Paris Journal 2007

Sign my guestbook. View my guestbook.                      ←Previous    Next→                 Paris Journal 2007 Home

 

 

This is the kind of view Sarah Turnbull describes in her
book, Almost French.  It is our view from the balcony
of the apartment in the 15th.  Below is the view out the
kitchen window, including the top of the Eiffel tower.

 

A typical Sunday, with families and tourists picnicking on
the grass in the Champ de Mars.

 

In this little park right next to Invalides, the Square
d’Ajaccio, the grass is supposed to be in a temporary state
of “repose,” as the sign on the left indicates.  People are
still using the grass anyway, of course.

 

Bikes and pedestrians take over the highway along the Seine
on Sundays.

Monday, September 3

 

All the hotels in Paris are full because of the rugby world cup.  I haven’t noticed any change, however, in terms of how many people we see on the street, how crowded the restaurants are, or what kind of people are out and about.

 

Since the FedEx from New York never arrived on Saturday, we both had a whole day to goof off yesterday.  It was one of those Sundays when the busy road along the Seine is closed to cars.  Although the photos I took make it look like the weather was gray and depressing, it really was not.  There was no threat of rain, and we saw blue patches of sky fairly frequently.  I think Paris in the Fall is quite gray; and the weather is now absolutely Autumnal.  For people from southwest Florida, that’s a real treat.

 

So we happily started off a bit before noon.  We tried to stop in our local Saint Sulpice church, but it was disgorging lots of people at that moment – mass had just ended.  So we went over to Saint Severin, where mass was about to start.  We made the tour around the inside of the church very quietly, then exited and headed for Saint Julien le Pauvre, the oldest church in Paris.  There we stood in the back for a while during a special high liturgical Greek Orthodox service.  It was all choral, and the choir was impressive.  We left and crossed the river to Notre Dame.  Mass was going on in the middle of the church while swarms of tourists, us included, walked around the periphery.  I could have kicked about 50 tourists who had the nerve to use their flashbulbs during the service!  How incredibly insensitive, disrespectful, and ill-mannered they were!  Tom was a bit shocked to see that at the end of our tour, the church people were selling postcards and souvenirs to the tourists while mass was still being said.  Oh well.  That’s Paris!

 

Having attended churches, we went down to the Seine and had a nice, long walk over to the Eiffel Tower.  We decided it was time for Sunday Dinner at about 1:30 or 2, so we dropped in on La Gauloise and consumed leg of lamb with potatoes dauphinois (a sort of combination of lyonnaise and au gratin potatoes), finishing with the restaurant’s especially savory crème brulée.  We were relieved to find that once again the servers there treat us like we’re something special.

 

Fortified, we walked back over to the 6th and collapsed for a good, long Sunday nap.  When we were fully awake again, we went out for another walk, through the beautiful Luxembourg Gardens, the Cavelier-de-la-Salle garden directly to the south, and back along boulevard Saint Michel and the rue de Medicis because the Luxembourg was closed by then.

 

All the fruit in the garden at the southwest corner of the Luxembourg now appears to be almost ready for picking.  It is mostly apples now.  Each piece of fruit hanging on each espaliered tree is placed in a little waxed paper bag to keep the birds from pecking on it.  The fruit, like the gardens, is owned by the Senate.  I think the Senators will soon be eating freshly homemade tarte tatin.

 

I’ve just finished reading a book that my lovely friend Wendy left for me.  I should say re-reading, because as I read it, I recalled that I’d read it before, four years ago, when it first was published.  It is Almost French, by the Australian journalist Sarah Turnbull.

 

It’s very funny and extremely well written; I highly recommend this book to every Anglo-Saxon who is interested in Paris.  Sarah has some astute observations about the French people and their culture.  Things she learned the hard way, you can learn the easy way by reading her book before you come to France.

 

That said, I must point out that she makes some mistakes, mostly due to the fact that she knows her part of Paris well, but does not know the rest of it all that well.  She says, for example, that the lawn in Parisian parks is forbidden to people.  That is only true in some parks, and they happen to be the ones in her part of town.  But in many, probably the vast majority, of Parisian parks, this is not true at all, as you can see by the many photos I’ve taken through the years of walking through many Parisian parks.

 

And even when there are funny rules about what you can and can’t do on the grass in the parks, the rules are often routinely ignored.  Such is the case on the Esplanade des Invalides, where supposedly ball games are banned.  But there is a perpetual soccer game going on just about every day, weather permitting, in one big section of the Esplanade.  I suspect that many of the players are off-duty gendarmes, and that’s why the rule is not enforced.

 

The time period that Sarah is writing about is roughly 1995 to 2003.  We started summering here in 1998, so we’re experiencing Paris at the same time.  She does a magnificent job explaining how the victory in the 1998 World Cup (soccer) changed the mood of the entire country, for the good, and forever.  The change in mood, the emergence from a national depression, precipitated an economic Renaissance that we’ve seen unfolding ever since then.  Back then, unemployment was at about 11 or 12 percent, I think.  Now it is down to 6 point something percent.  Neighborhoods that were almost hopeless back then are now spiffing up.  We were here for the first time together in Paris in 1998, when the great event took place. 

 

I will never forget all the cheering and dancing in the street in ‘98.  In fact, soccer is always a big deal here.  I remember walking somewhere in the 10th arrondissement the morning before one of the great soccer evenings.  We were wearing blue, and some young men we passed chanted “Allez les Bleus!” as we passed.  (The Bleus are the French team, of course.)  Whereupon silver-haired Tom had the wit to respond “Allez les Vieux!”  (Go old people!)

 

Sarah makes a few claims about sexist restaurant service that I have never found to be true in the entire time we’ve been coming here.  When we dine out with friends, if I order the wine, the server always brings it to me to taste.  Sarah claims that when she would order the wine, the server would typically bring it to the table and offer to let one of the men taste it first, even though she selected it.  That has never happened to me in France, although I think it has happened in the U.S., and I suspect that the reason it happens to Sarah is not due to sexism, but to some other factor.  There is sexism in France, alive and well, but this isn’t how it manifests.

 

When it is just Tom and me dining at a restaurant, I just get the house wine in a glass or a small carafe, so this isn’t an issue then.  Only bottles of wine are offered for an initial assessment before they are served.

 

Sarah correctly observes that as of the time her book was published, there had never been a black newscaster delivering the evening news on French TV.  That was embarrassingly true.  Then last year, it was embarrassing what a huge deal the newspapers made out of the fact that for one month, the dead month of August, a black newscaster would be delivering the evening news.  This made it onto all the front pages of the papers!  Incredible.  We’d think nothing of it.  It is routine for us in the U.S.

 

And now, Nicolas Sarkozy has not just one token woman on his cabinet, he has several women on his cabinet and in other key positions in the government.  And they aren’t all white.  This is one way in which he has already started a revolution.  But don’t take this to mean I’m a full-blown Sarko supporter.  I’m not.  I still wish Ségolène Royal had won the election.  A woman as president of France; now THAT would be a revolution.

 

 

←Previous    Next→

 

Sign my guestbook. View my guestbook.