Just being in Paris for my thirtieth birthday was wonderful, but the day had a few particular highlights too. Firstly there was breakfast, or rather there were breakfasts (plural). Having begun the day with a healthy aspect, eating fresh fruit and yoghurt from the Rue Mouffetard market, I decided that old ladies such as myself need additional sustenance to get them through the day. Consequently I had a pain au chocolat from the bakery "La Fournil de Mouffetard". Meltingly soft, buttery pastry and a not-too-sweet chocolate centre set me up for the day's activities.
The boyfriend and I spent lots of time just walking around the Parisian streets. The weather was grey and cold, but not too rainy. We decided to give the ferris wheel in the Tuileries a miss (I suffer from motion sickness and he doesn't like heights - the combination of vomit and terror wouldn't have been a birthday treat), but I did get some good photographs of the Louise Bourgeois "Welcoming Hands" sculptures in the park, watery against a menacing cloudy sky. We ended up stopping at a cafe near the Pont de l'Alma for coffee, toasted sandwiches and warmth, but mostly we just wandered around arm-in-arm, trying to do the city justice by looking our romantic best.
In the afternoon we stumbled upon the Delacroix museum. Eugene Delacroix was a painter and he spent the last years of his life creating murals in one of the chapels of the church of St. Sulpice. We saw these when we went to a free concert in the church last time we were in Paris. Bruckner's fourth symphony dragged a little, especially as the seats were very uncomfortable, but it was free and the murals were extraordinary - a religious theme combined with furious brush strokes gives them an arresting power. Visiting the museum we got a glimpse of the man behind the art. There were surprisingly few actual paintings by him there, but there were many of him by his friends and lots of work by his contemporaries. It was housed in a tiny building where Delacroix once lived and worked. He seemed to have been quite a sickly chap and spent a lot of time being ill in bed there. The rooms have changed little since he was alive and the whole place was very atmospheric. The boyfriend and I, ever alert for interior design inspiration in our capacity as new home owners, were rather taken with a red velvet chaise longue in the hallway. Sadly visitors were not allowed to sit on it. There was a sign in French, German and English telling you not to, but maybe if you were Japanese or Russian you could have pleaded ignorance and got away with it - who can tell?
After the museum I was keen to see what was going on at the Pompidou Centre. When we got there the queue to get in was horrendous, so we just hung about outside and watched a magician as the day started to grow dusky. He had a French techno/trance soundtrack on his iPod and a tame pigeon (elle s'appelle Julie) whom he whispered to periodically and tenderly wrapped up in a scarf against the evening chill. He did some tricks with bits of rope, children and people's shopping. In the end he made l'oiseau Julie disappear. He had a nice line in multi-lingual humour, too. He asked us all, in French, for a couple of euros at the end of the show, then said in English "for the English in the audience, that will be five euros please." Ah, yes, we are the nationality everybody likes to mock. Probably rightly so, acutally.
Climbing back up towards the Pantheon, the Quartier Mouffetard-Contrescarpe and our little apartment, I reflected on what a pleasant day it had been. Then I realised I was a bit knackered from all the walking, so I took an executive decision to stop at Le Petit Cardinal for hot chocolate and beer. Slowly sipping my chocolat chaud while the boyfriend savoured his pression of Leffe, I smiled at the fortuitous presence of such a good cafe halfway up the almighty hilly street on our homeward route. Full of chocolatey goodness, I looked forward to the evening ahead.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Paris, je t'aime
I spent my thirtieth birthday in Paris. Ever since our holiday there last year I had been vaguely pining to return, saying every now and then how much I would like to go back, but knowing that the prospect was fairly remote. The purchase of the flat and the general day-to-day business of life seemed to prevent it from happening in the near future. Then my wonderful boyfriend surprised me with a weekend trip. He was doubly seduced - by me (nearly ten years ago now) and by some very tempting Eurostar offers that emerged when the new St. Pancras and Ebbsfleet stations opened.
Thus we returned to the same little apartment where we had stayed the previous March, on Rue Mouffetard in the fifth arrondissement. From the moment we took a walk down the street to sip a chocolat chaud in my favourite little cafe (Le Petit Cardinal, just opposite the Cardinal Lemoine metro station) we slipped effortlessly back into Parisian life. I'm not really a city person. London is okay but I have no great affection for it. I have a romantic attachment to Paris, though, that draws on all kinds of disparate threads, from the sublime to the utterly ridiculous. Take, for example, this thought that struck me whilst rumbling through the metro: French women are not yet subject to the tyranny of the hair straighteners. I see kindred heads everywhere in Paris - long, flowing locks left to wave and kink to their hearts content, unconstrained by product or pin. Sometimes in England I feel positively baroque because of my untamed tresses, violently doing their own thing amidst acres of plastic barbie hair, flat-ironed to within an inch of existence. La Belle Femme in Paris seems to know there's more to life than a hair-do. It's the same with shoes. Battered old Converse baseball boots are common on Parisian streets, even with skirts and smartish dress. As such women in the French capital seem to stride out lustfully, going forth into the day with vigour. In London the streets are full of English women tottering and limping through life in shoes with daft heels and pointy toes. I like comfy shoes. Paris is my kind of place.
There's a genuine sense of being oneself that fills the air in Paris. Even the practicalities seem geared up to letting people live their own lives with ease. The shops open late. The post offices are open until seven in the evening, so you can do all your necessaries on your way home from your daily perambulations. Walking home at 2a.m. on the morning after my birthday, several cafes were still open, merrily serving coffee, chocolate and warm milk with vanilla. The cafe culture as a whole is a marvel and so far removed from the British model that it's probably the thing I miss most when I come home. I can sit down with a hot chocolate, the boyfriend can have a beer, a nice waiter brings it to the table and we can watch the world go by while we drink it (at Le Petit Cardinal, the view includes a fire station, patisserie and a pedestrian crossing that cyclists/moped riders often ignore - a people watchers' paradise!) Starbucks just isn't the same.
It shouldn't be forgotten, too, that Paris is a breathtakingly beautiful place. Each day we were there this time we walked by the Seine. From the towers of Notre Dame to the shining golden dome of Les Invalides, and of course everything else besides, the views are amazing. The parks, especially the Jardin de Luxembourg with its ardent chess players, and the Tuilleries, with the Louise Bourgeois statues of hands, and all of the iconic sights like the Eiffel Tower and the Sacre Coeur (but maybe not the Tour Montparnasse - nowhere is perfect) provide a backdrop for a current of culture that I've not felt anywhere else. The art galleries, the concerts in churches and the fierce debate in cafes, the free public bicycles for hire and the entire feel of the city just draws me in every time. I honestly just love the place and I hope to go back again and again.
Thus we returned to the same little apartment where we had stayed the previous March, on Rue Mouffetard in the fifth arrondissement. From the moment we took a walk down the street to sip a chocolat chaud in my favourite little cafe (Le Petit Cardinal, just opposite the Cardinal Lemoine metro station) we slipped effortlessly back into Parisian life. I'm not really a city person. London is okay but I have no great affection for it. I have a romantic attachment to Paris, though, that draws on all kinds of disparate threads, from the sublime to the utterly ridiculous. Take, for example, this thought that struck me whilst rumbling through the metro: French women are not yet subject to the tyranny of the hair straighteners. I see kindred heads everywhere in Paris - long, flowing locks left to wave and kink to their hearts content, unconstrained by product or pin. Sometimes in England I feel positively baroque because of my untamed tresses, violently doing their own thing amidst acres of plastic barbie hair, flat-ironed to within an inch of existence. La Belle Femme in Paris seems to know there's more to life than a hair-do. It's the same with shoes. Battered old Converse baseball boots are common on Parisian streets, even with skirts and smartish dress. As such women in the French capital seem to stride out lustfully, going forth into the day with vigour. In London the streets are full of English women tottering and limping through life in shoes with daft heels and pointy toes. I like comfy shoes. Paris is my kind of place.
There's a genuine sense of being oneself that fills the air in Paris. Even the practicalities seem geared up to letting people live their own lives with ease. The shops open late. The post offices are open until seven in the evening, so you can do all your necessaries on your way home from your daily perambulations. Walking home at 2a.m. on the morning after my birthday, several cafes were still open, merrily serving coffee, chocolate and warm milk with vanilla. The cafe culture as a whole is a marvel and so far removed from the British model that it's probably the thing I miss most when I come home. I can sit down with a hot chocolate, the boyfriend can have a beer, a nice waiter brings it to the table and we can watch the world go by while we drink it (at Le Petit Cardinal, the view includes a fire station, patisserie and a pedestrian crossing that cyclists/moped riders often ignore - a people watchers' paradise!) Starbucks just isn't the same.
It shouldn't be forgotten, too, that Paris is a breathtakingly beautiful place. Each day we were there this time we walked by the Seine. From the towers of Notre Dame to the shining golden dome of Les Invalides, and of course everything else besides, the views are amazing. The parks, especially the Jardin de Luxembourg with its ardent chess players, and the Tuilleries, with the Louise Bourgeois statues of hands, and all of the iconic sights like the Eiffel Tower and the Sacre Coeur (but maybe not the Tour Montparnasse - nowhere is perfect) provide a backdrop for a current of culture that I've not felt anywhere else. The art galleries, the concerts in churches and the fierce debate in cafes, the free public bicycles for hire and the entire feel of the city just draws me in every time. I honestly just love the place and I hope to go back again and again.
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