suzanne and I (and Nicholas) shared the mille-feuille des fraises, that is, layers of puff pastry with custard and fresh strawberries. Wonderful. It was after 10 o'clock by the time we made it home from the restaurant and got Nicholas in bed.
We've been resisting, since we have to keep on schedule for Suzanne to teach a 9am class, but it's almost impossible not to shift later here. The restaurants don't start serving until 7:30 and it doesn't get dark until after 10. Little by little you get seduced into later and later bedtimes (a seduction to which I am especially susceptible anyway).
posted by Steve Shoemaker at 12:32 PM
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