Our train arrived at the Gare Austerlitz just after 5 pm on New Years Day, and we headed to our AirBnB to settle ourselves in. We were staying in the 19e Arrondissement, just off the 7 Metro line, in a room we booked through Airbnb, an online community of people who rent out their extra rooms or apartments to travelers passing through -- cheaper than a hotel, cleaner and nicer than a hostel, and with a local connection in case you have any questions. The young couple we stayed with, Peggy and Jeff, were great hosts, despite the fact that I'm sure it's a little strange to have strangers traipsing through your home. As soon as we dropped off our bags and got about fifty different recommendations for what we should do with our three days, complete with one of those great huge tourist maps, we headed out for dinner with Mackenzie's friends from UPeace who were also in Paris for the holidays.
So, the characters: Maeve is English, and currently working as an investigative journalist in London, where she hangs out in an office frequented often enough by Julian Assange that one can tell his recent presence by a lacking of chips -- (in a British accent) "where have all the crisps gone?! Really Julian, again....." Marion, who is technically French but really what we decided to dub a "globe floater" given her constant travels, is working with at-risk youth in El Salvador to try to reduce violence there. Agathe, a childhood friend of Marion's who volunteered to be our Parisian tour guide, works for a French Senator (aka old white men).
We all headed down to the Palais Royale and frolicked in the cold and the rain down past the lit-up pyramids in the courtyard in front of the Louvre before walking down the Seine to the Marais (the young hip quartier, which is also the historically Jewish district. Marais means marsh, which is where the Jews were once placed...) where we had some fantastic falafel. Ironically, the restaurant we ended up going to was exactly the one (Chez Hanna, I think?) that I went to with Lyse and Nina in October, but I was so hungry at that point that I had absolutely no complaints about going somewhere I knew was good.
After filling up on houmous and fried eggplant and falafel and pita, we shimmied over to the extraordinarily French part of our evening at
Le Philosophe, a French wine bar/restaurant with all local organic produce and an ad for a anti-fast-food documentary showing sometime later this spring on the back of the menu. There, we ordered five different glasses of wine -- three reds: a Bordeaux, a Bourgogne, a Gamay, and two whites: a sweet Sauturnes and a dry one, whose name now escapes me. A full lesson on wine tasting and bluffing your way to classy sommelier status followed, with highlights including learning about how most red wines you can describe with red fruits, aka: "mm, yes, blackberry, definitely blackberry" or "yes, this one has a hint of cherry, I think, and a little plum" BUT NOT "well, I was going to say grape, but...." ;) Too much fun :)
Monday we met back up with the girls at the fountain Saint-Michel, skipped through the Notre Dame, and popped over to the Hotel-de-ville. There they were hosting a free Sempé exhibit, showcasing hundreds of his drawings, cartoons, and New Yorker covers. It was so much fun to get to wander a museum full of laughter, it was a very different experience than most stuffy art galleries, and that many of his works together gave you a sense of scale, an idea of how consistently funny he had to be, and was. The little twists on every day situations that force a smile, the sense of scale that he created in many of his drawings, his use of color to draw the eye in a blur of black and white... it was really marvelous to be able to see such a long string of works and really get a sense of the artist who made them.
From there, a hankering for crèpes settled over us (what else to do with Maeve's last few hours in Paris?) so we tucked ourselves into a corner creperie for lunch. I think Mackenzie even got fancy with the French and ordered something with a variation in it (actually, I'm pretty sure she just said she'd have the exact same variation as the girl before her, but shhh). I was also lucky enough to be nearby to Mario, one of Sophie's good friends from Columbia, for his last few hours in Paris, so he joined us there and for our tea-shopping afterwards. I love that I can have friends of friends all over the world -- Mario and I had never met, but it turns out I loaned his cousin a book for our history class together during my one semester at Columbia. It was one of those really lovely easy meetings where technically we didn't know each other, but because Sophie's been in both of our lives, it becomes infinitely easy to imagine a world where we're great friends, even after only a few minutes squabbling over who could buy the other coffee.
So a little wandering and a few books of French poetry later, we put Maeve and Mario on trains back to London, and Agathe went off to buy some furniture, so Mackenzie, Marion and I wandered around the streets to a fondue restaurant for Mackenzie's first ever cheese fondue. Gooey melted goodness :) Again, Mackenzie was working her French language skills with the waiter like you wouldn't believe, and the whole evening was full of great food and superb company (and some more good wine).
The next morning dawned collllllddddd on Mackenzie and my day set out for just the two of us to wander the streets of Paris. Our first stop was MontMartre and the Sacre Coeur. Despite the low clouds, there still managed to be a pretty spectacular view of Paris from the top of the hill, as well as the last day of the Christmas market (aka vin chaud!!). Despite how horribly touristy all the shops around the Sacre Coeur are, we actually found some great post cards and nice Paris-artwork posters for Mackenzie to bring home (you know, one step up from "my sister went to Paris and all I got was this crummy t-shirt"). We wound our way down from the top, stopping at a FANTASTIC little bakery with its own "Pain" recipe book of just bread and beautiful photographs.... that I can't remember the name of. Besides bakeries, we allowed ourselves to duck into More walking through winding streets, to a cute little local recycled-leather shop with beautiful bags and wallets that Peggy recommended for us, and then on to Galleries Lafayette and the Opera Garnier lit up at night... pretty spectacular. Mackenzie and I just frolicked in the rain in front of it for a while, jumping over puddles and imagining what an incredible sensation it would be to perform in a building like that. Not that Theatre du Capitole isn't beautiful, but... there are no golden angels in the ramparts.... Is it so bad to dream of golden angels?
For our last day in Paris, we spent most of the day with our good friends Monet, Rodin, Renoir, and Degas at the Musée d'Orsay. As per usual, the line outside wound around the square, meaning we had a 45 minute or so wait, which luckily was made infinitely more fun by having a beautiful 8 month old baby right behind us. Naturally, because I have no qualms about kidnapping, we played pattycake and peek-a-boo and all sorts of fun games to pass the time together; though it's possible my favorite part was glimpsing people's smiles when their part of the line happened to pass by close enough to hear her giggle. Once we were inside, of course, it was marvelous... Some of my favorites: Monet never ceases to take my breath away. There were also a lot of paintings by Camille Pizanne that I really liked, which captured a similar feeling, just slightly more human, slightly less magic. The curator put two tall Renoir portraits next to each other on the center wall of the room in the impressionist section -- "Danse à la compagne" and "Danse à la ville" -- each showing a dancing couple, captured waltzing in the country with a straw hat on the floor in the lower corner, and in full coat and tails and above-the-elbow gloves in the city. Sculptures hold a special allure to me, given that I work in a three-dimensional art-scape myself, and I really loved the marble "Pan et les Orsons" of a young faun watching two bear cubs play, and of course the Rodin. The North Carolina Art Museum just opened a whole wing of Rodin, so it was fun to see a few repeat sculptures that felt familiar (though familiar maybe isn't the best way to describe the Gates of Hell, oh well).
With the little time left before meeting up with Sasha and Lauren (good friends who are a Russian-American pairing, both dancers who arrived this year) for our train back to Toulouse, Kenzie and I dashed back to the Opera Garnier to go inside (well, the bookshop, anyway). It's really just gorgeous, and by chance they had a video of the Paris Opera doing Jerome Robbins'
The Concert playing, which I'd been telling Mackenzie about to try to explain how dance could be more things than just pretty. One last kiss blown over our shoulder and we were off to the Gare Montparnasse, laden with cider, bread and cheese to get us happily all the way home.
