We're back, and exhausted! We joke that it's the mark of one of our vacations that you feel like you need another vacation to recover--even though this time we took it rather easy the last few days.
Things didn't start out in the most auspicious manner, I have to admit. Sean was working up to the very last minute on his last paper of the semester--and by the last minute, I mean that when the limo driver pulled up in the driveway, he was racing to jump in the shower while I proof-read the paper itself. Sean had rolled his eyes at my insistence on paying for the private car, but it turned out to be not only a stroke of genius but absolutely necessary; we simply wouldn't have made it down to the train station in time. Instead, our driver, who turned out to be Syrian, waited for us patiently and then talked politics with Sean the whole way to NYC, after discovering their opinions were perfectly in line. I didn't get his name, unfortunately, but once he found out that my grandmother was Syrian he acted like I was one of the tribe. (I learned that the word my grandmother applied to her meat and rice dish, hushway [حشو or, as it sounds on Google translate, hush-oo] really just means "stuffing", and in Syria is generally not served on its own...he seemed confused when I told him we put it in pitas!)
Our plane ride to Dublin was short, and I didn't sleep much (the presence of no fewer than three babies in the rows around us didn't help!). I was so tired in Dublin that we scrapped the plan to go into town for breakfast, but Sean still got his Irish breakfast on, right down to the disgusting blood pudding. Blech! We arrived in a Paris that was grey and cold, which was pretty disappointing. Our hotel room was also not what I had expected, despite being told that we were being upgraded to a triple (as I would learn when we came back to the hotel at the end of our trip and got exactly the beautiful room that I thought I'd booked, not protesting this "upgrade" was a mistake).
I will admit that I was not in the best mood that first day or two. In a twist of our usual roles, Sean found himself in the position of cheerleader to my black gloom! I had just been looking forward to this trip so much after the hellish year we'd had, and to leave New Haven, where it was climbing the upper 70s, only to have to bundle up in Paris and face the drizzle seemed the ultimate disappointment.
One immediate bright spot was our first dinner, at Le Felteu, which was a wonderful, entirely non-pretentious establishment with portion sizes on the American, rather than French scale (perhaps this has something to do with the fact that the gruff-but-friendly proprietor, who sported some serious tattoos-- including the word VITRIOL--is apparently a Harley rider, as I learned from a review). The food was fucking amazing, even though we were largely guessing as to what we were ordering. The "menu" was just a chalkboard that he plunked on the table. Now, I can read French generally, but that is very little help in a restaurant; I can identify canard, veau, boeuf, etc, but not how it's being prepared. The owner was kind enough, in his limited English and with my zero French, to warn me off the andouillette. I knew it was a kind of sausage, since I had read about it in Emile Zola's The Belly of Paris, but what Zola did not mention was that it was a tripe sausage. No thanks. We had a charcuterie plate to start, and both of us had duck, which came not only with delicious vegetables but a heaping side dish of potatoes gratin. I'd never had that before, but cheese and potatoes, you really can't go wrong, right?
I was hoping for better weather the next day, but alas, no luck. We had bought two-day Paris museum passes, and Sean doesn't believe in taking the metro if you can walk for 10 hours straight, so we pretty much went non-stop Wednesday and Thursday. Our first stop was the Pantheon, burial site of luminaries like Marie Curie and Emile Zola (Sean was very amused by the signage which explained that Voltaire was buried directly across from Rousseau, his sworn enemy). The first "wow" moment came at the sight of Notre Dame, though I was disappointed by the darkness of the interior. After waiting a good 30 minutes in line, we were able to climb the towers, which offered an extraordinary view over the city. I found it more impressive than the view from the Eiffel, which was really too high, and too far from the center, to allow you to connect with what was below. We had brought along my mom's opera glasses (which actually got my bag searched in Dublin, because they were confused by them on the X-ray; the security woman was then so delighted by how cute they were), so we could look at things quite far distant, which was pretty cool.
In the late afternoon on Wednesday we found ourselves at the Louvre, the day it stays open till 9:45PM. This proved to be a mistake. Not only were our feet already very tired, but contrary to my hopes, the museum was no less full than it ever is. I suppose the drizzly weather had something to do with it. Anyway, while it was extraordinary to finally see, in person, paintings like the Pastoral Concert or the Belle Ferroniere, it was really hard to appreciate them in a setting that was loud, crowded, and humid from the press of all those bodies. And forget about Mona Lisa! The crowd was so thick, it wasn't worth the effort. I've always told my students that she is the rare painting that's better experienced and discussed in a classroom than in person; there's just no way to have a quiet moment with her to understand why she might have any importance at all. I wasn't disappointed, because I knew it would be like that. I was more pleased to see paintings like David's Napoleon Crowning Josephine, or Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, and Gericault's Raft of the Medusa, huge canvases that didn't fail to impress, and which can also stand up to the mass of humanity passing in front of them.
After the Louvre, Sean consented to a taxi back to the hotel, so we could get ready to meet his friend Delphine and her husband Herve for dinner. We didn't wind up getting a French SIM, so we were relying on Facebook. She had told us to meet her in front of the city hall at 8pm. According to Google that was the Hotel de Ville, a massively elaborately 19th-century building with a big empty plaza in front of it that Sean had admired the night before. At 8pm there we were, huddling under one umbrella. Sean hadn't seen Delphine since they taught at Xavier together 6 years previously, so he wasn't 100% certain of what she looked like anymore, and as the minutes ticked on, we started to fear that Hotel de Ville and City Hall might somehow not be the same thing. Luckily, at about 8:20, we spotted her and her husband racing across the plaza. They had encountered so much traffic coming in from the suburbs that they'd ditched their car and gotten on the metro.
I suppose it was silly of me to expect them to have a place in mind to go, any more than I'd know where to take a foreigner in New York, but it was ironic that in the company of real French people we wound up having dinner in the most touristy restaurant of our whole trip! On the plus side, our service was great in the company of natives. This was where Sean tried to order "lapin" as "lapeen" instead of "lahpohn", leading Delphine to later explain that he'd asked for a serving of dick. In the company of friends it was a hysterical mistake, but I'm sure we'd have felt more embarrassed if we'd managed to figure that out when we'd been on our own. This was also the spot where we tried escargot, and found them delicious. It's pretty much like a bit of chewy calamari, and they're served drench in pesto. Again, having friends was helpful because Herve showed Sean how to hold each shell firmly in this little tong device, then scoop the escargot out with a tiny fork. It's not as simple as it sounds, as I discovered when I tried, but at least no one got splattered with basil. Herve was also kind enough to pay for the whole meal.
There's something very releasing about sharing a meal with other people, especially in a foreign country, that can improve your spirits dramatically, and that was the turning point for me. As if the weather was responding, Thursday morning dawned with some sun, and we decided to head to climb the Eiffel tower first thing. Well, the rest of Paris had gotten this memo too, so it ended up taking us longer to wait in line than to climb its 700 steps! Still worth it. We only went to the second level (which is as far as you can climb steps, anyhow), because Sean, in another reversal, was getting freaked out by the heights. Looking out from the structure on our way down was a little woozy, I'll admit, but there was something about the strength of the iron structure enclosing you that prevented my fear of heights from coming into play; I was actually more nervous going down the narrow, curving staircase inside Notre Dame. Hell, I get nervous on a stepladder! Meanwhile, Sean is not fazed by standing on a cliff's edge, but a man-made tower makes him nervous. Go figure.
After lunch, our next visit was the Invalides and the church of Saint Louis, which had been re-purposed into a monumental burial site for Napoleon I after his body was returned to France in 1840, while the country was ruled by its last king, Louis-Phillipe of Bourbon. We particularly admired the propaganda in the relief sculptures decorating the lower level, which touted Napoleon's many achievements, not only military, but in terms of education, the Napoleonic code, etc, all of it presented in lovely Neoclassical fashion. In the Museum of the Army in the Invalides, Sean discovered a whole wing dedicated to World Wars I and II, which he insisted we visit.
It really was interesting, as much as I groused about going in, to see things from the French perspective, particularly World War I, largely fought on their territory. The reading I had done before the trip had enlightened me about the far-reaching consequences of 1870-1, when Emperor Napoleon III's failed war against Germany led to his capture, the fall of the Second Empire, the uprising (and brutal quelling) of the Paris Commune, and, most keenly felt in French pride, the loss of Alsace-Lorraine to the Germans. The ensuing decades saw a steep rise in nationalism, machismo, and the need to absolve the stain on French honor, whether on the sports field or the battlefield. The Great War, when it came, was France's chance, and when it was over, even though their country and economy were decimated, they took their opportunity to punish Germany thoroughly for a slight committed nearly fifty years earlier. And, of course, we all know how that turned out. In fact, one of the most instructive points for me was in the display of military costumes, by all interested parties, from the late 19th century through WWII, demonstrating how the showy grandeur of the 19th century slowly reappeared in the interwar period, a symbolic example of France's failure to modernize its military--the failure that would doom them against the German invasion in 1940.
Later that afternoon we made two other stops, first to Saint Chapelle, one of the most glorious monuments of Gothic stained glass, and to the Musee Cluny, the medieval museum. Sean was wowed by Saint Chapelle, more than I think I've ever seen him moved by any post-classical monument. The Cluny museum was interesting too, but by then our feet were really dragging. It was time to pack up our things and get ready to head out to Avignon in the morning.
TBC...
No comments:
Post a Comment