Falling in Love All Over Again … with Paris

 

(Part One)

    We had the opportunity in October, to spend two weeks in an apartment on the fourth floor of a Hausmann building on the Left Bank.

    The modern-but-very-Parisian lift (three people max more comfortable with two) takes us up to the top floor-but-one, where we look out over the fashionable Sixth Arrondissement. 

    The entire floor is ours, the front three rooms retaining much of the glorious interiors of a more genteel age:  crown moulding one does not see today, lofty ceilings with floor to ceiling windows overlooking the street, balconies big enough on which to enjoy une coupe du Champagne, fireplace, chaise longue, herringbone wood floors (that creak).

    The rest of the flat is renovated in a modern but elegant style: Miele and Smeg appliances, airy and well-furnished.

    The quiet back bedroom has a large built-in wardrobe with plenty of drawers and hanging space. It’s also ensuite, with a walk-in shower.

    Since both of us are hip-challenged (I’m on the tail end of hip fracture surgery, Scott’s anticipating his second hip replacement early next year), the shower is a welcome addition. 

    Our favourite Italian eatery is just down the street; Place St. Sulpice and its excellent market are a five minute walk away, and cafes are plenty, where one can sit and watch humanity pass us by.  

    There was a time when we both had grown tired - even bored - with this city. Perhaps we’d gotten too familiar with it. Perhaps it was the beggars, maybe even the perceived snobbery of the locals.

    All of that is bull-shit of course.  One can live one’s entire life in Paris and never get too familiar with it. Beggars are everywhere in the big cities all over the world.  The locals are not snobs, they just cringe when they hear their beautiful language butchered. 

    This time around, we found everyone we encountered everywhere to be gracious, welcoming and patient with our bad French. All but one, that is. I’ll get to that later.

    We flew from Birmingham Int’l on AirFrance business class. The last time Scott flew out of BHX, it took him thirty minutes just to get inside the building to the lift that takes passengers up to security: heavy construction going on at that time.

    This time, there was no queue to get into the building let alone line up for the lifts. The same with security - no queues at all. We were seated in the AirFrance biz class lounge almost exactly two hours after leaving our flat in Ludlow. The road was clear and the airport was easy.

    Speaking of the AirFrance Lounge, they share it with their partner KLM, of course, and, if one is not in biz class, one can buy one’s way in if you want to pay £40 per person. 

    The lounge was not crowded. And it was an elegant way to spend the next two hours before our flight: I had a peach bellini (well, two). Scott had scrambled eggs and sausage with a spicy bloody Mary.

    The day was perfect.

    Yes, there’s a hitch.

    It seems the school mid-term break began yesterday. So today is the first day of a week off for all UK school children.

    It seemed as though all of those UK school children were on our plane to go to Disneyland Paris, with their parents.

    The plane was jam-packed with Disney-paraphernalia-wearing children and adults alike. I was terribly frightened.

    But.  We had a one row buffer between us and them.  We were in Row One Seats D & F and row two was empty. Turns out the flight was not chaotic with screaming children. They were all (mostly) well behaved.

    We have this ritual of buying a really nice box of chocolate for the crew, to thank them for their thankless jobs. Since we sit in Biz Class, they know we’re not seeking an upgrade.  And those lovely, chic French crew are always gracious and happy to be recognised.

    Since we were first off the flight and had only carry-on luggage, we were also close to first in a short queue for a taxi. Set fee to the Left Bank of €65.  The ride is not fast: traffic in and around Paris is still jammed. An hour after leaving CDG we were at the flat.

    The flat’s manager was there to buzz us in and show us around. As I mentioned earlier, this is a really nice place to stay, both inside and outside in the neighbourhood.

    We get settled, put our clothes away then head out to a café to flâneur with a glass of wine in hand.

    Flâneur is (obviously) a French term that roughly translates to “watching people go by.” 

    Looking at Wikipedia: ‘from the 19th century, a flâneur is an urban male "stroller", "lounger", "saunterer", or "loafer", watching, detached from those he’s watching.’ Basically he’s a people watcher, a voyeur.

    We like doing that: watching tourists, locals, old, young, oftentimes making up stories about them and oftentimes criticising their clothing.  Kind of mean but lots of fun.

Illustration of a flâneur by Paul Gavarni

    Anyway, we while away the afternoon before stopping into the supermarket around the corner to stock up on (mostly) breakfast stuff and wine, before heading back out for a pre-dinner glass down the street from Pizza Chic.

    We love Pizza Chic because it is staffed by Italians. Scott speaks to them in Italian. Even I speak to them in what little Italian I know.  They also serve great pizza.

    The first time we came upon this wonderful eatery, we had just arrived at our hotel, the Hôtel de L’abbaye, which is next door to a pizza parlour. We were both hungry for lunch.

    I wore a bright red winter coat to Paris that time. One of the staff, a quite good looking young man, came right up to me and said something rather flattering, I think it was how beautiful I looked. In Italian. You bet your ass I was in love immediately. 

    We were so very pleasantly surprised at our discovery of both a great pizza joint and the opportunity for Scott to speak Italian. We have come back several times over the last couple of years. Sadly, I didn’t see Antonio again. 

    Until tonight. We had booked a table for 7pm. and as we were being seated, I saw him across the room, smiled and pointed: ‘I remember you!’  He came over all smiles and said, in his rare English, ‘I remember you too!’ and gave me a hug and kiss.

    I was home.

    Back in the flat, it was kind of comforting to hear the metro rumbling far below.  Reminded me of sleeping in our London Hotel. 

    The clocks fell back last night. After jumping forward from London to Paris time on Saturday after our flight, we were kind of right back to London time. Weird, but no time difference felt.

    Sunday morning was lazy and we were anticipating a stroll down Rue de Rennes to Boulevard Montparnasse for lunch at the famous Bouillon Chartier Montparnasse.

    This kind of eatery is a prototype of the classic brasserie, but with prices that don’t kill the wallet. The concept was created by a butcher to feed his workers at Les Halles, the famous market that was Paris’ central fresh food market until it closed in 1973.

    The concept caught on and Chartier built several around the city. They were designed at the height of the Art Nouveau movement and many of them retain their original interior designs and an elegant space where one can dine without breaking the bank account.

    Alas, when we arrived at the famous bouillon, there was a queue of what looked like hundreds of people waiting to get a seat inside. Interesting that their website claimed ‘no waiting, always a table.’

    We strolled back up Rue Racine to a little cafe we stopped into before lunch, Cafe Raspail. They had very good snails and steak frites.

    After an afternoon nap (I walked 6,000+ steps today, glad to have the cane) we made the very short walk to Taokan Chinese/Thai restaurant just around the corner.

Classy little joint. Excellent cocktails (I had a Kowloon made with Veuve Clicquot). But their kung pao chicken was some of the best I’ve ever had. Wow. 

    After dinner, we took a stroll around the corner and up to Rue du Dragon to see what else was nearby. 

    It seems we have so many restaurants and cafes to choose from, just around our corner! There’s a pretty Japanese restaurant next door to Taokan, a sort of chess club cum bar cum cafe next to that (sadly no backgammon).  Then up onto Rue du Dragon, there are several, very good looking places.  We will have tried four of them in addition to the Japanese place by the time we leave.

    We found a little cafe for a before- or after-dinner glass of wine where we visited many times during our stay. The staff at le Grand Cafe Dragon got to know us, and we were grateful to be recognised.

(end of part one)

If It's Tuesday, It Must Be Hereford

This past weekend was not planned.

Oh, the actual weekend in London was, seeing family and friends.  And Scott playing backgammon in Prestbury.

But Sunday didn't turn out the way it should have, because of Storm Bert.  Yes, here in the UK we now name our storms.  We don’t have hurricanes or typhoons (yet) but we hate missing out on anthropomorphising our bad weather like the rest of the world.

Anyway, Storm Bert dumped a whole lot of rain on our part of the country.  So much so that the trains to Ludlow weren’t. There were no trains because of landslips (that’s the British term for landslide) and flooding.

I was dumped at Crewe.  Which is not a bad place to be dumped since it’s an excellent hub for many other routes.  But it kind of sucks to stay overnight there (apologies to the, I’m sure, very nice people who live there).

I briefly considered staying at the Hotel Ibis in Crewe and quickly realised ‘not’: Wilmslow was just one stop north of Crewe, and Scott was playing in a backgammon tournament nearby, not scheduled to return to Ludlow until Monday. 

I hopped on a train hoping he would finally see my messages so that I would know exactly where I was going.  He did and I cabbed it to Prestbury’s Bridge Hotel. Luckily, he was happy to see me (he won two of many matches) and we stayed the night.

Next morning, trains to Ludlow were still cancelled because of Bert, but they were going as far as Shrewsbury, an hour away from home, and a very nice place to spend a day and evening. We booked our favourite hotel, the Darwin Townhouse, small and eccentrically cosy with a staff who knows us. Two minutes after booking the hotel, the train driver came on and said that they were going to Ludlow after all.  We decided, however, to remain nomads for one more day.  So Shrewsbury it was: Italian lunch, French dinner - pretty good, actually. 

There’s an honour bar stocked very generously with both wines and spirits, so before bedtime we had a nightcap of Jack Daniels on the rocks.  Haven’t done that in a long time.

We sat in the front parlour across from one another, with a substantial chess board on the coffee table between us.  The bishops were like large salt shakers, that gives you an idea of the size of this chess board. Neither of us had played in a while.  (I haven’t played since Grand Rapids when my brothers beat the shit out of me every time. That was in the ‘60s.)

I remembered how each piece could move but that still didn’t save me from a stupid defeat. Clearly Scott had played more recently and successfully than I!

After a much better sleep on a much better mattress, we enjoyed a great Shropshire breakfast amidst an explosion of Christmas decorations throughout the public rooms. Everywhere you look there are Christmas trees, large and small. Christmas pillows on all the furniture. Holly wreaths on all the windows.  You know it’s Christmas time!

We made it home by train at 10:30 Tuesday morning, just in time to change clothes and ride to Hereford, about 45 minutes south of Ludlow for Scott’s pre-op appointment with the anaesthetist. (He's having a second hip replacement in January).

I came along because we were having fun being nomads, and one more night beckoned in another hotel we love, the Castle House, in Hereford. It is situated down the street from the magnificent Hereford Cathedral. An imposing monument both outside and in.  It is much more interesting inside, because it contains an original copy of the Magna Carta, with the seal of King John I (nasty piece of work I’m glad the lords cut him down to size! [although I think Claude Rains did an excellent job of portraying him in Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood])

The Magna Carta is not the only treasure here in the cathedral: one of the oldest maps of the world, the Mappa Mundi, is also on display here, an eccentric, circular piece of art which depicts the world as it was known in the early 14th century.

But wait!  There’s more!  

The cathedral was a repository for some very important, and rare, books, some pre-printing press and some after.  So valuable were these books, they were chained to the bookshelves where they resided.  Oh, you could take them down and read them (if you got special permission back in the day) but you could not check them out.  There they stayed, and there they stay today.

Such an easy stroll from the hotel, so we stopped on the way home for a late lunch, an excellent pizza, then a lie-down before cocktails in the hotel bar.  We decided a late, light bite was in order, and wandered down the other way to the bao and ramen fusion fast food joint.  Really pretty good!  It’s been awfully cold, so the hot sake warmed us up.  The chicken bites were spicy.  So spicy, in fact, that my lips were burning by the end of the meal.

A leisurely night and late-ish morning saw us boarding the train about 10:30, passing miles and miles of flooded fields and overrun rivers. 

So: London to Crewe, to Wilmslow, to Shrewsbury, to Hereford, to Ludlow. We’ve become more familiar with our part of England.  But it’s nice to be home.