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Part
of the Promenade Plantée in the 12th arrondissement.
One of
the beat-up public hospitals in
Rose
on the Promenade Plantée.
Looking
down at Saint Antoine des
Quinze Vingts from the
View
from the front of the speeding line 14 métro as we
Passing
another train going the opposite direction on the
Top of
the Saint Antoine de Quinze Vingts steeple. |
Monday, August 20 Last night we had a delightful dinner with Wendy and June. It was their last night in Earlier, in the afternoon, Tom and I took the métro up to Because of the expansive view from Sacre Cœur, we could see the
ominous rainshowers approach us. We recognized some of the riders’ names from the Tour de
France. Le Parisien gave minimal coverage to the event, I suppose because
the VTT is not owned by the Amaury Group (who owns the Tour de France and Le Parisien). The VTT, which is part of something called
the Hexagonal Tour de France, is organized by the International Cycling
Union. This is the first year the
event has been held in the city instead of only in the mountains. That was good for the riders because they
had an enthusiastic crowd cheering them on.
Trees just aren’t enthusiastic about humans. I don’t blame them. We made a friend by sharing one of our umbrellas with a fairly
young, tall French (but not Parisian) businessman who was wearing an
expensive suit jacket as a sportcoat.
It would have been a shame to get that garment all wet, so Tom and I
tried to keep him covered. He was very
talkative. He wanted to know right
away what state we were from. When we
said Floride, he looked surprised
and impressed, because, he said, the Americans he meets in He was easy enough to understand because, I suppose, he’d been
to good schools. He told us all about
his favorite restaurant in He was so nice, knowing exactly how visitors should be
treated. I cannot say the same for the
rude little old French woman who pushed her way in next to me. When she started almost pummeling me on the
side, sputtering her demand for my space in bad French, I finally turned to
her and said, in French, “I’m in the same place where I’ve been from the
start. I am not moving. I am NOT moving.” She was shocked that I spoke French. After all, she’d heard me answer a young
German couple’s question in English, regarding the start time for the
competition. “Two o’clock,” I had said
(not 2PM or 1400 hours), in clear, old fashioned English. Wendy and June said I was right to stand my ground with the rude
woman. The young man on Tom’s left had
also wormed his way in, but he did it ever so much more politely and
gracefully than the crazy, rude woman did.
The fact is, there were plenty of other places for her to stand. She had just decided she wanted mine. I say she is crazy because why would she
take on a 5 foot 7inch muscular blonde when she was barely 5 feet 1 inch
tall? The answer is: I’m foreign. She wanted to attack the invader. Since we have to live with massive hordes of tourists all
winter, and we are always nice and helpful to them, I have no patience for
Parisians who are intolerant of visitors.
None. Fortunately, the vast
majority of Parisians are not like that. Tom and I had arrived early and so we had an excellent spot at
the stone balustrade for watching the riders descend on the hill. They came flying off the ramps, sailing
through the air, landing hard on the wet steps, bumping improbably around
sharp turns -- this was impressive
bicycle riding. When it was time to go, we shook hands with the young French
businessman and thanked him for the restaurant recommendation. Then we were on our way. Tuesday, August 21, 2001 The journal was interrupted yesterday because Tom was ready for
me to scan pages in final preparation for our pilgrimage to the Federal
Express office. But I wanted to take a moment to tell you about our outing on
Saturday. We decided to the length of
the Promenade
Plantée and then down to the Parc Bercy over in the 12th
arrondissement. We recommend this walk
to everyone. The Promenade was
completed in the 1990s, and it is a lovely, long narrow park planted on top
of a former elevated train track -- beautifully designed, as most Parisian
parks are. Hats off to Jacques Vergely
(landscape architect) and Philippe Mathieux (architect) for this park. By the time we reached the gorgeous Parc Bercy, we were a bit
footsore so we walked only through part of it, then headed for the Cour St.
Emilion for a drink. This Cour is a
former cobbled street with cute little old stone wine warehouses on each
side. Now the warehouses are shops and
cafés. We always go to the Nicolas
café where the drinks are inexpensive and the food is good and reasonable,
too. We’d already had our big lunch,
so we just shared 6 escargots. With
escargot, one always is given a basket of bread. We ate some of the bread, and then Tom
surreptitiously fed scraps of bread to the cute little sparrows that our
server evidently despises. It was one of those perfect moments. The sun was shining on us, we were
surrounded by attractive wildlife of human and bird variety, we’d just had a
bit of fine French cooking, and I had the glow of a glass of wine in me, Tom
had the glow of a cup of espresso in him, and life was superb. Tom loves to take the number 14 métro line because it has no
driver and you can sit in front, pretending that you’re in a spaceship and
the lights passing by are the stars.
That’s how we left Cour St. Emilion, on the sleek number 14, to
Madeleine. We got the seats in the
very front of the train, with no trouble at all this time! Everything went our way on Saturday. Yesterday, we made the pilgrimage to Federal Express where they
are starting to recognize us (oh, those older Americans who actually speak
French and who are always sending paper to a publisher in Then we decided to treat ourselves to an extremely late lunch at
Chartier,
the restaurant that the young man at the VTT told us about on Sunday. This old fashioned restaurant is located on
the rue du faubourg Montmartre, just around the corner from the Musée Grevin
(wax museum) on the boulevard I decided that this would be the place where I would have my
very first tête de veau. And so I did. Knowing it would be very rich, I simply had
a salade de tomate first. It was very small and light. That’s good, because the main course was as
rich as I expected and it came with THREE whole expertly boiled, buttered and
seasoned potatoes. Needless to say, I
didn’t eat all that. Tom had a green
salad and pot au feu. He ordered it with fries, but later wished
he’d ordered the vegetables from the pot
au feu instead. Next time. We had dessert. Tom just
had ice cream. But I chose the apricot
tarte, which was a real treat. The
crust was crumbly and firm at the same time.
The apricots were situated on a thin bed of pudding that was like a
thickened crème anglaise. What a
treat. We walked from there down to the left bank, the boulevard Saint
Germain, and bought tickets to see Ratatouille! For three days, the City of Ratatouille is the number one movie in Paris right now. Congratulations, Walt Disney. Kudos to all the people who made this film
possible. We loved it. After, we went to the apartment on rue du Canivet and just
lounged around, doing laundry and reading newspapers, for a couple
hours. It was a pleasant evening. |
