When will it never end?! The butter, the cream, the butter cream, the crème, the beurre, the dough, the chocolate! What torture inflicted upon an innocent bystander! One minute I’m minding my own business, and then the next thing I know Susan walks in the door with a couple of hundred pounds of pastries she made during that day. Figure it out: Susan makes enough food for a family of six every day six days a week and we wind up with a lot of pastry in the house. (photo: steve standing along the seine, after two weeks of eating susan's pastries.)
Ok I’ve got that off my chest. Thanks.
Well, it’s rainy again this Sunday afternoon. We did have sun early on with a huge sky full of gorgeous clouds – very much like a western Michigan sky in fact, and then out of nowhere, BAM! rain and then gone again replaced by sun and clouds you eat on a stick. Then just when I thought it’s safe to out without an umbrella – fool that I was this morning -- BAM! again I get caught in it. Still watching the weather drift casually but inexorably in from the west from our balcony is a real pleasure and makes the climb worthwhile every day. And the temps have been just right too. Great for sleeping or traveling the Metro!
So it’s been another week of intense school for Susan. She’s two-thirds of the way through the basic level and finals are next week already and in fact she’s studying right now for the written exam, which is Monday. The practical – the really important exam is Thursday. Then a break of a few days off followed by a slower-paced intermediate level before the last, Superior level (in French only mind you), again intensive, and then she’s done in mid-December.
With my exploration of Pere Lachaise largely behind me – OK one or two more trips and then really I swear that’s it -- I’ve turned my attention this past week to another thing I’ve been wanting to do for some time: bring my civil war project to some sort of “closure.”
And so the big news is that at long last the history of the Third Michigan Infantry is done. Not finished mind you – it probably never will, not in my lifetime at any rate. But I hope to have it ready for sale online in an electronic format next month. And in hopes of generating some interest just today (Sunday) I finished the press release and sent off a note to my Third Michigan email list.
Whew!
Still we had time for a couple of interesting outings this past week.
On Tuesday, the 15th, a major holiday here in France, there was no school so in the afternoon we headed off to explore more of the historic center. In particular we wanted to spend a bit of time along there Seine, to check out the Isle St. Louis – worth anyone’s time I might add -- and of course the Parisian “beaches” (“la plage”). The beaches show you just how imaginative a city government can be. First they brought in tons of sand, and laid down boardwalks and put out hundreds of deck chairs and sponsored all kinds of cool stuff for everybody to do as they strolled along the “beach” and they even covered the large overhead streetlights with blue plastic to add to the effect at night, since blue seems to be the “hot’ color here. And they also laid down palm trees and tropical plants – not just in buckets mind you but actually brought in soil and put in overhead misting sprinklers to make a truly tropical garden! Imagination at work! I mean how hard is that? Apparently pretty difficult for lots of folks and I wonder why. Sounds civilized to me.(photo: "la plage".)
And speaking of civilized I don’t know if I mentioned it or not in my last update but we finally got our high-speed Internet access working in our apartment. OK, so big deal you say? Well – get this – for €30 a month (which is included in our rent) we get blazin’ fast connection to the internet, scads of TV channels (including al Jazeera, Algerian TV, Tunisian TV, Polish TV, 3 Italian channels, Classicla music channel, you get the picture) and unlimited calling to 53 countries including the US! Now is that civilized or what?
Anyway around the two islands in the Seine before heading off on the Metro to the Big Arc and strolling along the Champs Elysees. After a glass of wine on the Champs watching the world we took the Metro home, and that night we ate out at a nearby Indian restaurant. Not bad food, actually pretty tasty, and good portions (meaning small). The Indian wine was, uh, shall we say, interesting? The service was goofy and frankly given the number of places to eat here we won’t be going back. Next up we hope Vietnamese. And I don’t mean the Vietnamese food I had when I was there last, which was, how should I put this, far, very far from the Michelin crowd.
Friday night we had yet another pleasingly odd dining experience. Le Cordon Bleu put on a dinner aboard one of the (many) Seine dinner cruise boats and I got myself invited to go along. Susan After class Susan dashed home and after a quick change we headed off on the Metro (one change) to the Eiffel tower, where the boat was moored, arriving in plenty of time before sailing. We sat with the students in Susan’s practical group and what a cool bunch! American, Canadian, French, quite a diverse group – but you knew that already and quite unlike Apicius in Florence. Anyway there was live music – a trio hitting all the top 10 from past 30 years – and while the food was mediocre and the wine more so, the company was fantastic, conversation lively, but the views from the boat along the Seine at night were worth the price of admission – simply stunning.
And put this in your hat: along one of the bridges – I forget which one now but I think near the Isle de Cite’ – there is a large statue of a French zouave soldier from the 19th century, a statue which has over the years become the barometer for the height of the river, I might add, and which is almost at river level, built into one of the pilings. Anyway, the Zouave soldier wore a uniform, which consisted of fez, bright, colored baggy pants and colorful red shirts and were so popular that they were adopted by a number of regiments (north and south) in the American Civil War. Anyway, as we were passing the bridge, there along the base of the statue – at a location that could only be accessed by small boat – was a man dressed in the very same uniform! Waving to everyone who went by. Whoa! Now this is really cool we thought.
But then we couldn’t help but notice the statues built into the bridges – not just the ones for show but statues built literally inside the bridge infrastructure, as if they were somehow participating in the holding up of that bridge or in doing something on the bridge. But this seems very typical of statuary here – dynamic, fluid somehow. I don’t now much about this stuff but man oh man take a boat ride at night, when you’re not distracted by the buildings, when you’re focused pretty much on the bridges – all 23 of them – each one with a different lighting pattern, a different expression inherent in the shape of the bridge as well as in the accessories – such as statues, then you get a sense of what this city is all about.
After the boat docked – it was about 11 pm – we had a nice stroll along the Seine on our way to the Metro stop (Bir Hakeim in case you asked) and home because we both had an early morning.
And now as Susan starts her final week of basic pastry I turn my attention to Montparnasse cemetery.
But we are so lucky to be here and wish you could be here too – if for no other reason than to help eat all this pastry. . .
Steve
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