There we went again. Another trip to France. Again, a little damp. A little overcast. A little cool. Again, the rivers: the Seine, the Rhone, the Saone ran high. This time it was a flight through San Francisco to Charles de Gaulle. Paris for four days. A high speed train to Lyon for four. Another high-speed train and Paris again for ten more. A rescheduled flight back due to storms in the American east resulted in a long layover in Chicago. And then, at last, home in Park City, Utah. I left Paris with many photographs, the later three-fifths of my gallery ile de france 18 and galleries ile de france 19 through 28 in my photography galleries. Lyon photographs should also be posted soon in two or three Lyon galleries. December 1st through 19th. I was accompanied for the first nine days and then traveled alone for the remainder of the trip. Two bucket list items accomplished for me: the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the La Fête des Lumières in Lyon. I also returned with mixed feelings.
I’ve taken a new approach to Paris on the last four visits. I used to stay in quiet comfortable Bercy with the attitude that I could get anywhere on the extensive Paris Metro. But now partially because of a desire to spend more time out and about in the neighborhoods and other factors which have come up here and there, I’ve been staying in various other parts of town. This time it was the Marais. This is an upscale hipster-ish area with a prominent gay presence on the right bank bordering the Pompidou, Ile de la Cite and Notre Dame, the Place de la Republique, and some vague spot over toward Arsenal and the Bastille. It is almost as central Paris as central Paris can get, usually unaffordable, but this time affordable. I stayed close to Place de la Republique on the first run through, and a hop, skip and a jump from Notre Dame and the Pompidou for the second round. Also I did spend a couple of days in Bercy at the very end, for old times sake.
Most of the time was spent walking all over the Marais with several side ventures into Saint Germain des Pres, the Les Halls and Chatelet area, out to the Eiffel tower a couple of times, the Champs-Élysée a couple of times, over to Bercy, also a couple of times, the Rue de Rivoli often, and around the business and university sector across the river from Bercy. In other words a pretty standard trip to Paris. Particular spots visited included the area around the construction zone of Notre Dame, the Eiffel tower, Hemingway’s first apartment, several Christmas market locations, the Hotel de Ville, the Picasso Museum, the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, the National Archives, the Jardin des Plants exterior areas, maybe ten parks in the Marais, Bercy and elsewhere, half a dozen churches and Cathedrals, the artist studios at 59 Rue de Rivoli, and long walks along both sides of the Seine and Arsenal. An attempt was made at the Delacroix museum but it was closed. So far I am up to around twenty-five to thirty museums. So I am running out of the popular ones for first time visits.
History weighed heavily on this trip because of the historical significance of so many things in the Marais. It seemed like I encountered places and things of significance to the Levant at every turn. A large pro-Palestine protest was organizing on our arrival at Place de la Republique where some met their ends at the guillotine. There is the park which held a temple which was the French home of the crusading Templar Knights and later the prison of the French monarchs in their last days. It now holds a statue of Elie Weisel. A church on Rue Saint-Denis is the local home to the order of the Knights of Saint Sepulchre of Jeruselum, another order around for centuries to protect Catholic interests in the Middle East. Then there is the scroll, in the National Archives, containing the notarized torture-induced confessions of the upper hierarchy of the Templars leading to their destruction by, yep, the French monarchy. A little closer to the Seine is the National Museum of the Art and History of Judaism. And finally, we find the massive, almost brutal statue of Charlemagne in front of Notre Dame.
I will get to Lyon and more on the presence of literature and history in Paris in later posts.
A few thoughts on how Paris has changed since I was last there. This was only for a few days following a longer trip which included Barcelona and Granada Spain in October and November of 2019, just a month and a half before I learned of the pending pandemic. I had also been in Paris at the beginning of that trip. I stayed around Gare Saint-Lazare at the beginning, across a courtyard from a house where Proust had lived, and near the Montparnasse cemetery and the catacombs at the end. I tripped over Alfred Dreyfus in the gathering gloom while looking for Guy de Maupassant. I never found Maupassant.
In Barcelona on that trip I found the city to be overwhelmed with tourists and not as pleasant as it had been on previous visits. Most of the small cafes all over the city were stuffed with tables and chairs to accommodate the crowds and benefit from their spending. Also it was pretty clear that the regular citizens had had enough with the tourists. I returned thinking that I would be skipping Barcelona for a while until the rush subsided. Little did I know what was about to happen and that I would be stuck in backyards in the western US for the next few years.
My return from Paris again leaves me feeling the same way. It didn’t help that for most of the trip the weather was just cool enough to keep patrons on the inside of the bistros. The galleries of tables in front were largely vacant. So it was quite crowded even though the places were only half full. Although I did visit a few that were empty on the inside as well. That provided a curious feeling, having to wedge myself into a very small space, maneuvering tables and chairs around me, in an almost empty restaurant.
I also noted that the menus and prices seemed different. My main way of doing France, or similarly Spain for that matter, was to obtain a fruit tart, usually raspberry, blackberry, or strawberry from a local boulangerie and then hit Starbucks for a venti latte. With these in hand I would take to the streets and walk until around noon. Then it was into a bistro near wherever I happened to be for onion soup and a small glass of Cotes du rhone or brouilly, both a tad fruity and the bruoilly often with a modest touch of fiz. This used to be very inexpensive, which was nice, because I would stop like this, walking for several miles in between, more than once in a day. Then fairly late I would have a small dinner, often duck or chicken, also at a small random bistro, also with a glass of wine. Every meal except the first of the day involved a warm new baguette and fresh French butter. I could walk with abandon knowing that I could easily navigate home on finding any metro station. Those were the days.
Now the onion soup with beoujolais runs about thirty euros and the small dinner a touch more than that. Also duck which was everywhere now seems hard to find. I used to note that wine in France was cheaper than bottled water. I didn’t test this on this trip, I just stuck to wine and tap water, but I suspect it is still the case. There was a whole category of bistro fare including onion soup, beef bourguignon, coq au vin, and others that I thought of as the French equivalent of fast food. It was prepared in large volume in advance, kept heated, and could be served cheaply with a glass of wine almost immediately. These dishes appear to be less common than before and I noted a lot of new fast food style restaurants promising French tacos, French burritos, hamburgers and chicken wings. Of these I only tried the chicken wings once and they were indeed chicken wings but served in the style of American southern-fried chicken. And there were many, many of them. In short I left with a sense that the classic bistros and bistro foods were being replaced by more American style food served in more American style fast food restaurants. Efficiency in the face of inflation I suppose.
If all else fails make your way to the ubiquitous inexpensive purveyors of French culinary satisfaction: a small permanent market, or a pop-up style street market which can be huge, or one of the streets where each shop along several blocks offers just one type of food: chicken, fish, cuts of pork, beef, lamb, and veal, shellfish, vegetables, sausage, fruit, cheese, wine, eggs, rabbits and hares, bread, tarts, snails and so forth. Some prepared, most not. Often there are numerous spots interspersed providing these same things but from different regions in France. Then do your best to get through a few days very inexpensively. There is much to be said for the minimal approach of a baguette, butter, a pear, some cheese, a bit of sausage and wine. Don’t leave home without a pocket-knife and corkscrew, best of all a pocket-knife corkscrew combination. And if the weather is right find a spot along the Seine with the many others doing exactly the same thing and simply enjoy.
A few other things have changed as well. It used to be that my mobile provider offered free data service in many countries. But this was invariably a disappointment because on arrival I would receive a welcoming message to whichever country and then around twenty minutes later it would stop working entirely. Now it works, works well and continues working for the length of this last stay at least. I was shocked. Google maps didn’t work well under these circumstances. It kept asking me to upload photographs of where I was so that it could determine my precise location. I decided to skip this entirely and managed to get by. I had never used it at all outside of the United States before. On this trip it was nice to be able to bring up the zoom-able maps and find the locations of places even though it invariably placed me in the wrong spot and going in a direction which differed from the direction I was going. Once I figured that out things were fine.
In anticipation for the Olympics this summer there is a lot going on in terms of construction. I had thought that the United States had overdone it with construction this year but they don’t hold a candle to Paris. I worry that Paris may be running out of time before the Olympics. Parks are dug up everywhere and buildings are being redone. The Eiffel tower is now painted gold. All of this is happening in addition to the rebuilding of Notre Dame following its 2019 fire, and a long ongoing reconstruction of the Metro and RER systems to route people from suburb to suburb rather than into the city and back out again. It leaves it hard to find any place that isn’t at least a little bit disturbed. All of this while some standard things like working toilets along the major thoroughfares and functional escalators in the metro are still not easy to find.
Old tunnels along the Seine have been converted from traffic corridors to walking, jogging and cycling routes and are galleries of graffiti complete with fancy lights to illuminate the art. These change colors and intensity and some of the graffiti is painted with special paints that respond to the varying frequencies of the lights.
Perhaps the biggest change and the last that I will mention is that my long standing digital partners in my traveling that ended with the Pandemic are no longer as useful. I am reluctant to reach out to a friend in Spain on Facebook to see if they will be around when I might be there because I only rarely access the site any longer. Also the web sites that I used for booking flights and hotel and temporary apartment stays now appear to be much less functional. I kept finding a decent price for a hotel or whatever to then check the prices for others in the area and return to the original only to find the original had gone up by fifty percent in a few minutes. This happened over and over again with both accommodations and flights on the three sites I had used most commonly. I suspect it is some form of AI figuring out my situation and giving me the prices on a take it or leave it basis, so that I don’t find comparisons elsewhere.
Before I tended to travel without making reservations except for the very first spots on the trip and this allowed me to change things based on stuff like the weather, or labor unrest, or who might be around in a specific city. Now this is far less viable. Also I found that cross-checking prices on individual websites for the accommodation or airline often reveals lower prices, sometimes much lower prices. That never used to be the case.
I had planned to go on to Spain from Lyon and only make a return connection in Paris. But having lost faith in my long-standing travel sites I decided to return to Paris. I had come to rely on my old process so finding the sites unreliable left me out of sorts. It also worked out well because the prices for Paris were actually quite low because of the season and all of the construction and metro outages. But at any rate this is a major thing for me and something I need to sort out before I do much more international travel.
I did learn a few new things. Most notable among these was how secular Paris really is. This took the form of almost no Christmas decorations relative to the United States, very close to Christmas. My travel companion had come with me for the first part of the trip to check out the Christmas markets in Paris and the festival of lights in Lyon. We both were surprised at how little Christmas there actually was in the Parisian Christmas markets. I noted this in a bouchon in Lyon and wondered if it was something related to the French constitution and a fellow at our table explained with chapter, verse and date of inclusion that it was. He went on to say that he was from Strasbourg and that if we went there we would be fully satisfied with regard to Christmas markets. Another surprise was the extensive presence of the LGBTQ community in the Marais near the Hotel de Ville. I hadn’t noticed that many of the street markings were rainbows, as were so many other things, until I stayed there on the second part of the trip.
Many things, of course, have stayed the same. The people of Paris are wonderful. They always have been and I can’t fathom how many Americans speak ill of them. There is the occasional waiter or the security person at Charles de Gaulle. Oh don’t get me going about the security person at Charles de Gaulle. It took me a very long time to forget an earlier experience even though I skipped flying from the airport and went through Orly or only transferred to other cities at de Gualle for around ten years. But I had forgotten. And sure enough I had an even worse experience. There is that, but in general I have found the French to be kind, creative, generous, fun to be around, clever, open-minded to all sorts of things, and willing to converse in whatever combination of English, French and Spanish we could muster. My French is appalling or so I am told. But not by the French. They only politely grin.
And in Paris the history and the literature walk beside you with every step as if they together were a living and breathing thing. And there is the beauty of the place. The cumulative impact of a multitude of subtle, gentle gestures. Age-worn and otherwise. And the value given to artisans of every stripe. Restorers of old books, makers of shoes, and watch repair shops and seamstresses, makers of fine sausage from all of the animal’s parts, and all of that sort of thing. I surely hope that these things will never change.