Tom & Lynn's Excellent Adventure

Our Senior Year Abroad is over.

In the last 13 months, we have visited Paris (twice), Nice, Venice, Florence, Rome, Lisbon, Madrid, Barcelona and London for a total of about 21 weeks.

We have crossed the North Atlantic on the Queen Mary 2 for seven days and nights, crossed the English Channel by train from London to Paris, taken other trains from Paris to Nice, Venice to Florence, Florence to Rome and back and Madrid to Barcelona, plus assorted day trips. We have flown in and out of airports in Lisbon, Barcelona, Paris, Nice, Venice, Florence and Brussels.

And now it’s back home for a while. A long while. For more than a year now, we have been planning the following trip even before taking the next one. Now we are just planning when to take our boat to the Gulf Coast this summer and maybe a baseball trip to Miami and Tampa, since we will not be frequenting the home park of the team formerly known as the New Orleans Zephyrs.

Traveling for longer stretches makes you appreciate home and friends more. The familiar haunts and habits that become so routine in everyday life take on more pleasure and importance when you return to them. Friends become more special. The coffee tastes better here. Can’t get French Market with chicory over there. Or anywhere else but in New Orleans, for that matter.

Every time we return home, our friends ask the same questions, so I thought I would answer them right here, along with offering a few tips for travel abroad.

Question #1–What was your favorite city?

Answer #1–All of them.

• Paris is Paris. Even in the 20s.
• Nice is nice. (Sorry, I’ve been wanting to say that for a long time.) The Mediterranean there is a pure blue, like the sky. The food is great, and the city buses will take you as far east as Monte Carlo, west to Cannes and north to St. Paul de Vence. For one euro.
• Venice is La Serenissima. You have to go there to understand. Go there. Go while it is still there, because that is not a given for the long term future.
• Florence is the birthplace of the Renaissance. Yes, you can actually get blasé about another Michelangelo. No, not really.
• Lisbon is a real gem just now being discovered. Go there before everyone else discovers it.
• Madrid is huge and bustling and alive. And the Prado is just one of its great museums. Which is sort of like saying the Louvre is just one of Paris’s great museums. The Prado is at that level, though.
• And then there is Barcelona, everyone’s favorite. Barcelona is to Europe what New Orleans is to the United States. Great food, great architecture, lots of history, very laid back and enjoying a culture all its own (which, by the way, is NOT Spanish but Catalonian). No one doesn’t like Barcelona. And Milk restaurant on carrer Ample makes the best Bloody Mary in Europe. If you find a better one, let me know and we’ll go over to test.

Question #2–how you you find apartments in the cities you visit?

Answer #2–Type the following into Google: “Apartments for rent in (fill in the blank with your city name).”

It helps to know the city, so you can choose the right neighborhood, but even a little research will give you a good idea of where you want to stay. It didn’t take long for me to find Alfama in Lisbon even though we had never been there before.

Friendly Apartments is a huge company that manages more than 3,000 apartments in some 35 cities across Europe and the U.S. You can try them first. But Barcelona has MH Apartments, Florence has Apartments Florence, Venice has Apartments Venice and Nice/Cote d’Azur has Habitat/NY (yes, New York). They all carefully screen (or in the case of MH, own) their apartments, so you can rest assured your choice will meet your standards. If you use VRBO or Air BnB, you take your chances, as we learned to our disappointment this last time in Paris.

Question #3–How much weight did you gain living and eating the local cuisines?

Answer #3–None. We ate pasta and pizza and potatoes and anything else that looked good, all washed down with gallons of great local wines and never gained a pound. In fact, I lost weight after three months in Europe.

But we walk three to five miles a day in these cities, not counting time spent standing in museums and cathedrals.

Finally, a few tips that we have learned about eating, drinking and living in these places:

1. Don’t go into restaurants that either:
   • Show photos of the food. If you have to see what it looks like, look on the diners plates.
   • Have waiters standing outside barkering you into their restaurants like they are Bourbon Street strip clubs. There is usually a reason the waiters are not busy, and it’s usually because their restaurants are not good.
2. Check the back label of any wine you buy. If there is no back label at all or if the label is printed only in the local language, buy that. It means this wine will never be exported to the U.S. The Europeans save the best stuff for themselves.
3. Learn the following words/expressions in the local language:
   • Good morning
   • Good afternoon
   • Please
   • Thank you
   • Very good (spoken to your chef or waiter after a great meal)
   • Pardon/excuse me

No one will confuse you with a native, and in fact, most people in the major cities speak English a whole lot better than you speak their language. But using a few words of greeting lets them know you respect their language and their culture. And so they treat you with respect.

4. Never, ever, ever use a selfie stick. In fact, don’t take selfies at all. The selfie stick is one of the major threats to Western Civilization, right up there with ISIS and pine trees. Don’t be one of Those.

5. Never, ever, ever pack more than one bag per person. You don’t need that much stuff, and you will be sorry, really sorry, to lug that extra suitcase around. The best way to pack is to pile all your clothes up, then start moving stuff away. You’ll be amazed at how much you just don’t need.

6. One of those unneeded things is a hair dryer. All apartments come with hair dryers. Even if you own a European model (which we do, having overpaid in Paris last year), you can leave it at home. The reason apartments come equipped with hair dryers is that they don’t want you plugging your American Monster Air & Leaf Blower into their tender electrical system using your two-dollar adapter and blowing out all the circuits in the place. This actually happened to Lynn many years ago at Royal Thames Yacht Club. Today the club provides hair dryers in each room. And they still let us stay there when we visit London.

Like I said, it’s great to be back home, but just writing this last segment makes me want to go back already. Je suis desolé. Adieu, Senior Year Abroad.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For the third time in 19 months, we bid Paris au revoir. This time is a bit more melancholy than before, because the next stop is home, not another European city. But after a week of sub-freezing weather, we are ready to head back to the warmer, moister climate we call home.

But first, we took a last walk around the old familiar neighborhoods in the Latin Quarter.

Since our flight did not leave until the evening, we had plenty of time to take a nostalgic tour down to the old ‘hood, stop to take in Hemingway’s apartment on rue Descartes, then pop in for lunch at one of our old favorites before heading back through delightful rue Mouffetard and its markets.

Le Petit Perigourdine was barely occupied when we walked in, so we had our choice of tables. We took the third one offered after Lynn deemed the first too close to the door, and the second was squeezed between two occupied tables in the rear. Finally settled in our selected space, we ordered full plats for lunch, since we figured we would not eat another real meal for several hours again.

Lynn went for the lamb shank, and I ordered the rabbit in a spicy mustard sauce. Both were mouth-watering delicious, giving us second thoughts about leaving Paris after all.

On our way out, we stopped at a large table of American women from Colorado who had wandered into the bistro by sheer happenstance. We recommended they have one order of the creamed potatoes, just to see the show if for no other reason. We had learned in our last visit that the waiters bring out the potatoes in a copper pot and make an impressive display of pouring out the creamy pommes from on high into the diners’ plates.

After our brisk walk back one last time through the rue Mouffetard markets and a wave at our friendly wine seller, we packed up and summoned Uber for the long ride to Charles de Gaulle Airport and our flight to New York, which would not arrive until about 5 a.m. on our body clocks.

Our Uber driver actually arrived earlier than scheduled and was forced to park a block up, because the police in the tiny guard shack staffed 24/7 across the street from us would not allow him to park in front of our apartment.

I was still lugging the bags (one of which contained four bottles of Bordeaux) down the four flights of stairs, and Lynn realized she had forgotten to toss out the remains of the refrigerator. Some pieces of really good, really stinky cheese were tossed into the garbage at the last minute.

Charles de Gaulle is Paris’s main airport, and the French take no chances these days with security. Soldiers in camo carrying automatics at the ready routinely patrol in groups of three. Our Uber driver dropped us off at the ground-level entrance to Terminal 1, where passengers walk in and line up to check bags before they ever are allowed into the main part of the airport.

From bag drop, we took the escalator upstairs and found the Priority Lounge, which, like all lounges in CDG, is situated before you even enter security. As we walked through the door and checked in, what did I see on the TV monitor but live coverage of the record-breaking finish of the Vendée Globe sailboat race solo around the world.

In France, long-distance sailing is considered a major sport, worthy of live TV coverage and taped reports on French TV news. Winning skipper Armel Le Cléac’h has ascended the level of major rock star in France, especially having broken the race record by no fewer than four days. And at the same time, another French sailboat is on its way to winning the Jules Verne Trophy for fastest time around the world.

We enjoyed some afternoon snacks, a couple of glasses of wine and a cocktail in the lounge before plunging into the security lines downstairs. French airport security, like most other European airports we have seen, is thorough, efficient and actually helpful. You keep your shoes on, but always take out your iPad. For some reason, European airport security is more interested in tablets than laptops.

At CDG, our gate for Norwegian Air was literally at the end of the security line. The seating area was tiny, especially for a huge plane like the 787 we were scheduled to board. Since we were seated in row 7, just behind First Class, we were among the last to board. Norwegian’s version of the new 787 Dreamliner features nine seats across each row, and this flight was completely full, so Lynn was squeezed into the middle seat between me and a rather large, heavily perfumed lady on the aisle. Luckily the 787 flies at 40,000 feet booking nearly 600 miles an hour, so the entire flight from Paris to New York took a remarkably short 6 and a half hours.

I watched the interactive map in the seat back in front of me for half the time and read some of Dos Passos’s early post-WWI novellas the rest of the flight. Dos Passos was part of Hemingway’s Lost Generation circle in Paris of the 1920s, so reading him on the way out seemed fitting. Au revoir, Paris, until next time. A night at a JFK airport hotel and the presidential inauguration await us tomorrow before we reach home.

Our last dinner in Paris was pasta. L’Angolo is steps from our apartment, and we very much enjoyed it earlier in the week. It is a tiny Italian restaurant run by an Italian family. They require reservations, but neither answer the phone nor have an online service. Somehow, you just need to know. So at 6 p.m., an hour before they opened, Lynn marched down to the restaurant to reserve in person.

Except there still was no person in the restaurant. The well tattooed chef pulled up on his motorcycle, and somehow the two communicated that we wanted to eat there at 7:30, their early seating.

L’Angolo’s menu is interesting. They offer some 20 kinds of pizza on one board, another 20 kinds of pasta on another board, and six different ways to prepare veal on yet a third board. And a fourth board lists the starters. Having seen their portions on our last visit, we knew better than to have starters, although their mussels are exquisite.

Within minutes after we sat down, the place filled to capacity and became quite lively with Italian spoken as much as French. We heard hardly any English except from our table and from the very helpful hostess, who spoke our language quite fluently.

Their wine list is also simple but spectacular. All Italian all-star wines at prices that are a bargain even by European standards. We slurped down a bottle of Monepulciano d’Abruzzo that was just delicious. My new criterion is to look on the back label. If there is no English or no back label at all, that means the wine will never make it to the shores of the U.S. to be marked up scandalously by our American neo-Puritanical system.

We had spent the day in the 8th Arrondisement at another house museum Lynn found, the Hotel de Camondo. Built in the first decade of the 20th century by a fabulously wealthy heir to a banking fortune, the house was furnished in late-18th century style right down to the wall paneling. Moise Comondo spent his life collecting and contemplating the 18th century.

However, his life was marked by sorrow. His only son was killed in WWI, his wife ran off with an Italian count who worked with Comondo’s horses, and after his death, his daughter and her two children were hauled off during WWII by the Nazis to Auschwitz where they died. Ironically, Comondo’s widow, who survived the war by converting to Catholicism and posing as the Italian countess she actually was, later divorced her Italian count and inherited her first husband’s fortune from her daughter. She outlived them all and spent her last years gambling away the family fortune in the south of France until she died in 1963. I conjured up the vision of an ancient, dissipated old woman living in Nice, spending her fortune down to the last sou until she was forced to live on the kindness of strangers.

Somehow that seemed a fitting end to a generally sad story of the rich and famous in pre-WWII France.

We washed down the sorrow with a glass of wine and lunch at a nearby place called Cafe Zinc. It is so named, because, well, all the fixtures are zinc. I had my first and last salad Nicoise in Paris, where they used canned tuna. (They use canned tuna in Nice too.) As I have mentioned before, the best salad Nicoise is served at Cafe Degas in New Orleans. Where we will be in just a bit more than a day and a half.

 

This is our second time living in Hemingway’s old Paris neighborhood. Last year we lived closer to his old apartments and to Shakespeare & Co., the bookstore run by Sylvia Beach that plays a large role in A Moveable Feast. This year, our apartment is closer to Blvd. Montparnasse, where Hemingway and his buds hung out drinking and generally carousing.

Our plan for this bitterly cold Tuesday was to make a long circuit along Montparnasse to stop in four historic Hemingway-era bar/bistros, then along Luxembourg Gardens where Papa would take his young son to play, then back to our old ‘hood near his original apartment. Our survival plan included stopping for coffee and a drink along the way to sustain ourselves through the sub-freezing temperatures.

The walk from our apartment to Port Royal, which becomes Montparnasse a few blocks later, is only a few minutes.

Closerie des Lilas is the first building at the start of Montparnasse, so that made an easy starting spot. In Hemingway’s day, Closerie was a cheap bar where he could spend his afternoons drinking absinthe and jotting notes for his books. Today, it is a swanky, expensive restaurant, long removed from but profiting by its literary associations nearly 100 years ago.

We walked into the handsome, wood paneled bar without being greeted, and I found the little brass plaque at the corner engraved simply with E. Hemingway, spelled correctly, despite the note in John Baxter’s Hemingway’s Paris that it was spelled “Hemmingway.” When no one came up to ask if we wanted to be served, we walked out, satisfied with our observations and warmed enough to proceed down the street.

A couple of blocks down is La Rotonde, another famous Montparnasse bistro that was a favorite of the expat crowd in the 1920s. There we sat down for a quick cafe Americain. Their version of cafe Americain is to give you a regular cafe in a large cup and hot water on the side.

You get to dilute to your taste. Lynn received a small bit of chocolate to drop into her cafe, even though we ordered the same coffee. (Have I ever mentioned the French love their sweets? Sitting outside–outside!–was a very elderly lady dressed in matching electric blue hat and coat looking for all the world like a member of the Lost Generation drinking her own cup, spooning dollops of melted chocolate into her cafe.)

Rewarmed, we started off again for Le Select and La Coupole, which stand across the street from each other. We decided on Le Select in deference to the bar by the same name in St. Bart’s, where we have had many a cheeseburger and beer in paradise. In the Paris Le Select, we chatted with our very friendly bartender who is a native of Sri Lanka and fled with his family to escape the civil war there several years ago.

I ordered a pastis, the closest one gets to absinthe these days. Sure enough, it turns milky when you add water. The licorice flavor spreads warmth all down your center as you savor each little sip. Lynn opted for a glass of white wine.

Warmed and fueled again, we started back toward blvd. San Michel and the Luxembourg Gardens to find a U of Paris sweatshirt for our grandson Grayson, who will be starting college next fall. He has been accepted to Parsons School of Design, of which we are all proud, but the Paris campus is a bit far to find for authentic gear, even if they have such. Besides, he just returned from New York this past weekend, probably with his own Parsons sweatshirt.

The souvenir shop was located on rue Soufflot, the street leading up to the Pantheon and our old neighborhood. We walked over to rue Montaigne St. Genevieve and dropped into Le Petit Cafe for lunch of a hamburger (me) and open face ham & cheese (Lynn). Lynn’s jambon et fromage was served spread all across the plate, well enough for both of us to eat. The cheese part was semi-melted brie, laid under slices of ham/bacon and all on top of sliced tomatoes and brown bread. This is what passes for a light lunch sandwich (dejeuner) in France.

By now, it was approaching mid-afternoon and just barely above freezing. We completed our circumnavigation along rue Descartes to rue Mouffetard near frozen but still moving steadfast. Lynn had her eyes set on having her nails done, so she stopped in at the nail salon on Mouffetard, noticing that it was the same brand as the one she had used the year before along the Luxembourg Gardens. I chose to use the time to go back to the apartment and take a quick late afternoon nap.

Lynn later calculated that we had marched more than three miles in our Hemingway walk. I acknowledged our feat by going back to the wine store and picking up a couple of bottles of Bordeaux, the criterion being that the bottle has either no back label at all or if there is one, it is only in French. That way we know this wine will never cross the shores of the U.S.

 

 

Having seen firsthand the lines Sunday at L’Orangerie, Lynn wisely ordered tickets in advance for Monday. We took the Metro across the river and down to the Concorde bridge, walked across the Tulieries and were greeted with a small line standing in the bitter cold waiting to be allowed into the building.

Inside, L’Orangerie is like no other art museum in the world. The art was created specifically for the space and given to the French state by Monet. Altogether, eight immense Water Lillies adorn the walls of two elliptical rooms positioned end to end. That’s all there is to the main museum–eight huge paintings that evoke the full day from sunrise to sunset over Monet’s beloved gardens in Giverny. The effect is stunning and contemplative, as Monet planned.

Downstairs, L’Orangerie showcases a more conventional gallery of major Impressionist works collected by Parisian art dealer Paul Guillaume and his wife, including large collections of Renoir, Cezanne, Rousseau, Matisse, Picasso, Derain, Utrillo and Modigliani. The paintings are all arranged according to artist along a narrow double hall that makes viewing easy. The hallway also exhibits four models of the L’Orangerie building in its various stages from original construction under Louis XIV to house (what else?) orange trees to its contemporary layout as a double museum.

The star of the day was a temporary exhibit of American paintings from the 1930s, which drew the largest crowds, as it was closing at the end of the week. The highlight of that show is Grant Woods’ iconic American Gothic, being shown for the first time in Europe. The six small galleries were tightly crowded with visitors viewing American masters like Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keefe and Jackson Pollack, grouped thematically with commentary on various aspects of the Great Depression in the U.S.

For such a seemingly small museum, we still spent more than two hours walking through, before stopping for a quick sandwich in the tiny cafeteria.

By now, it was well past 2 p.m., and I wanted to venture forward to see the Musée de l’Armée in Les Invalides, which we had not seen last time we were in Paris, because we couldn’t find the entrance. Lynn demurred, wondering if we wouldn’t be better going over there another day. I insisted, since we were almost there; from L’Orangerie, you can see the gilded dome of the church where Napoleon is buried, which was really what I wanted to see.

As it turned out, Invalides is huge, so big that we could not tour the entire museum before we were ushered out at 5 p.m. right as we walked through 1943 in the Great Wars sections. Although we had to leave just before the Allied invasions of France, it was interesting to read the accounts of the two Great Wars from the French perspective, which you can imagine is somewhat different from our own American history.

Napoleon’s tomb is impressive, classical and un-Napoleon like, not marked with his name. It simply towers there on the lower level under the dome of the church surrounded by bas relief sculptures that depict Napoleon as a Roman god. He would have liked that.

On the upper level of the rotunda are several rooms of tombs of great French military figures like Vauban and Marshall Foch, creating a pantheon effect in the church. The entire space is voluminous and unheated, so visiting in the depths of winter is physically challenging.

After being booted from Invalides at 5 p.m., we worked our way home on the Metro for a well deserved glass of wine before another delicious dinner at La Forge around the corner. The proprietors seemed pleased that we returned so soon, as the restaurant on a Tuesday night was much quieter. The food and the wine were no less wonderful, however.

 

After our feast Saturday night, we slept in on Sunday. Actually, we generally don’t need much reason to sleep in because of the late sunrise, gray clouds and cold temperatures. Besides, we are on vacation.

Sunday’s forecast was for more rain, turning to snow by the afternoon, so we hustled out to see the morning activities in the Mouffetard markets. The street was bustling with people shopping for the weekend, singing in front of the church, having a Sunday morning coffee (outside!) and standing in line at both the sweet shops along the pedestrian mall.

We walked into TournBride, a small establishment offering home cooking, specifically onion soup, which we deemed the perfect dish for a cold Sunday brunch. And the menu promised Bloody Marys.

Indeed, the promise was fulfilled. While certainly not the level of the Ritz, TournBride’s version simply mixed the vodka and tomato juice, then presented the eager customer the fixings of Worchestershire, Tabasco and celery salt on the side. Just fine with me.

Lynn preferred to have a glass of wine, since we had just tested the Ritz Bloody Marys yesterday. The onion soup came out in large hot crocks with rich cheese melted over baguette pieces soaking in the broth. In short, everything that defines French onion soup. We scooped it up to the last drop.

On the way out, we stopped at a local wine merchant who was tasting a fine Gamay outside. I had spied a Loire Valley cabernet franc that looked interesting, so we bought the Gamay and the Loire to test back home. Since we traveled to Europe with three bottles of wine packed in our bags, we planned to go back home with at least as much.

After a walk around the rest of the neighborhood, we repaired to our apartment to store the wine away and pull out the laundry we had left in the washer to dry. European washer-dryers take forever to dry clothes, because they never get very hot in order to save energy. When we pulled out my pants, we realized they had stayed in a bit too long and were tightly wrinkled. Ironing didn’t help, so we ran them through the wash again and hung them to dry on the towel heater on the bathroom. An elegant and effective solution.

We started down the stairs to explore more of the Montparnasse side of our neighborhood, but the rain started to come down as we walked out our door to the street. Since by now we had not much more than 90 minutes of daylight, we retreated to the quiet of our apartment to watch the rain come down. Despite the forecast, it never snowed, but the rain fell until well into the night.

If we are stuck in the house for a late afternoon, Sunday is the day to do it. At least we could watch the CNN International feature on the America’s Cup. Can’t see that at home in the U.S.

 

 

 

 

 

If Saturday’s visit to the Ritz was new, Saturday night’s dinner and drinks renewed old acquaintances.

We summoned Uber for the short ride down to Ciasa Mia on rue Laplace across the street from last year’s apartment, even though it is only a 15-minute walk from our current place. As we approached the Pantheon, we ran into a wall of traffic, police and crowds of students. Apparently, the students returning to the Sorbonne were staging some sort of mass demonstration, and the local authorities were taking no chances. Police wagons with flashing blue lights were lined up a full block of the street alongside the Pantheon, and SWAT teams in full riot gear stood by, shields in hand, ready to fend off any violence.

The crowds seemed to be peaceful, perhaps partying as much as anything. We remembered pretty much the same event last year when the students returned to school from Christmas break. As a result of the police barricades, we were forced to make a long, circuitous route to the restaurant that in all took longer than the 15 minutes it would have taken us to walk.

The two attractive servers and the chef at Ciasa Mia welcomed us warmly, even as we walked in a few minutes early. The women dress in some traditional outfit from another day and another country. The proprietors, Francesca and Samuel, are from Italy, and their wine list is almost exclusively Italian, even if their food defies geographic definition.

We ordered the small degustation, which is preceded by no fewer than three amuseé bouches not listed anywhere on the menu. Three hours later, we were the first to leave the restaurant. We simply could eat no more.

Again, we marveled at Samuel’s concoction of a single egg yolk the innards of which he drains with a syringe, then injects truffle oil. Served in a single spoon, the truffle-filled yolk is consumed in one obscenely rich gulp. This too is not a published element of the tasting menu.

The three main tasting courses included smoked duck with a shredded potato pie and chickpea pureé (hummus); stuffed chicken roll presented cooking over an open flame of pine needles accompanied by stuffed spinach rolls and finally an offering of a small but thick perch filet accompanied by sauteed vegetables.

Those are just the listed dishes. That doesn’t include the palate cleansing chocolate/licorice wafer or the weightless spongecake that gets you ready for dessert of mousse under a paper-thin wafer with rich cocoa sauce ladled over the top. After all that, we had no space or desire for café.

Waddling out before anyone else in the tiny but packed restaurant, we walked to the other end of rue Laplace and down to Pomme d’Eve, a South African bar occupying the former wine cellars of the medieval Eglise St. Genevieve on the street above. Pomme d’Eve’s proprietor recognized us as soon as we walked in; we shook hands warmly a year after we had last visited.

Pomme broadcasts NFL games, so we watched the first half of the Atlanta-Seattle game while sipping Havana Club on the rocks (he remembered that too). Our host updated us that his business has fallen off, because of the fear of terrorism. After three attacks in Paris and the most recent one in Nice, not to mention Turkey, Germany and the U.S., people young and old, he said, have become wary of congregating in crowds these days. And that has affected bars and restaurants all over Paris, giving the barbarians a short-term victory.

Terrorism or not, by now we were well past our time for us to summon Uber again for the short ride back up to our rue Mouffetard neighborhood. The streets around the Pantheon and the Sorbonne were quiet again, as the demonstrating students had found a much warmer, more welcoming atmosphere in the local bars that are omnipresent in the Latin Quarter.

Our night of reacquaintance was done. Time to climb the 61 steps up to the fourth floor. Snow is predicted for Sunday.

 

 

In case I haven’t mentioned it, Paris is cold and rainy. Incredibly, Saturday morning was not too rainy. Lynn prepared a delicious breakfast of scrambled eggs and lardons to fuel our exertions of the day. Our agenda was a combination of the old and the new to us in Paris–a drink at the newly re-opened Ritz, followed by a visit to the L’Orangerie museum, then the Museé D’Orsay and finally dinner at La Ciasa Mia with a nightcap of NFL football at Pomme d’Eve on our old street. We have actually done all of the above, except for the Ritz, which was still closed for renovation last year at this time.

The Ritz just accepted its first guests last summer, three months behind schedule from a multi-million dollar renovation that closed it for four years.

Our goal was the Hemingway Bar, which unfortunately does not open until 6 p.m. So we settled for the Ritz Bar all the way in the back of the building, a small intimate watering hole where we were informed by the very skilled bartender that this was the original Hemingway Bar. The current one in the front of the building was renamed to accommodate more patrons.

Sitting next to a like-minded couple, we ordered two Bloody Marys, which were prepared with great flair by our bartender. At 24 euros each, the least you should get is a show with the drink. Both turned out to be excellent and memorable.

The couple seated next to us at the small bar reside in both New York and London and just came across on the Chunnel, as we did. We compared notes about the taxi chaos at Gare du Nord, which they also encountered before summoning Uber. After their Bloody Marys, they ordered a glass of Chablis each with two sandwiches. I reckoned their lunch tab probably approached 200 euros.

Blessedly, it was not raining when we walked out of the Ritz on our way to the Tuilieries and Monet’s L’Orangerie Museum. On our way along rue Tivoli, Lynn spotted a sweater she liked in a shop window, so we walked into the store to meet and chat with the attendant, who is herself from New York and now living in Paris. We enjoyed a nice chat about the weather (why would you want to visit Paris in the winter?), and Lynn bought the sweater.

We walked on along rue Tivoli around the corner past the Ferris wheel and across the Tuilieries to L’Orangerie, somehow expecting to walk right in. We weren’t the only ones who had the same idea, as the line stretched around the building and into the park. We quickly decided to try another day, next time with advance tickets.

Undeterred and equally uninformed, we crossed the Seine and walked down to the Museé D’Orsay. Same result. The lines for all the entrances, even the private C Window, wrapped back and forth in the queues. Silly us, thinking that maybe these museums would not be too crowded in the winter. On a Saturday. What were we thinking?

At this spot on the Left Bank of Paris, there is a hole in the Metro system from Museé d’Orsay along the Seine all the way to Blvd St. Michel, the boundary between the Fifth and the Sixth Districts. If we were to walk all the way down to the next Metro stop, we would have almost been home. So we repaired to a reasonable retreat, a bar run by an Asian family, to plot some sort of course back home.

Three Metro lines and transfers later, we emerged from the Censier-Daubenton Metro stop, the one nearest our apartment. It would have been quicker to walk.

On the walk back along rue Mouffetard, we stopped to buy some really stinky cheese at a fromagerie and a small baguette at Franprix (39 cents!) for a snack before dinner at Ciasa Mia. After all, we had skipped lunch, since we ate breakfast so late.

Back in the apartment, we drank wine and ate cheese as we prepared to go out to dinner, discussing the merits of taking Uber as opposed to a 15-minute walk. How French. How New Orleans.

 

It’s still cold and rainy in Paris. This is what Parisian winters are supposed to be. We were incredibly lucky last year. Reversion to the means is catching up with us.

We woke up comfortably late on Friday and managed to get out of the apartment in time for lunch at our old favorite, ChantArielle, across the street from our old apartment on rue Laplace.

It’s a 15-minute walk down trendy rue Mouffetard to rue Montaigne St. Genevieve, where the church is located honoring the patron saint of Paris. The proprietor at ChantArielle briefly flashed that funny look of “I have seen you before” as we walked in to ask for a table without a reservation.

All jestfully whining aside, the weather here is weird. While we sat enjoying a wonderfully simple country lunch, I saw bright blue sky above in the courtyard. A few minutes later, I saw ice falling from the bright blue sky. It was still sleeting slightly when we walked out of the restaurant after finishing lunch, as we bid our au revoirs to the owner.

Later that afternoon, the weather was not getting any better, so we decided to take the bus to Tour Montparnasse, Paris’s tallest building that features a 360-degree (almost) view of the city below, with touch-screen interactive monitors to explain what you are looking at more than 500 feet below. We could see the rain and fog move across the city from our airy perch.

The route to Montparnasse runs along rue Royal and some of the most famous bars in Hemingway’s Paris. Closeries das Lilas, La Rotonde, and Le Select are all right along the bus route. Had it not been so nasty, we would have walked back and drank a drop of history.

As it was, I got off on the wrong stop, so we hastened into a little brasserie for a quick beer and a potty stop for Lynn. The little bar was warm and accommodating, decorated with vintage rock concert posters (Jim Morrison, the Doors, Steppenwolf and the Chambers Brothers July 5, 1968 in San Francisco for $4.00 a ticket) and license plates from states all over the U.S. We didn’t see any from Louisiana before we walked out to find our way back home.

We stopped on rue Mouffetard to buy a rotisserie chicken as only the French know how to roast, but decided to go out again for dinner, as we had no vegetables to accompany the chicken. So we walked down the street less than a block to L’Angolo, a small, warm Italian restaurant that makes dining out in Paris or anywhere in Europe so special.

They offer an amazing number of different pizzas and pastas, at least 40 in all, with one meat special. I ordered the veal scallopini, and was very happy. Lynn ordered the pasta in gorgonzola sauce and was very happy. We shared the mussels in a broth with cooked tomatoes and were both very happy. But happiest of all was me when I saw the wine list. This Italian family offers great Italian wines for a song. I could not resist paying all of 27 euros for a Rosso Montalcino that would have cost more than twice as much at retail in the U.S.

C’est bon.

 

 

 

Our first night in Paris was rainy and cold.

Our first full day in Paris was rainy and cold.

Last night we walked down the street in the cold rain (did I mention it is rainy and cold in Paris?) to La Forge restaurant just a block away. In the rain and the cold, that was about as far as we wanted to go.

Dinner turned out to be great classic Parisian bistro. A wonderful family run restaurant, tiny, warm and inviting. They welcomed us after we made a reservation online (highly recommended–it shows you respect their establishment) and seated us at a very private table in the corner of the stone-walled room. Across the wall to our side was a table of some six French diners who were laughing loudly and having a great time. A good sign, but they got louder as the night progressed.

As we ordered our wine, another large group of women marched in and were seated opposite our little table. They were soon joined by a gentleman who spoke fluent French and seemed very friendly with the ownership. But he spoke English with a Texas accent, and it appeared that the group of women were all from Houston on some sort of European adventure as singles. Thankfully, they were animated but much less noisy than the French.

Our dinner was spectacular. We shared an appetizer of escargot swimming in a cream sauce with bits of garlic and lardons (bacon pieces). The menu’s English translation called them fried, but indeed they were fricaseéd and all that implies.

For our plats, Lynn ordered the sausage stuffed chicken leg, which was prepared with the meat falling off the bone and the delicious stuffing spilling out. My lamb shank came out falling off the bone as well, awash in a rich jus after being cooked sous vide for five hours, according to the waiter. This was the perfect dinner for a cold, rainy night in Paris.

We slept well and late.

When we finally woke up Friday morning and emerged from our fourth-floor apartment, it was rainy and cold. Surprise, surprise.

Exploration of the neighborhood eventually happened, with a walk to the market on rue Mouffetard, near where Hemingway once lived almost a century ago. The Mouffetard market is a very pleasant pedestrian mall featuring meats, seafood, vegetables, fruits, candies and lots of non-food offerings like clothing, beauticians and home furnishings. Very upscale, very inviting. We will spend more time here, for sure.

In fact, it is becoming apparent that this part of the Fifth is more upscale than our old neighborhood. So the apartment may not be the best, but the surroundings are awfully nice.