I was just writing to Jinn that I don't think we really understood how long a month can feel, if you don't have an external job or a social circle, when we decided we'd spend August in Paris. We do each have work to do--I'm turning in my second chapter to Dr. Cooper tomorrow, so that Sean can start using my laptop to finalize his conference paper--but it's surprising how *long* the days feel when it's just the two of us! Yes, all of Paris is our oyster, but Paris is also a very expensive oyster, so we can't exactly spend our afternoons guzzling wine in sidewalk cafes. We've been trying to walk as much as possible, for example, to save on metro and bus tickets, but Menilmontant is a hike, and it's also been unpleasantly cloudly and chilly.
Last night we went out belatedly to celebrate Sean's birthday; our attempt last week at Le Richer was met with disappointment, as they were closed for the August holidays. We wound up at a restaurant that was highly recommended on Tripadvisor. The service was very friendly and they're not condescending about speaking English, which probably accounts for a lot of the good feelings people leave with, but the food was mediocre at a ridiculous price. However, the night was saved by the couple next to us, Kirby and Jessica, who initiated conversation once we'd both finished our meals. They were Canadian, but had spent two years living in State College, PA, when Kirby was an assistant professor there in geography (as we learned later, geography as in climate-change research, not maps!). They were leaving Paris the next morning and heading, of all places, to Rome! We had a great conversation with them, and best of all, after agreeing on the mediocrity of our current location, they gave us a recommendation for a mom-and-pop place they had found the night before. It was really nice to have someone to talk to other than ourselves, so I told them I was grateful to them for making the first step!
After days of chill and clouds, today was a brilliantly blue, warm day, and we tried to make the most of it! This I walked down to the Bastille market to buy groceries for the week. It was less overwhelming than last weekend, and the deals are great; I got plenty of eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes, shallots, cipollini, nectarines, and grapes for less than 15 euro. Sean and I went downtown to visit the Opera Garnier, which was beautiful. I had never put this together, but one of the signs pointed out that it's a rare example of a work of architecture which carries the architect's name (along with, for example, the Eiffel Tower). Then we headed to the Tuileries to take advantage of it being a free-museum Sunday, to visit the Orangerie. It was a pretty long line in the sun, but Monet's Nymphea were worth it (although we noted that Monet's belief that the painting ensembles would produce a meditative effect on those who sat amid them would not have held up in its current environment, full of people talking and taking selfies). The pamphlet noted that when the paintings were unveiled to the public after Monet's death in 1926, people were uninterested, since it didn't seem avant-garde, but after WWII some of the expressionists returned to the paintings and saw connections to their own work in the near-abstraction of his late brushwork.
Paris has to have the loveliest and most user-friendly green spaces of any European city I've seen so far. Not only are they kept in really nice shape, but the way people use them is so incredible varied. In the Parc des Buttes-Chaumonts, there are always people doing yoga and meditating, but also people boxing, and even doing Zumba on a rare strip of level ground. At the Tuileries and other parks, there are benches, but also plenty of green metal chairs, which people can arrange to their hearts' content (provided they can get ahold of one). We snagged a couple after our time in the Orangerie and sat on the terrace overlooking the gardens. I had never thought about the way that only having benches effectively reduces the ways you can use the seating in a park; only a certain number of people can fit on one, and they can't be rearranged. Here instead you see knots of people gathered in all sorts of configurations, including plenty using a bench as a footrest or a picnic table. Poor Rome: in so many ways it comes off worse by comparison! Rome certainly lacks the money to have the kind of services and upkeep that the Parisian parks have; plus Sean pointed out, you could never have those moveable chairs there, because they'd all disappear within a month.
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