Boston Day 4: DIY Dinner

Perhaps I haven't been clear.  Yes, I am learning stuff!  After all I'm in the city of education ... where there's Boston College, Boston University, Harvard and MIT.  I have learned:

• I am staying at the very hotel where the Parker House roll was invented.  That fact is pretty indisputable.  The Hotel is called the Parker House.
• The first publicly funded school for African-American children was in Boston.
• Oh yeah, and Oracle SOA.  Which is why I'm here.  But I won't bore you with the geeky details.

It was a soggy day in Boston, so I didn't venture far over the lunch hour.  Just down to the African American Heritage museum, just around the corner in Beacon Hill.  The museum is in the old school house, and is right next to the African Meeting House, the oldest extant African-American-built church. 

I'm a big African-American history buff, and it was really cool standing in the meeting place where they came together and discussed, organized, worshiped and stood as a community.  When the Fugitive Slave act sent bounty hunters into the city pilching people from the streets (many of whom were NOT fugitive slaves), they stood by each other here.  When soldiers went to the Massachusetts Regiment in the civil war, the community took care of their families left behind.  And the doctrine of "separate is NOT equal" was born here, over a hundred years before Brown vs. Board of Education.  I find African-American history inspiring ... I may not "get" it on some level because I haven't dealt with racism, but I get how daunting the whole task of civil rights was, and still is.  That was lunch well spent.

So let's face it.  I have been a lazy ass when it comes to dinner.  I haven't lifted a finger to grill the salmon or drizzle aoli on the plates.  So I decided to go someplace where I can share the duties of the meal a little bit ... and so I ended up at the Q Restaurant for some Mongolian Hot Pot!

I have never MHP before, but now I'm a big fan.  Here's the setup.  You sit at a table with a smooth cooktop burner in the middle.  You order broth - for mine I got a "split pot" of regular and spicy broth.  (Spicy is on the right, you can see all the peppers floating on the top.  Ouchy!)  You get your choice of thinly sliced raw meat (I picked short rib), raw noodles and raw vegetables.  You take your chopsticks or a ladle and you dunk your meat, noodles or vegetables in the broth for about two minutes until they're done.   That's all it takes!  The flavor of the broth is heavenly, full of ginger and hot pepper, garlic and spices, and it is infused throughout the food.  Everything's fresh and very hot this way.  You get sauces to throw on top.  And if you want, you have a bown to just ladle up some broth and make yourself a side bowl of soup to munch on when your other stuff is cooking. 

"This is how the Mongolians conquered the world!" goes the blurb in the menu.  I think it might've had something more to do with chopping people's heads off, but whatever.  I would've been one happy conqueror eating this every day!

This being my last real overnight in Boston, I celebrated with high-end dessert over at Finale.  Peanut Butter pie ... and just the right amount of cream, and not too much sugar to get in the way of the peanutty taste!  The plate was littered with peanut brittle on the side and chocolate ganache in front.  A work of art!  Paired with a glass of 10 year old Tawney Port, it was the end of a perfect day. 

One more to go, and I'm back on the train to New York. 

Boston Day 3: We Are Going to Screw Up!

Amy taught me a certain method traveling in Paris, and I use it pretty much all the time.  Every day have a good breakfast, loaded with carbs and (if you can get it) butter.  A croissant does just nicely.  Drink
juice and lots of water.  Walk everywhere.  Skip lunch, and instead eat some trail mix occasionally when you're hungry.  Then eat a really nice dinner rather early in the evening.  Doing it this way you don't have to exercise - it's taken care of by walking everywhere - and you don't spend gobs on food.

The problem in America is getting a good carb-loaded breakfast that won't weigh you down unnecessarily.  Dunkin' Donuts?  I don't think so.  Here in Boston there are two within 3 blocks of each other.  I'd rather eat my Oracle Student Workbook.  And Capitol Coffee House wasn't doing it for me, so I plugged in "Bakery" into my Smart Phone and let it choose my destiny.  I first ended up at Just Croissants across the Boston Commons ... closed.  Next stop the Vanille Cafe in Beacon Hill.  I walked past the swan pond and Cheers and spent about 10 minutes looking for the door. 

And the angels descended from heaven and said, "Lo!  I bring you tidings of great joy!" Butter everywhere!  Mille feuilles, strawberry kayaks, pastel-colored petit fours, and a display case full of French Breakfast pastry.  I got on my knees and thanked the Lord!  And I could order in ENGLISH!  I got a croissant and an Escargot Raisins (a raisin danish - it looks like a snail.)  It was about 90% of the buttery goodness of the Paris counterpart, which was close enough for me, and as good as you're probably going to get in America.  If the dough was just a tad tougher and the taste toward American butter instead of French (less dairy, clover flavor), .... well, it was still the moist, flaky, airy croissant that I had fell in love with.  Tony The Tiger says Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and even if his particular version of breaskfast sucks, he's quite right.  I felt satisfied all the way to dinner time.

Noontime was a bust.  I mapped out a course to In Your Ear, a record store with a supposed inventory of 250,000 CD's.  I need some Elis Regina and Bossa Nova is a little bit hard to find these days, even in the era of widespread digital music. I took the T to Harvard Square ... only to find the store closed for the winter break, being a student-led affair.  Bummer. 

But Harvard Square is refreshing, and I got to see the legendary Clover restaurant. Clover started as a squadron of food trucks that brought fast, flavorful vegan sandwiches to the masses of hungry students.  They were extremely popular, and opened a sit-down restaurant.  On the window was a hand lettered epistle in white paint, "When I opened this restaurant I knew just one thing.  'We are going to screw up.'"  It went on to tell what things did get screwed up, and offered a pleading for time to fix them.  Restaurants can be one of the most dishonest, covert places in society, so this was kind of refreshing. 

For dinner, I landed at Lineage in the very hip Coolidge Corner neighborhood.  I'm a big fan of the farm-to-table restaurant, which is the big thing in Ithaca these days.  From an environmental standpoint, it makes sense to get your food as close to where and when you eat it as possible.  But I think, like vegetarian food, it has its own merits that you discover only after getting into it.  (Choosing food solely on moral grounds is ... ironically, humanly unsustainable!)  First, I think the body craves things that are "in season" and
going against it, like eating peaches in the winter, makes it somehow taste non-peachy.  Second, food that makes a very short trip is fresher.  (Duh!)  Third, and I think this is the most important, art flourishes amidst restrictions.  It makes one think deeper,become more creative.  It provokes surprise.  It's anti-corporate, anti-consistent.

So we get to Lineage, where farm-to-table worked perfectly.  Everything was in sync, from the smell of wood smoke in a contemporary fireplace, to the daily-generated menus, to the enthusiasm of all the staff.  I had grilled salmon with bernaise on a bed of assorted vegetables and the freshness of everything was astounding.  Lemme talk about the parsnips for a second.  Parsnips are your quintessential winter root vegetable. Here they came in chunks.  I bit into one that was soft on the outside, then hard on the inside like an underdone potato chunk.  It was weird at first, but it's brilliant!  Parsnips cooked all the way through have no taste.  Raw parsnips are intense but hard to chew and swallow.  But cook them halfway and you get just the perfect amount of parsnip sweetness.  Incredible! 

Coolidge Center was very beautiful, and I stayed around for awhile.  An Oreo ice cream sundae, followed by a movie at the local arthouse (The Descendants - an excellent movie if you like Alexander Payne, who's one of my personal favorites), and a ride on the T back home ... man!  I could live here. 

Boston Day 2: Come To The Dark Side!

At 3:00 AM I woke to a loud buzzing.  My fist immediately went to the alarm clock, banging on it in a half-awake stupor, but the buzzing wouldn't shut off.  A speaker in my room blared: "IF YOU ARE ON THE FIRST FLOOR, PLEASE EXIT THE BUILDING.  IF YOU ARE ON ANY OTHER FLOOR, PLEASE GATHER YOUR BELONGINGS AND WAIT FOR INSTRUCTIONS."  Then the sirens wailed into hearing.

Great.  About 2 minutes later, the same speaker said, "The Hotel and Boston Fire Department have verified that all is clear.  Please resume your activities."  Meaning banging my fist on the alarm clock?  I thought of all the activities one could be doing at 3 AM that could be rudely interrupted by a fire, and drifted back off to sleep.

A minute later, again over the speaker.  "The Hotel and Boston Fire Department have verified that all is clear.  Please resume your activities." Nice.  Then a minute later.  "The Hotel and Boston Fire Department have verified that all is clear.  Please resume your activities." Repeat that every minute for the next hour.  ARRRGHH!  At 4 AM, I was finally allowed to sleep.

At 7 AM, groggy and miffed, I stumbled out of the hotel down to my new regular coffee joint, The Capitol Coffee Room.  Their muffins and croissants are not really very good there, but I'd rather poke out my eyes than go to Dunkin' Donuts.  I consulted the computer for more Boston Weirdness ... this was turning from a curiosity into an obsession.   Then it was back to Oracle University.  The view from Oracle University is pretty darn nice, as you can see on the right. It's hard not to daydream a little. Once I did my lectures and homework assignments, I was ready to explore.

At noon I hopped on the Green Line to visit the Darth Vadar building.  It is called this because ... well look at it and it should be pretty obvious.  I couldn't really see it well from the street level, so I looked for the tallest building in the neighborhood.  That would be the Prudential Tower, 52 stories tall. I bought a ticket to the top floor, and found the view a lot less white-knuckle-producing than the towers in Chicago.  From there, I could snap a really good picture of Lord Vadar.  You can almost hear the breath whistling out of the windows.  "Agggggg-haggggh.  Agggggg-haggggh.  Luke  I am your fath-ah!"

I just wanna say ... I Love, Love, Love the T!  I was able to get all the way from Beacon Hill to Back Bay, up the Prudential Tower, back down and to Beacon Hill again (with a quick stop for Starbucks Espresso) all in the space of an hour.  And all with my $15/week pass for all the rides you can handle.  I don't care if Charlie had problems with the subway (and you can pay homage to him by buying a Charlie Card).  I love it. It's part of my new love for public transportation in general.

For dinner, I decided to hike out to the Boston University turf.  The Boston Vegetarian Society recommended the Grasshopper for Asian Vegan cuisine.  Sounds like a plan!  The campus was a little dead this time of year (classes start next week).   But the night air supported a brisk 2 mile walk, making me one famished patron.  I ordered the Grasshopper Supreme and texted a picture to Amy ... who concluded "It looks like Animal from the Muppets or Jack the Pumpkin King."  Or at the very least glazed Duck and Bananas!  In fact, the Grasshopper Supreme is two long skinny eggplants, steamed and sliced up the middle to resemble a squid, a portobello mushroom cap in the middle, carrot slices, and a "hairpiece" of asparagus atop a bed of spinach ... the whole of which is smothered in brown sauce.  Think Garlic Vegetables.  It wasn't spectacular, but it was a lot of good wholesome food and it was just what the doctor ordered! 

I ended up back at the The Last Hurrah for single malt scotch (Ardbeg - I'm a creature of habit) and hot nuts.  Love those hot nuts. This will be an endless supply of jokes, I'm sure. 

Boston, Day 1: The World's Ugliest Building

La Vita Nuova is a lesser-known work by Dante.  It means "The New Life" and it'sa very romantic, heatfelt mess of sonnets and prose.  I feel like I'm living in it right now.  In the past week I've sold my house, moved to Ithaca, and started a new job at Cornell.  Everything feels new. 

And now I'm in Boston doing training for Oracle SOA Server ... I thought this would be all-consuming but our class is small and the instructor is very funny, informative, and kind enough to let us roam free on our lunch hour.  So I'm finding more free time than I thought I'd have.

Rather than eat lunch, I started walking around the Freedom Trail and ended up in Old South Meeting Hall.  This is where the rabble rousers discussed the Boston Tea Party before carrying it out.  The Meeting Hall has a long history of debating free speech and the merits of same.  Evidently in the 30's there was an outcry against Margaret Sanger, the champion of birth control and founder of Planned Parenthood, and a lot of people were pissed off that she was issued a gag at the city limits of Boston and was not allowed to speak.  A debate about "Boston-banning" occurred here as well.  I guess that sounds like Boston has more a history of censorship than anything ... but really, whereas other cities quietly banned that stuff or were just not interested, Bostonites dragged all their dirty laundry out in the open.

I found a book in the gift shop on "Weird Boston", and they mentioned the World's Ugliest Building, an honor bestowed upon the new Boston City Hall, built in the 60's.  Which means I had to go see it!  And man is it ugly.  Butt-ugly.  It's from the "Look How Hip I Am" school of architecture, trying hard not to be boxy buy failing miserably.  If that weren't all, it doesn't fit in with the surrounding architecture at all.  Yuck!

But if one can balance out the ugliness of a building withe the beauty of dinner, I did it!  I just had the best fish ever at Atlantic Fish Company.  They are pretty obsessive about the fish freshness there, and their menu changes daily to reflect it.  Today their catch was Red Snapper grilled and served weith butter-garlic sauce, and MAN!  It snapped my head back in amazement!  Most fish is flaky and kind of reminds you of an onion whose layers peel away with a very thin slimy film in the middle. This fish was more like beef or chicken - stringy and dense.  It was kind of like the duck we had in France - it barely resembled the classic American version.  It wasn't strongly fishy, yet it didn't taste "mild" - e.g. like water.  It was just the right amount of seafood.

On the side were mashed potatoes with shrimp and calamata olives.  A bed of perfectly-grilled asparagus graced the top.  A glass of Poilly Fume was the perfect pairing - tasting as strong as Pineapple juice on the first sip, then a pleasant aftertaste like dish soap (which sounds bad, but it's more like what smells good about dish soap, and nothing else).  For dessert - fruit crisp made with the fruit of the day, fresh from the oven and worked over with a blowtorch like creme brulee.  They bring it to your table and top it with a scoop of ice cream at the last possible moment so you don't get any meltage.

I ended up in the Whiskey Bar of the Omni hotel, reading an essay on the pianist Fred Hersch and nursing a single malt Islay Scotch - rich and peaty and smoky like a good one should be.  It was good, but was exemplrary were the nuts.  They toast them in the oven (and good ones only - macadamias, cashews, almonds) before serving them in a small bowl to you.

If you've ever put your fingers in a bowl of hot nuts, you know what a joy it is.  Eee gads.  Did I write that?  Oh well.  Not every sentence needs to be perfect in La Vita Nuova.

Chicago, Day 1: Happy Friday!

There might be some confusion about whether I travel for something other than weird music or a decent plate of duck.  You know, something practical and/or geeky.  Like my job.

Well, here I am in Chicago on business.  (Gawd, that sounds so 1950's.  Where's my hat and briefcase?  And my martini?).    It's the first time I've been anywhere on business in 10 years.  The last was ApacheCon 2001 in Orlando, FL.   My wife Kathy got pretty ill after that point and it wasn't practical to attend conferences (she would need to go to a nursing home - the minimum stay was two weeks and really expensive).  But, it was tough.  The techie's life should have at least one conference a year, just to keep up with the fast paced world.

So here I am at SpringSource 2GX.  2000 attendees - about 4 times more than ApacheCon.  Lemme summarize it for the geek-allergic among you.  It was 3 days long, buzzword-compliant, and had too many guys and not enough women.  But I learned a lot - stuff with immediate benefits and interesting stuff with no immediate practical value. Conferences knock your brain out of its ruts.

Then it was Friday, the conference ended. At 3:00 Amy comes strolling into the Millenium Knickerbocker hotel in Chicago.  Finally the real work could begin!

Toddlin'

But lemme back up a bit. Chicago is a Toddlin' town so the song goes, and there are a few interpretations of what this means. It stumbles around like someone after a night of drinking (Chicago was not really big on prohibition, hence Sinatra calls it my kind of town.) It's a toddler compared to other cities, like says Memphis or Paris. Or toddlin' is just a nice alliterative word. But that sounds kind of like a dimunitive compliment, like "I can't say anything nice about Chicago, so it's toddlin'." They could at least say it has a nice personality.

But Chicago is my favorite large American city. It has been ever since I came up for air from Union Station in the Sept. 1990. It's fun, laid back, has an interesting mix of people, and a lot of variety. I set a lot short stories I wrote in Chicago after that. There are lots of stories here.

This time I arrived in Chicago O'Hare and got the skyline view. It's very different - pretty overwhelming. The downtown looks like The Adriondacks - it's like a wall of stuff that immediately becomes the foreground. And this time, I had a little knowledge of architecture. Just enough to make me dangerous.

I didn't get to see much Chicago at the conference itself. There were little reminders here and there - the water coolers made out of wood straight from Frank Llloyd Wright. Chicago hot dogs on the buffet. Of course you had to make one yourself, which requires an Internet-fueled knowledge of just what a Chicago hot dog "dragged through the garden" means:

• Poppy seed bun
• Hot dog (of course)
• Lettuce and tomato
• Celery Salt (I used too much)
• Mustard
• Hot thin peppers on top. Just two.

I think I approximated it pretty well. In general the conference food was really good, so I only ate out once ... at the Weber Grill. They make everything on literally a Weber Grill in this place. I had their legendary beer can chicken. It may not have been the most flavorful, but it definitely the tenderest, juiciest chicken I ever had. And their bourbon baked beans were pretty fantastic. I wanted to try dessert from the grill - apple pie baked in a bag is their speciality. But I was too full.

Keynote speakers went on until past my bedtime. But at night,on the 8 block walk back to my hotel, I could really see Chicago in it's finest. At night, it's a beautiful city. There's color everywhere. The John Hancock Building glows strangely, with it's two purple antennae scraping the sky like an ant. The Allerton Hotel sports the neon sign "Tip Top Tap". I find new, interesting things every time I travel down Michigan Ave.


And Chicago is Even Better...

... when your good woman gets there! At every meal, I had asked my compatriots (a new set every time - that's the way I do conferences) what I should do with my girl friend the weekend.  I got lots of suggestions from going shopping (not good) to a Bear's Game (really not good), but mostly they just told me what restaurants to do.  Which of course is the main thing.

Someone suggested, very strongly, to go to Erwin's.  It's a 3 mile walk, our of the touristy section, and the locals have just started to discover it.  Meaning - perfect!  After a few wrong turns courtesy of Google Maps (which works great as long as your GPS working - not a given with all the tall buildings in Chicago) we high-tailed it to Erwin's in the Lincoln Park district, past the zoo.

It was the first eye-closing mail we've had since Paris.  By eye-closing, I mean each bite is so good that you close your eyes to focus your whole brain on taste, feel, aroma.  Erwin's, it turns out, was a groundbreaking restaurant in the farm-to-table movement.  Get local, in-season ingredients and make something spectacular out of them.  Their menu, therefore, is very fluid.   It's quite French, actually.

Amy had duck comfit with basil sausage.  It wasn't like French duck - not as dense and beefy.  But it was so fresh that it blew most of the duck we've had out of the water.  It was every bit as good as Great Range duck.  I had risotto with a creamy tomato sauce, shrimp and calamari.  The calamari was fantastic, not a bit rubbery or tasteless, and reminded me of the best meal I had in Paris (Les Olividades).   Dessert for me was a lemon ice that was spectatcularly creamy without a bit of cream.  Amy had a piece of sour cherry pie with a scoop of fabulous pumpkin ice cream.

It's hard to describe just how much different totally fresh food tastes, but it's pretty spectacular. My grandparents had a farm and I remember the farm food tasting quite a bit different. Maybe too intense. But here it just tasted like "food on steroids" to use a phrase that, on hindsight, means the exact opposite of what I really mean. You get the idea.

Once we were done, we were a block away, and then it hit! Or rather it almost hit. I stepped off the curb and just about got run over by a bicycle. The rider yelled "Happy Friday!" What the? Then I looked left, and found ….

I had actually almost got run over by a thousand bikes! Literally! Bikes as far as you could see down Clark St. There was no room for cars - they took over the whole street. About half were dressed in Halloween costumes, and a lot of them just shouted Happy Friday to us. Seriously. There was about a 2 mile string of bicycles.

What we had witnessed, as I found out later, was Critical Mass. The last Friday of every month in Chicago, people gather on their bikes at one end of the Lincoln Park district and ride to Daley plaza. There's enough that need they need a police escort. It's kind of an organized movement (the idea started in San Francisco and spread to other cities),but mostly not.  There's no real purpose, no leader, no committee to make sure it comes off, and no real reason to do it except people just love to ride their bike with other people. It's a "take back the streets" movement, but there's no protest. People are not angry or demonstrative. They just want to wish you a happy Friday. And they do ... repeatedly!

In hindsight, the fact that we were about to cross Clark St at that particular moment in the month was pretty amazing! But I'm convinced that Amy and I just attract amazing things. We can't help it. 

After we got across Clark St. we hiked the three miles back downtown to the John Hancock Tower. We went up to the 94th floor for the best night view of the city. And yeah …. It was very spectacular indeed! As colorful and light as the city was from the ground, it was just as colorful from almost 1000 feet up. It felt a little unstable, but that was probably just my mind flipping around. (I'm not fond of heights).

Coming back to our hotel we saw All Saints Spitalfields, a fashion store on Michigan Ave. Which doesn't sound all that exciting except for their awesome display of sewing machines. Two display windows on either side had about 100 sewing machines, and above the door was an awesome array of about 200. A banner hung in back of them with designs shown on from a projector. The effect was awesome - a peculiar mix of very old technology (The Singer and Pfaff machines were circa 1920's and 30's) and very new.

As people passed us on Michigan Ave., we just stared up at the display. It was a fitting way to end the day.

Paris Day 5: The Sweeps

I read Keith Richards' autobiography last year.  After about 100 tales of snorting, shooting up and smoking, I decided to skip all passages related to drugs.  They got too monotonous.  In that spirit, I will spare you the details of our breakfast this morning.  You know it already.

The Best View in Paris

The temperature plunged overnight and the next morning was caked in a classic European drizzle.  But did this stop Amy and I from hiking?  Of course not!  We put on our rain gear and made our way to Sacre Coeur.

To get there, we passed through some of the most beautiful neighborhoods in Paris.  There are no huge houses, and it wasn't glamorous like the Champs Elysee.  It was just very eclectic, full of people on a Sunday morning, with markets and little restaurants and some blocked off streets.  Every once in awhile an unexpected landmark would pop up, like the Palais Garnier, or Paris Opera House (pictured left). 

Otherwise, the North Paris neighborhoods reminded me of Boston or San Francisco.  There were blocks of ethnic shops - Italian and Thai were some.  But these are where real people lived and moved and talked to one another, not just a place where people visited. 

Sacre Coeur itself is on a steep hill that looks like San Francisco neighborhoods.  You can take the Montmontrobus up the hill, but of course Amy and I would have none of that.  We instead climbed the huge stairway to the top.  Supposedly the hill is 150 meters up, which is about halfway up the Eiffel Tower, so it was about like our climb the previous day.  I'm not sure.  It was definitely a hike.  But when we got to the top, the view was indeed worth the effort.  It was a Panoramic shot of all of Paris.  Unfortunately, my pictures of it were a little hazy from the rain, but you get the drift.

I liked the inside of the cathedral itself a lot.  It's way, way newer than Notre Dame - in fact, it's little more than a hundred years old.  But the stained glass is really modern and the almost Frank Llloyd Wright-ish.  Rather than saints, the windows depict bible sayings in French and symbols of everyday life.  Kind of like the neighborhood around it, this felt like a church built for people rather than posterity. 

Organ Recital at Notre Dame 

After all les chiens (dogs) we had seen in Paris, it was refreshing to finally see un chat!  As we made our way to Notre Dame, we saw a cat climb out a second story window, then crawl along the narrow ledges on the Paris buildings. 

After a lunch of vegetable soup and Perrier (standard meal in our book) we went to Notre Dame for their weekly Organ recital.  After all Amy and I both love our organs (uhhhh, yeah, probably need to reword that).   Today was September 11th, and the French marked the event by stationing soldiers with automatic weapons on the Notre Dame courtyard, which made everyone a little nervous. 

The organ is the largest in France, and dates back to the 13th century.  The program, which lasted for an hour and is free, started with some Bach.  At first the music was very soft, a little strange from such a huge beast.  Then slowly it gathered steam until notes were thundering through the cavernous cathedral, bouncing off all the walls and echoing in all the crevices.  It was amazing how much music was projected in such a large space with no amplifiers.  It surrounded and enveloped you and got into every cell in your body. 

They played four pieces, the last two were fairly modern and I thought they were very interesting and effective.  It's tough to write music for ancient instruments, so the people that do it have an almost fanatical love for the instrument.  I could understand that. 

And so, we ended our trip with a classic French picnic in the hotel courtyard.  (Resturants mostly are closed on Sunday, so it was a good time to do it).  We had a baguette from Moulin de la Vierge, cheese and wine and pears from the grocery store.  But we started with dessert.  Amy had a raspberry tartine with a velvety custard and the freshest raspberries in creation on top - she called it the best dessert she has ever had.  I had a strawberry millfeiulle, which is flaky croissant-style buttery pastry layers filled with custard and strawberries in the middle.  Oooooo.   So good.  And good for you too, I'm sure. 


Research Project Results

Before going to Paris, I had questions about their everyday life.  I made sure to carefully research these questions, since I believe every vacation should have an educational component of some kind.  Here are my findings. 

Cheetos:  France doesn't have 'em.  They have Lays and Fritos.  But in a land where cheese is an actual course of a meal, the theory and practice of Cheetos seems superfluous.

Squirrels:  You can't get them in a restaurant.  Birds are pretty plentiful - duck, guinea fowl, goose, etc.  And of course there's rabbit.  But no squirrel.   This was a disappointment, since Amy hates squirrels and I was hoping to increase my "macho factor" by eating one in front of her.  No such luck.  And there aren't any running around in the parks either, which I thought was weird.

Sacre Bleu!  I was hoping to stop in the middle of the street, slap my forehead and say "Sacre Bleu!" and see how Parissiennes say.  I dunno why.  I decided not to do it because (1) I'm chicken (2) I didn't feel like swearing!

Conclusion

And what better compliment for a trip than "I didn't feel like swearing!"  Paris was dreamy, the food was heavenly, the architecture and surroundings thought-provoking and lovely.  Most of all, though, the company was perfect.  Amy is the best traveling companion I've ever had.  She remains calm in adversity, gives me strength when climbing huge hills and stair cases. makes swift decisions when necessary, yet watches all the lovely sights with dreamy eyes and a childlike wonder. 

Amy is an elegance magnet.  I can't wait to see where we end up next. 

Paris Day 4: We Slow Down

I'm Waiting for My Man.  My croissant man.  Amy and I are shivering with withdrawal as our fingers nervously pop the Euro's into the cash register (Parisiennes don't want to handle "ze filthy money", so machines do it for them and dispense change). Finally!  We grab the croissants and don't even bother sitting down before shoving those crusty, buttery drugs in our mouth.  Our eyes close as we chew.  Our bodies stop shivering and melt into contentedness.

Amy's eyes pop open.  "Let's just climb the damn thing!"

Eiffel Tower by Stairs

The "damn thing" she meant was the Eiffel Tower.  We spent the last three days ogling it from near and far - there's no place in Paris it isn't casting some shadow.  Now it was time to get up close and personal.

You can basically go up the tower two ways: stairs and elevators.  The elevators are expensive and you have to wait in a long line.  But they go all the way to the top.  The stairs are cheap and you only need wait in a 10 minute long line for a ticket.  They only go halfway up the tower - basically to where the four legs meet and start one big sheet of metal to the top.  The tour guide on our Red Bus two days ago describes it, "You can take the elevators or ... IF YOU HAVE THE COURAGE ... the stairs!  Gasp!"

But we climbed friggin' Algonquin just two weeks ago.  How bad could this be?   We looked at the sign for the proper way to ascend the stairs ... one arm raised in front, one arm lowered below (we couldn't find a turtle to attach to our foot - oh well) ... and embarked on our journey.

And it really wasn't bad - Algonquin with handrails.  We stopped at the Premier Etage (first floor) and surveyed the landscape.  Very nice.  There were three or four restaurants, a gift shop, and bathrooms - and if you're wondering where the sewer pipes go in the Eiffel Tower, I'm as mystified as you are.  And there were lots of plaquards describing the building of the tower and its subsequent opening. 

Then up to the Deuxieme Etage (second floor) where the end of the stairs are.  This is where it starts getting freaky.  The pillars going from the first to the second are more exposed to the air outside, and you feel less sheltered.  You've got cages around you - it's not like your climbing a utility pole - but it's still more raw.  I white knuckled the rails.  Still the view was worth it:

Amy said, "Ooo, you know what would be great?  Call your mom!" 

So I dug out my cell phone and dialled Lincoln Nebraska.  "Hey mom!  This is Craig your son ... remember him?  Well guess where I'm calling from.  You'll never guess.   THE EIFFEL TOWER!  I'M ON THE EIFFEL TOWER!  You wanna talk to Amy?"

Amy said, "Hey there.  What time is it in Nebraska?  7:00 in the morning huh?" 

Catholic guilt settles in.  I try to make myself feel better by saying, .... well as far as 7:00 calls one might be expecting, that one wasn't too bad!

Chillax!

After one climbs the Eiffel Tower, one finds an overwhelming desire to take it easy.  And we knew just the place.  The Jardin by the Louvre. 

As I said a couple of days ago, this park is what parks should be.  It doesn't try to cut itself off from the city like Central Park does.  It it large - 5 blocks long and a few blocks wide -  with lots of moveable metal chairs everywhere, sculpture and fountains.  The grass is all blocked off, so there are no prosaic scenes of children running through the greenery.  You walk on mostly sand and a little concrete in between.  There are a few classic restaurant areas around, a few glaceries and creperies.

Getting chairs to sit in and put your feet on required big city predator instincts.  We used the ladder method.  Find an uncomfortable, unoccupied spot.  Use it as your temporary home base.  Wait for a chair to come free.  Grab it, sit down and wait for another chair to be free.  And so on. 

Pretty soon Amy and I were in the lap of luxury, scarfing down trail mix and water, writing post cards and my blog entries (which I still couldn't send for lack of an Internet connection.)  The autumn was settling in the Paris trees although the weather that today was hot and a bit balmy.  I will say this.  Fall tree colors are prettier in the Northeast, and I found the leaves turning a crunchy brown on the Paris trees as closer to my midwestern roots than I was expecting. 

Refreshed and enlightened, Amy and I made our way back to the hotel and dressed up to the nines for dinner.  Well.  I don't mean Tuxedos or anything, but we looked great.  There's something about the backdrop of Paris that makes you look more elegant than you normally would. 

A Fine Evening

If you're lucky, you find a rhythm when you travel.  You find what generally works, what looks right.  Amy and I plugged the address of La Gout Dujour into Google Maps and made our way from the hotel across the Champ Du Mars (the park that connects the Eiffel Tower to the Military School).  The neighborhood was a bit newer.  But the restaurant was old school Parisienne, waiter in white and black clothes and tie.

Amy had Guinea Fowl, which was beautifully crispy with the meat falling off the bone.  I had duck - big surprise.  It was like Amy's dinner the first night at Le Bistrot de Paris, but spectacularly different.  It had the density of good prime rib, but the spices rubbed into it were fascinating and surprising.  It was a different dish every bite.  We finished with a fromage plate apiece, and the honey and walnuts which graced them brought out their subtlety.  There's really nothing like French fromage!

I think it's important to note here ... we have not eaten hardly ANY recognizable vegetables in the last 3 days.  The French like their vegetables, but in season, and often whirled and pureed beyond recognition.  People ask how the French stay thin and they do it by eating LESS, smoking more, and riding their bikes, I suppose.  Evidently not by roughage. 

And we ended the day watching the sparkling lights of the Eiffel Tower as we hiked back.  We stopped in a grocery store and bought stuff for a picnic the next day.  Brie for 3 euros (4 dollars), white burgundy for 4 euros (about 5 dollars).  Only flash forwards of eager custom inspectors ransacking our belongings kept us from filling every pocket of ours suitcases with the stuff.