Versailles

Giverny

Bois de Boulogne

OK, so I have to come down on the side of not choosing this again, not at least with kids in tow. Evidently I didn't figure out which metro stop puts you closest in without a walking over highways, watching the ladies load into vans after the evening shift (which apparently ends around 1 pm), seeing one too many guys taking a leak, and a little too much cruising, and walking through a few too many wooded paths that you can't see around. Other than that we got our rowing in, and the lakes are actually quite lovely, but too much algae - the oars kept getting covered.

We will be ready for Lake Cheston and our own little deserted woods in a couple of weeks.

Bon soir.

Les Mis and les animaux

So yesterday we went to see Les Mis at the theater in ENGLISH at Chatelet. It's OK to like musicals - they are so huge and wonderful! What better story to tell, what better song to sing than the song of angry men? And if you don't think that freedom chaffing up against the law and tradition is part of a daily message in Paris you don't have your eyes open. In the USA, we are told we have so many freedoms, and in a way, to assume that you have them makes you a little lazy. Here you are told every day that you have to fight to keep from being trod underfoot. It may be part of Paris' museum-like atmosphere but really you hear some version of it from everyone here.

Today at the Louvre we saw among other thing Gericault's Raft of the Medusa and Delacroix's Liberty Leads the People. If my children are not little revolutionaries by the time we leave, it's not my fault.

Finally I took them to France's attic - not a museum, but the collection of taxidermied specimens and natural world collectibles at Deyrolle. Although a fire nearly destroyed the place a few years ago, we can attest to its back from death's door, living large existence today. Cabinets of butterflies, beetles, shells, and cases of birds, surrounded by giant polar bears and baby giraffes and a...phoenix...but I couldn't really bring myself to purchase anything except a couple of notebooks, but then again couldn't really look away having been brought up in house stuffed with preserved snakes, bats in formaldehyde, and real koala skin made into a teddy bear. Just another Parisian indulgence. Like the ice cream and cookies we had after. (They had to have something while I fed my caffeine habit.) (The one I had given up for 4 years.)

Shakespeare and Company 2 Following a Maritime Tour

I have to work backwards again, and in a twisted circle will start with yesterday's visit to the Museum de la Marine and a return to Shakespeare and Company.

I have a thing for boat models, so this was a lot of fun. Apparently the founder of the museum, François-Edmond Pâris, did as well, and his worldwide travels resulted in a collection of boat models and lovely watercolors that appear in the current exhibit Tous Les Bateaux du Monde. Having learned a lot about Pacific Sailing vessels when we went to Tahiti, it was fun to be able to recognize some different types and also to see the star charts made from reeds and shells. The english language audio tour was a little wordy, with a character pretending to be the admiral. But at least the audioguide worked!!

After a long tour of all the boats of the world, we headed to the city center and had ice cream (don't tell anyone) and spent an enormous amount of time at Shakespeare and CO. There is a children's room upstairs, just as tiny and well-loved as the other nooks and crannies there. Joshua bought The Underneath and Rachel bought A Fool's Girl (which is a children's book that takes place in Shakespeare's time). (Rachel also reminds me to tell everyone she is working on a story called Once Upon a Fairytale. Marketing lessons have not been lost.) I bought a beautifully produced book about Beirut called White Masks also available at Amazon.

So why am I telling you that you can buy this at Amazon. Because for several weeks I had been wondering about the idea of loud Americans. Really I thought that scenario only happened at the Eiffel Tower or Versailles, the part with loud Americans. Oh we are quite obvious regardless if we are being silent - I've decided it would take 3 years to learn to dress with the aplomb of a Parisian. But I really thought the loud part was unfair until yesterday when a woman was talking to her 20 something daughter who was recommending a book and, I will add, hinting that she wanted it for herself and the woman, who had been speaking loudly about whether or not to buy a signed James Frey book (really?) said in her really really loud voice forget it, she could order that, or any of these, from Amazon "for half the price. Really, for half the price." Which isn't even true because the books at Shakespeare and Co. are not overpriced. I couldn't even look, her daughter appeared to want to melt into one of the crevasses in the floorboards. I was thrilled to buy my kids a book at Shakespeare and CO. Or the Red Wheelbarrow. Or any Paris bookstore. Am I just delusional? I don't want to make fun of her - it just made me really sad. Maybe she had buy-me-mommy fatigue. Maybe she lived alone and had lost her job and used her savings to visit her daughter and things in Paris were a lot more expensive than she had thought they would be.
The killer was that the daughter was holding a copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Irony: discuss. What would it have meant to give all that bound between two covers, plus a happy memory of tooling around St. Michel on a perfect day and looking at books? I hope I get to come back to Shakespeare and Company in 10 years and buy my kids another book. But who knows, I might have shopping fatigue and try to weasel my way out of making a purchase...
OK, I'll save the rest of the catching up for later.

Doubledecker Shakespeare and Company

No clue how it got to be Thursday. Do I work backwards or forwards? Sunday, the flea market, Monday, the Champs Elysees planted like farmer's fields, Tuesday another view of the Eiffel Tower and a double decker bus ride, yesterday, a stroll through Mesopotamia at the Louvre.

Les Puces, the Sunday flea market at Clignancourt. Where are Linda Heck and Keri Moser to help work through racks of vintage clothes and chotskies? There are acres of things, plus the stores with "real" antiques. Plus the hawkers of clothes and shoes lining the streets before you get there. I would like to tell you that I left with some small thing, but indecision meant I took only inspiration. And the possibility of returning.

Monday the Champs Elysees was closed to traffic as the farmers of France turned it into fields with crops and trees. There was something vaguely hilarious about walking on top of one of the busiest streets in the world, posing in front of stoplights. Again I was taken with the ability of Parisians to stop and enjoy each little section, each set of plants, and pose for pictures in front of say a row of pineapple plants or sunflowers. Then pop into the Disney Store or Zara for a quick shopping sidebar.

On Tuesday we had planned to visit the aquarium and it was closed, only I think we were at the Museum of the Marine and I simply didn't know where the aquarium entrance was located (Dear Paris, more signs please, or a map at Trocodero) so I thought it was closed. Rachel suggested we take a bus tour. She practically ran across 4 lanes of traffic and hopped on a Tour Rouge bus. For something I had vowed to never do, it was a load of fun. The vantage is unbeatable even if the tinny static-filled earphones are tiresome. And you get little gems, like that the Seine bridge at Place de la Concorde was built with stone from the Bastille so that the people of Paris could continue to trample them underfoot...Parisians and their freedom of Man thing again...we walked most of the way home through St. Germain then returned home and stopped at Cafe des Industries for dinner. No sign of the cat who is usually perched on the benches in the back. CDI is a great place to play ISpi, It looks like someone's idea of an explorer uncle's run down study, with snakeskins and animal heads, old radios and car models, contemporary and old paintings, and ... the gallery of breasts, or what looks like every cliched picture of topless native women ever published in the magazine of the yellow border. The crowd is fun, the food is never bad, and they have a nice Quincy and even nicer tiramisu.

After catching our breath in the morning yesterday we visited the Mesopotamia rooms (actually the Near Eastern Antiquities) at the Louvre. Joshua was a fabulous tour guide, explaining kingdoms and kings, the significance of the potter's wheel, and the establishment of law with Hammurabi's code (for every expression of freedom in Paris, there is an equal expression of le loi!) The little prehistoric female deities are my favorite, along with the giant room of griffins tiled in blues and greens...hello new paint colors for the house. Rachel plans to make a cylinder seal, I think she started with one of the many wine corks in the apartment...we ended the day at our neighborhood bistro where the guys met us and sang, you guessed it: I ain't no student...of ancient culture...before I talk...I should read a book..


AND, I was able to slip out and hear the incomparable Marilynne Robinson read at Shakespeare and Company...and she did when asked what in Idaho could have inspired her to create Pulitzer Prize winning work, reply that it was 4 years of Latin in high school, followed by another in college. Is there a better teacher than Cicero? she asked...

Villette

So yesterday was a big outside day - off to Villette!! First we took the metro to buy a soccer ball at Les Halles, and I realized how absolutely integral it is to our lives now. I will really miss the train, and how you pop up out of the metro into another world, whether it is only 3 blocks or 3 miles away. Anyway we traveled with our newly acquired soccer ball to Park Villette which is in the northwest part of the city. The park is flat, with 35 hectares of green space, and there are some museums there, but a lot of separate fields and playgrounds, all along a section of canal. I forced the children to writhe out into the sun like snakes emerging from a crevasse while I lounged about and read. Many many families were there, it was nice to see hordes of children. On the way out we stopped at one of the vendors and had churros - the funnel cake of France I call them. I tricked the children into walking home along the canal - probably about 2 miles - from Villette to Bastille. It was a beautiful day, and we wandered from one neighborhood into the next. Swarms of people were outside, either sitting next to the canal, or at a cafe, but not the tight tourist crowds of midtown, thankfully. We passed a flea market, and men playing boules, and playgrounds over the covered part of the canal. And of course we end by looking at the July Column at the Bastille monument through the trees, which has now become our familiar homing beacon.