Because of conversations like this one, which took place on Saturday morning:
Cliff: "Joey is probably my favorite person in the whole world."
Blair: "Really?"
Cliff: "Well, after myself, obviously."
Or this one, on our way into the Catacombs:
Blair: "You know, I’ve already done this once before. It’s pretty scary. When we get down there, if something drips on my head, I’ll probably pee my pants."
Cliff: "If something drips on my head, I’ll probably pee your pants too."
So Cliff is a guy I worked with on a mountain that would become my second home. And this
semester he is studying in South Spain, which is kind of a cooler (or warmer, as it were) place to be studying than Northern France at this time of year, when Paris weather is still completely unpredictable. Anyway, I got to do the tourist thing here, playing tour guide and hitting up all the places I’ve gotten so used to seeing.
We went to Montmartre, the artist’s district, which was awesome, because it’s kind of a not good neighborhood, so though I fancy myself tough and rugged, I tend to stay away from it when I am alone. But when you are with a guy who is 3/4 mountain goat and 1/4 Kentucky-bred corn-fed mountain man, you can go wherever you want and noone is going to mess with you. Which is what we did.
And we ended up lost, at a café on the top of the highest hill in Paris, the Hill Of Martyrs, where we sat next to a floor-to-ceiling window, wavy with age, that looked onto a rainy cobbled street, drinking hot chocolate out of bowls (which is probably my favorite thing about France). Kind of not exactly unlike Belle.
On Saturday we decided (at 930pm) that we were hungry, so we made a frozen pizza. But not only did it take forever to cook, but it turned out to be not a pizza but some weird German thing we fondly referred to as notpizza, because we had no idea what it actually was, except that it was quite small and left us both as hungry as when we began. But it was Saturday night in Paris, so we decided to go to a piano bar (live music AND food? Does life get any better? I submit that it can not!)
And now came Cliff’s real initiation into the way of (my) life in France, because of course it couldn’t be simple.
We went to Harry’s Bar, a place Hemingway used to hang out, that claims to have singlehandedly invented the Bloody Mary. I’ve been there once or twice, it’s a fun really old-school kind of place with swinging doors and college pennants on the walls and a piano bar downstairs. I had never been to the actual piano room, but as we walked in we could hear soft jazz coming from the basement, so we asked to be seated down there. We walked down the tightly spiralling staircase, a woman took our coats, and suddenly I knew we were in way over our heads. Because as we walked in, not only was the waitstaff in bowties, but everyone was smoking their pipes (and not 3-foot long indian peace bubble pipes either) and wearing their furs and suddenly we went from the Casablanca bar upstairs to a scene from The Great Gatsby, and we were dressed like a scene from She’s All That. But I’ve gone to my fair share of events dressed inappropriately in France, so I thought we’d be ok... I sat on the wall side of our table, pinned between the wall and the tiny two-top, completely impossible to make a quick getaway, which would become a problem after we looked at the menu and realized that, even if we didn’t want a glass of wine, a soda was 8,50 Euro. Which is about $11. And I can pretty much guarantee there are no free refills. We looked at each other helplessly, and Cliff said, "I’ll pull the table out, you slide out and find that woman that has our coats and tell her we had an emergency." Which is exactly what we did, and apparently it’s not an odd excuse for a place with $11 sodas, because the lady just smiled at us and handed us back the coats she had only hung up 10 minutes before. Slightly disappointed but still thinking we had beat the system, we left. But we were in the Opera district, which is gorgeous at night but also (other than where I live) the most expensive area in Paris. But we found a cheap café, walked in, asked for an apple tart, and were told that the kitchen had closed 10 minutes before. But the lady pointed us in the direction of Hippopotamus, a restaurant she swore was still open. We walked into Hippo, got a table, sat down, (it was packed– I was wedged between the window, a large ficus, the table, and a making-out couple at the next table) and decided what we wanted. We were going to share two appetizers and two desserts, had our WHOLE plan figured out, and when the guy got to our table, he wouldn’t take our order. He kept telling me we couldn’t order the thing I kept trying to say, so I tried something else instead, and he just kept saying (in French, so that neither Cliff nor I really had any idea what was going on) "NO, no no no, Mademoiselle, you can’t have that." I thought maybe they were out of it, so I tried something else, and got the same reaction, but it wasn’t apologetic, it was just mean, as though I had tried to order his left arm for my dinner. Everyone else in the restaurant was eating, so I couldn’t figure out the problem. Finally he sent someone else over to us, who yelled at me some more, much to the annoyance of the interrupted couple next door, and who finally explained to me that they wouldn’t serve us unless we were ordering meat. But they were out of all their meat except the Viande Haché Cru. Raw ground beef, served in a mound about the size of a cupcake with a raw egg on top.
We looked at the picture on the menu, and I said "Aren’t you not supposed to eat raw beef?" to which Cliff responded "Aren’t you not supposed to eat raw eggs?"
So basically the guy was telling us that either we eat their salmonella salad or we don’t eat at all (Beauty & The Beast, anybody?). So we left. Again.
Now we’re standing on Boulevard Haussmann, it’s just after midnight, and we have to be ON the Metro on our way home in 40 minutes or we’ll miss it because it closes. And we’re starving.
Think think think, late at night in Paris, think think think, if I were in the US I’d be at a diner somewhere wolfing eggs and toast, apple pie a la mode, and a bottomless cup of coffee, but in Paris you have a better chance of finding the Easter bunny than a diner. Think think think, what do I usually eat when it’s this hour in Paris... think think think...
"Cliff, how do you feel about crêpes?"
"If it’s food, I’m in."
To the St. Michel Latin Quarter restaurant district we go, flying across the Seine in front of Notre Dame and through winding alley streets lined with Shawarma restaurants and Lebanese bakeries, to the first crêpe stand we see. Nutella for me, ham and cheese for Cliff, and straight away onto the last Metro of the night to eat them.
WHO gets kicked out of three restaurants in one night? Honestly. Luckily Cliff is cool, so he didn’t care– it probably doesn’t hurt that he’s been living in Spain for the last three months, where he probably has the same cultural misunderstandings as I do here.
Sunday we went to the Louvre ("That’s the Mona Lisa? It’s so... so... unattractive." A valid response considering the 16x20 inch portrait is in a room with a fresco as large as the floor plan of the cabin I lived in all summer). And then walked home, passing the Arc de Triomphe ("It’s so... huge.") and a woman dressed in red tights with a black Speedo over them, a blue shirt, and a fanny pack. I don’t know if she was trying to look like a superhero, but she definitely succeeded.
We walked to the Eiffel Tower to see it in the daylight, and noticed the crowd of police under it.
"Umm, Blair, are there always this many guards armed with semi-automatic machine guns under the Eiffel Tower?"
"Oh yeah," I waved him off, "It’s the most touristed landmark in the world, they keep it under pretty close watch."
No. That is a lie. I was completely wrong. Someone had jumped off. I was completely shocked, and Cliff (who lives in a tiny town in Spain, remember?) looked at me and was like, "It’s the most famous building in the world– it’s gotta happen kind of frequently, right?" He overheard a tourist family talking about it– the 9-year-old kid said, "Yeah, we saw the body falling through the air, and then heard it hit the ground over there..." Apparently it does happen kind of often, because this was how they handled it: body hits ground, guard hears noise it makes, blows secret code whistle, all guards go into action, some surrounding the body, calling for an ambulance, some coming over with buckets of water to wash away... well... you know. NO ONE EVEN FLINCHED. The elevator lines weren’t interrupted, they didn’t shut down, even for half an hour to get the body out of the way. I was flabbergasted.
We went to the Gardens Of Luxembourg, where we hung out at my favorite fountain, eating Magnum bars (some kind of ice cream I had never had that changed my life) and watching some Boho chicks play guitar in the grass.
We went home, and, at about 11pm (we have acclimated to the European lifestyle a little too well... who am I kidding, we spent all summer eating second dinners at midnight in the industrial-size kitchen of the place we worked) decided to make dinner– a box of PastaRoni from a US care package and half a package of mozzarella prosciutto tortellini with lardons. I don’t think I have had a meal as good as that since moving to Paris. I have never been more satisfied in my life. We somehow managed to devour an entire bottle of sauce with it (by the way, when I am at any family gathering in the US, whether in FL, NC, or KY, I am always the last to finish eating. ALWAYS. It used to make me feel like a fatty until I realized I eat the same amount as everyone else, just at half the speed. Fortunately, Cliff eats the same amount as everyone else but at only 1/4 the speed, which meant all of our meals took HOURS, and it was amazing).
Since the weather was nice for a few days, we ended up spending all our time outside; we ate breakfast from the boulangerie in a park near my apartment, drinking milk from a one-liter jug we passed back and forth the way most people would a bottle of wine. We went to Pere LaChaise cemetery, since we had seen all the other parks– and spent an hour looking for Jim Morrison’s grave:
Blair: "Ok, let’s follow these people– that guy looks like a total hippie, you KNOW he’s gotta be going to see ol’ Jim."
Cliff: "Yeah, unless he’s seen him already, in which case we’re just following him to the exit, you know..."
Since I had been to the cemetery once before, you’d think I’d know where I was going– and you’d think wrong.
We cooked more pasta, more lardons, more sauce, and this time ate it with a baguette to feel like real Italians.
And then, on Cliff’s last day here, we walked from my apartment to Les Invalides, the gold-domed building where Napoleon is buried; former military outpost, veteran hospital, garrison, etc. We found the garden of the Rodin Museum, and from the street we could see the back of The Thinker... much less attractive than the front.
We ended up at the Musée d’Orsay, miles from my apartment, just before dusk, with nothing to do but drink café crèmes in a café with frescoes on the walls and acoustic American music playing on the stereo. The chairs were purple velvet, the bartender ignored us just enough to make it feel really French, and we sat in there for hours while all the rest of the world came and went, watching it get dark and not really paying attention to the fact that it was suddenly almost 9pm, we were miles from my apartment, AND we were each wearing nothing more than a light jacket (NOT helpful in blistering 50-km/hour wind gusts). But we walked to my apartment, bundled up, and went back to the Eiffel Tower, which was awesome. I have been up it once– years ago, in the daylight, so this time we opted for night, and it was basically amazing. The moon was full, the sky was clear (I saw my first Parisian star– they are always invisible here), the wind was freezing, but we wandered the whole top level, taking pictures and being freezing. I realized that, from the top of the Eiffel Tower, I can identify landmarks all over the place– Notre Dame, Sacré Coeur, l’Eglise Americaine, the Pantheon, the Arc, Louvre, Invalides– I’ve never had a better grip of the geography of where I live than I do in Paris. AND I even spotted my apartment building. (Not hard, considering it’s literally just across the Seine river from the Eiffel Tower.)
We got back to the bottom at half past midnight– nothing open to eat, and we had eaten all the pasta at my apartment, so it was either go home and make pancakes or find something to eat. We managed to find a panini counter, so we bought those and took them home to eat with hot tea. We played and dawdled until we realized it was 230am, and Cliff had to leave my apartment at 340 to make his bus to the airport to fly back to Spain. (This, mind you, is the kid that convinced me to stay up all night and hike Wolf Pen at sunrise when I was in the US at Christmas.) But we decided (stupidly) to go to bed– we had crossed the threshhold when it would be better to stay up, but we were fighting a losing battle, so we slept for an hour before the cab arrived to pick him up. An hour. That is the most useless amount of sleep EVER.
After he left, I went back to bed, but still managed to make it through my 3-hour soc class awake on only 3.5 hours of sleep. (I also drank a pot of coffee before I left my apartment, which probably helped.)
I can’t explain the weirdness of seeing someone that I know from the US here in Europe... wandering the streets of Paris with a guy I spent all summer with was especially weird, since all we did all summer was sweat through our clothes in the Eastern Kentucky heat and bicker like siblings. And now all of a sudden I am showing us around, speaking another language (that doesn’t include the words "ain’t" "reckon" or "yonder."), and wearing skirts and dress shirts instead of camo shorts and uniform t-shirts. It feels like going home...
Sweet we rock and sweet we roll,
B
The stupid thing about taking pictures on top of the Eiffel Tower is that all you see is the two of us standing in front of a metal grate.
If I could hold the camera still, you'd have a good view of Paris behind us. Please note the stupid hats: we were cold enough that we didn't care.
"Your arms are longer than mine, YOU take the picture."
"It's YOUR camera, YOU take it."
"Actually, it's Joey's camera."
"Anyway, I don't have monkey arms you know."
"Yeah, but it stands to reason that yours would be longer, since you are taller. But you know being short is pretty cool... we're always the last to get rained on."
Annnnnd this showed up twice and I can't make it go away.
A very 80's looking picture taken under the Eiffel Tower at approximately 130am, Greenwich Mean +1 time.
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