Paris (2018, Part I): Writing about the Duck, not Calling about it

J and I have been living in Paris for the past few weeks. It’s a difficult job, but someone has to teach all these American students on their travel abroad programs. Paris is a crowded and overwhelming (as well as fantastic) city, and the culture shock of France was a bit daunting at first. For example, we were not quite able to figure out the pricing and ordering structure at the sushi “buffet” 10 meters from our apartment (we’re still not sure if it was all-you-can-eat … and how may times one can click the boxes), and the “Miss Kale” establishment 15 meters from our apartment served a disappointing amount of kale — given the establishment’s name — in its Asian grain bowl. With our handy guide book, however, we were prepared to navigate any challenge.

Ok, actually we're pretty much living in Brooklyn -- and better yet, maybe the Brooklyn at the turn of this century. (It's actually some distance to the nearest Lobster Roll and Peruvian-Japanese.) French is the second language at our little ex-pat wine bar, restaurant, and cafe known as "Frenchie" (so named because that's what the owner was called working in Jamie Oliver's kitchens). Our housing, however, is quintessentially French.

Well ok that place is from a small town we visited on our trip to the Loire Valley (see next entry). Here’s our actual building (which is typically Parisian), with the entrance door right next to the Bio 'n Bon's right awning. J's on the left, non-pictured side of the building from the first photo.

We're on boisterous noisy corner where about four streets converge, kitty-corner from the Sentier Metro stop, about a half-mile North of the Louvre.

It's very noisy. Here’s the line to the club underneath our windows. 

But if we stick our heads out the window and look right (North), up the hill, we see Sacre-Coeur.

There are plenty of blog entries out there if you want to read about the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, Versailles, etc. (though I should note that the concert of Vivaldi choral concertos we attended in Notre Dame was brilliant — and Versailles was great once the initial crush of the crowd dissipates). Luckily we did a lot of the iconic stuff during our last visit to Paris, in 2016,  so we’ve been concentrating on slightly off-the-beaten-path Paris — as much as anything can be off the beaten path in the most visited city in the world. It’s pretty easy to blend in in Paris and be a little better than the average ugly American; just be relatively quiet on the Metro, mumble a few words of phrase-book French, and don’t do what one of a thousand groups of tourists we’ve eaten next to do: ask for butter with bread at dinner; declare one’s intentions to visit the “Orange Museum”; and inquire whether bouillabaisse is a good choice for someone with a shellfish allergy. And if you voted for Trump, maybe it’s better to keep that one to yourself in central Paris.

It was good to be back in the land of certain absurdities. We have seen progress in some key areas since 2015 and 2016, however. The beer scene is creeping upwards, give or take the fact that thousands of bistros, tabacs, brasseries, and even restaurants still offer an unrelentingly narrow choice of insipid corporate lagers (and the French, like the Germans, still go into a bar and ask "for a beer"). We live right near a lovely little (but jam-packed bar called Hoppy Corner that highlights the excellent French artisan beer scene (and even provided me with a delicious VIPA IPA from Handywood Brewing in Richmond). Proper Brewing Paris, anyone? And of course we visited John and Sarah's haunts, the Academie de la biere and La Fine Mousse. Hard to believe we needed jackets the first week. 

The coffee scene is steadily improving, and now one no longer needs a Paris Coffee Map to have a decent chance of finding an American-style café where the barista actually uses the tamper. We even stumbled upon this machine (ok, at a new American-owned place called Sunday Morning in Soho) — which, the owner claims, is the first of its kind in Paris. The Modbar machine puts all the machinery under the bar and allows the barista to silently choose among several types of roasts and grinds to extract a shot that best fits the customer. I am pleased to report that the barista guessed a third-wave, hipster-sour-blond shot for me, even though I’m loyal to second-wave dark.

On the negative side of the ledger, the Mexican food is still an abomination. Dear God, please, someone tell the folks at O'Tacos that barbecue sauce, curry, ketchup, and mayonnaise are not Mexican garnishes.

While we are on this theme, someone please tell the French that just because they make a lovely roasted chicken does not mean that roasted chicken is a good potato chip flavor. 

And the bedding is still as resolutely bad as we remember it from Germany. Do Parisians really not think, when it’s 83 degrees in their apartment at 2 a.m. after a warm day, that layers on the bedding might be nice, instead of just a duvet with a duvet cover? Suffice it to say that the 30 Euros we spent on a regular top sheet is the best money spent so far. Ok, except for the 18 Euros spent on two cheap pillows to compensate for the ones provided, which, in the words of one of my students, resemble a “sack with three cotton balls in it.” And if you live in Paris and purchase a fan, avoid the kind we have in our apartment with a two-hour-max timer. You’ll be up every two hours and two minutes during the night.**

** Editor's note. Sigh: it turns out that our fan does have a setting for "run all the time." Classic that we only discovered as much in our last week, after the hot stretch. 

We have found the French to be incredibly polite and warm and totally undeserving of the stereotypes built up against them in the U.S. Except, that is, when they are trying to cut in line in the special line at Versailles reserved for people who bothered to do ten second’s worth of research and buy exact-entry-time tickets ahead of time online. The people who show up at Versailles without a ticket are probably the same people who support a hypothetical (and, luckily, only remotely possible) Frexit.

Some of the highlights of our trip including seeing some of Paris’s less touristical parks, such as the Parc Monceau and the absurdly lovely and quintessentially European Bois de Bolougne, which has a lovely island one can ferry to (the weather was so perfect the day we visited that, needless to say, the restaurant was so jammed that a beer did not seem worth it).

We loved the Mary Cassatt special exhibit at the lovely Jacquemart-Andre mansion museum, which has a calming café perfect for afternoon tea and pastries. Gradually we learned that the key to Paris is finding uncrowded and calm spaces; it’s not that we don’t like the average corner bistros, but the crowds everywhere — on street after street after street — can be a bit much day after day after day. (Don’t ask us about Montmartre on a warm Saturday in late May.)

We enjoyed the Jewish Museum and the Picasso Museum (which currently has a special exhibit on the making of Guernica). The Belleville neighborhood is worth visiting if you have more than a few days in Paris (thanks Gillian), and includes a beautiful park and a couple of medieval water-testing stations. 

We skipped the macabre Catacombs, but we did tour the remarkable Père Lachaise Cemetery, which offers a lot more than just the grave of Jim Morrison of the Doors.

One of the highlights was of course Kari and Maijastiina visiting us from Finland. Disclaimer: K and M speak remarkably good English, with much better grammar than my students write. But really, it’s a crime we have not yet made a video of some of the hilarities that ensue when we are all together (to say nothing of the hilarity of a Finn asking for the bill in Paris in French, which sounds about as close to the French language as I sound to Finnish when I try a couple words).

Kari: “I think our son is calling about the “ducks” (sounded like duck to our ears, but was in fact Kari and Maijastiina’s “dogs”)

J: Oh, is Arturri cooking duck?

Kari (thinking that J had just asked if their son was cooking the family pets for dinner): speechless, with shocked expression.

And look, Kari and I are as progressive as the next guys, and I support striking workers most of the time, but I had to agree with Kari when he asked, “But what do the train drivers do except push a clutch?” Which may not seem that funny to you, but you had to be there, and don’t ask Maijastiina about what happened next. 

Maybe J just had duck on her mind because we all returned to Le Petit Canard, one of our favorites from 2015.

We ate pastries at Les Deux Magots, an unabashedly over-priced tourist trap famous for being Hemingway's hangout that was nonetheless completely worth it for its classic-ness.

The four of us also went to one of the most extremely under-priced meals of my life: an exquisite 8-course meal at the Michelin-star-in-waiting La Condesa, which could charge about 200 more Euros than it does. Go now before the 30-year-old chef, Indra Carrillo, becomes the Next Big Thing. He had us at the White Spargel Tempura on the Chef's Table–esque greenery.

When not having a top-5-all-time meal, we’ve spent plenty of time on the basics of Parisian life: wine, bread, and pastries. Blogging about the wine would give me carpal tunnel (though I should note that my favorite discovery has been the reds from the Crozes-Hermitage region). The bread has made my what-happened-in-America-with-the-bread? obsession to new levels. And we’ve committed ourselves to making a solid dent in “The Best Pastries in Paris," according to Bloomberg (click if you love pictures of pastries), which has been something of a Bible to me the past few weeks. The Equinox pastry — light bourbon vanilla cream, with a center of salted butter caramel on a crisp Speculoos biscuit, all wrapped within a cool gray coating decorated with three precise red dots — from La Patisserie Cyril Lignac — was magnificent (especially to end a picnic in the park). 
 

As mentioned, we have been happily headquartered in the 2^nd Arrondissement, but we did just take an excursion with my class this weekend to the Loire Valley. That’s for the next entry. For now, we will enjoying our last few days in Paris and trying not to take it all quite so seriously.