Paris, Day 2: Butter! Plus Gargoyles

Amy and I woke up late, the jet lag pretty much gone from our bodies. It's pretty clear that Paris is on a different schedule. No more waking up at 5:30 AM. The day was to be shifted about two hours - breakfast at 10, lunch at 2, dinner at 8 or 9. OK.  We expected some adjustments in that area.

But then something happened that screwed up our food schedule entirely.  Pastry.

In the morning we traced Amy's found baguettes back to their source - La Moulin De Vierge, a pattisserie and bakery next door. We stood at the window and drooled (down their window - it was tres gauche) at the raspberry-topped custard tarts, the flaky triangle millefeuille (thousand layer pastry) with custard filling and fruit, the pastel-colored macaroons with raspberries shoved in the middle. The inside of the shop was covered in ancient painted mirrors and ornate trim.  It was the opposite of an antiseptic American bakery.

We went in for breakfast and got a crash course in croissants. A real croissant should have a very crisp brown edge. It should collapse when you bite into it. The actual pastry should be moist and should stretch when you pull on it with your teeth.  It should taste like butter at every stage and French butter taste more like very, very subtle cheese than a chemical. I had that and an Escargot Raisin (named because it looks like the curly shell of a snail, more like a cinnamon roll). Amy had a an apple-filled pastry. We closed our eyes on every bite, realizing we would never walk into a Dunkin Donuts again.

Here's the thing about buttery pastry - it can sustain you fairly well, as long as you keep well-hydrated, for long hikes. You don't a large lunch, or a lunch at all, really.   This maximizes your site-seeing time, and this being the center of Paris, we had lots of site seeing to do.  And it was pretty clear what Amy wanted to do first.

Notre Dame

Churches should be fun, right? Notre Dame is an 850 year old bottle of laughing gas. The flying buttresses alone are a scream - if you're going to build reinforcements to your wall, you might as well make them ornate and interesting.  And well-placed gargoyles keep your blues (and demons, I suppose) away. 

Amy and I took one spin around the ground floor of the enormous church. Mass was being said, and the hundreds of people that toured around the mass, while being fairly quiet, must be an awful bother to the priest and the congregants. They're used to it, I'm sure. The inside of the church was like most Catholic churches - the smell of incense and candle wax - but on steroids.

We waited outside the church to get the tour, and it started raining. And that's when we saw the humor in the downspouts, which looked like weasel heads sticking 3 feet from the wall. As water poured into them, they came out of their mouths and spit down upon us. Riot!

Then we climbed the towers. It must've been a thousand or so steps up the spiral stone staircase, and you learned to look at the walls and not your feet, lest you get dizzy.

The view from on top was breathtaking - a panoramic view of the city with all its old and new architecture all squashed together. And the gargoyles were Amy's favorite. They all had their own little personality. The people who carved them really had fun, and put in a little human touch that is so lacking in church architecture these days.

Paris: An Overview

We hopped on a double-decker Rouge Bus to take us around the inner city. It was pretty incredible, but it also gave us a very good idea of where not to go. The north part of the Seine, Rive Droite, was fashiony, trendy, expensive, and full of cinemas and American stores. The Champs Elysees (the main drag) was nice, as was the Arc De Triomphe and the Paris Opera House. But not our cup of tea. The south part, where our hotel lived, was home to the Eiffel tower, the Hotel Des Invalides (the enormous hospital where soldiers were treated) and the St. Germain de Pres district. It was very artsy, older, and more varied. I liked it better.

We got off the bus and strolled through the Louvre. Not the museum itself, just the outside. As was becoming a theme in our Paris journey, lemme tell you something. The Louvre is GIGANTIC! It goes on for at least five city blocks long, and two city blocks wide. I mean, what buildings do you know that last for more than a block? It's a horseshoe shaped design with a large courtyard (that's where the infamous IM Pei pyramid is … and yes, it sticks out like a sore thumb.) A street traverses the middle and goes right through the building, since you can't cut off five city blocks without some major traffic damage.

The park next door was about 5 blocks long as well, and it's everything a city park should be. It's not Central Park - it doesn't try to cut off the city around it. But there are fountains and gardens and sculptures everywhere. Benches line the edges of squares, and about a billion moveable green metal chairs dot its surface. Literally thousands of people were camped in these chairs, many using two - one to sit and one to prop their feet with. They read, talked, watched people. They were all different races and nationalities, though I counted more Italians than your typical American park. Amy was enthralled and we vowed to come back here when we needed a break.

Which was not going to happen anytime soon. We were amped!

French Food: Turns Out It's Pretty Good

Amy and I vowed not to visit any restaurant that was either trendy with Americans or had primarily non-French cuisine. We got some good recommendations, and ended up at Les Olividades on the Rive Gauche. It was a little tough to find on foot, but once we made it … OMG!

I started with Kir and we had a tray of olives (which you'd expect at a Les Olividades) Our waitress was very rusty on English, but very charming and we bumbled our way through most of it. Amy had chicken with a little tunnel of fettucine in butter and wine sauce. It was crispy on the outside and fell apart to the touch on the inside. I had squid melted into a rice patty with herbs and sauce. It was probably the best thing I have ever eaten. If you ever had rubbery tough calamari, you'd be amazed at how thoroughly tender and succulent well-prepared squid is.

Amy finished with crème brulee, which crackled at the touch of the fork and felt cold and inviting on the inside. I had a Tartes Aux Pommes , an apple tart with a dollop of vanilla ice cream that had some spice in it that still haunts me. I mistakenly called it a Pomme De Terre (= potato) to the waitress, who laughed at my awful french.

In general I heven't found Parisiennes rude.  If you make a valiant attempt at French, they respond with patience and humor.  They may rush you, they may sound exasperated sometimes, but I think that's more of a big city "let's keep this show going" attitude than a "you stupid americans" thing. 

Here are the three things you learn quickly about Parisians:

• They love to smoke
• They love to wear skirts above the knee (at least the women do)
• They love to bike

Bikes are everywhere in Paris, and we dodged around them to get back to the Eiffel Tower to light up again. All around Paris are Velolib stations where there are unadorned grey bikes locked up to electronic stations. If you have a Velolib card, you can walk up to any of them, swipe your card and grab a bike, ride it to some other station, then lock it right back up. You see them everywhere, and Paris' bike lanes are plentiful and convenient. Cars know how to drive alongside them.

I saw a woman dressed in a power suit, skirt above the knee and pumps, leaning on the handlebars of her Velolib smoking a cigarette. And I thought - this is about as Paris-y as you get, doesn't it?   She could be the symbol for a tub of French Butter, a la the Land O' Lakes Native American maiden.

And again, we close the day seeing the Eiffel Tower erupt in light and sparkles.  What a day!  I can't wait to see what happens next...