Even more pictures

Yikes this took a long time to pair down. But if you really, wanna see way too many pictures of our trip to Paris? They're here: http://gallery.mac.com/macsarcule1 - and don't worry, they're categorized to save you time :)

BACK HOME

We arrived home again last night, some bags making it, some not, but thrilled to see our kitties again. We missed Martha and Ginger very much.

When we left the trees were full of autumn color and everything just on the cusp of Hallowe'en. This morning, I'm watching the pre-dawn light just before it breaks the horizon. There's no leaves now in the trees, but this early light catches the red in the grassy leaves of my neighbor's Japanese iris, and the orangey redness of the apples on our adirondack crabtree. It's a perfect November morning, a little bit strangely warm, but lovely. Just like home should be.

It's good to be back.

Pictures coming before Monday :)

THURSDAY-Musee d'Orsay

With the last remaining effort we had, we stopped at Mussee d'Orsay, home to lots of modern works of art. (think post 1800).



The scultures are fantastic, very emotional and fun.









We also saw some awesome impressionists.



And there was an art nouveau exhibit that was ok.







After, we stopped at a little diner filled with locals having a great time. We got cheeseburgers in t honor of our return to the states tomorrow.

The locals having a good time and laughing together reminded me how much I miss my friends back home. Maybe it's not so much the geography, but the commraderie that really makes homesickness what it is.

I loved Paris and the food and I can't wait to see you all again to tell you about it. :)

Night all! I'll post an insane amount of photos this weekend once I recover. Thanks for reading!

THURSDAY-Versailles

The first thing you need to understand about Versailles is it's frickin' enormous. The second is that no expense was spared in its construction. The place is fully loaded with all the options.




I tried to imagine as we approached what even a nobleman would have been thinking in the 1600s of what we saw before us. It's pretty jaw-dropping for our time; the person of the 1600s must have been absolutely convinced of the divine selection of the king and the immense power that came with it.




After a while though, one gilded room with crystal chandeliers starts to look like another, and your mind starts to wonder.

Mine wondered to the map of Paris and the location of the Bastille northeast of Notre Dame that the revolutionaries broke into to steal arms. They then trekked their tired hungry asses to the far southwest outskirts of Paris to storm Versailles, then trekked north to the guillotines at the far end of the Champs Elysees to chop the king's and queen's collective heads off.

As I sit here considering how sore my feet are from wandering the cobblestones and halls of Versailles, I reflect on the _miles_ these tired hungry people went to seize the king and queen. Those dudes were seriously angry.

WEDNESDAY-Dinner at Boullion Racine

Just a few yards from our hotel is Boullion Racine, the location that started the first chain restaurant in Paris in the late 1800s. That chain and the rest of the Boullion chain are gone. But this one has been lovingly restored to all its art nouveau glory. The place is really amazing and probably not possible to do justice to with pictures from my cell phone.






The food and service were amazing. Jeri started with a great salad of greens, country ham, French blue cheese, tomatoes, pears, and a light vinegarette.



The ham had a very peppery tasted and all of these flavors from the pungency of the cheese to the sweetness of the pears worked together. It's one of those things I value most in cuisine, a dish that tastes like itself instead of the combination of its parts.

I had a coarsely pureed cream of cauliflower & broccoli soup. It's interesting to note, no other country in the world eats as much broccoli as the US. They just don't care for it; so I was surprised to see it on the menu.



It was very lightly creamed, the vegetables cooked just past tender (perfect for a soup I think) and really satisfying after a very cold day.

We couldn't resist and ordered a new favorite of ours we had one of the first nights here: cote d'bouef for 2 with a glass of bordeaux.



It's that same simply roasted large chunk of beef served with mashed potatoes and it was fantastic. I must learn to make this exactly as they do. It's not a roast or a steak and it's barely messed with in terms of seasoning. But it's so perfect. It is a painful ecstacy to restrain yourself to slowly eat something this fabulous.

BTW, I've not said much about the wine here. It's great and all, but the bordeauxs here taste just like the bordeauxs I buy at home.

Dessert was a molten chocolate cake for Jeri and a framboisier for me. Most of you know what Jeri's was; mine was something very akin to what we call 'jello salad' in the US. The only difference was a delightful thin layer of genoise cake in the middle. Delightful!






Night all!

WEDNESDAY-Light shopping and city tour

Yup, more bummin' around town this morning and we each went our own way to have some fun and shop. I spent half my time lingering over coffee in a sheltered outdoor cafe near Jardin du Luxembourg. Jeri did some shopping and had a wonderful time.







We met back at the room after I made a quick stop at the local boulangerie. I got Jeri a nice piece of chocolate cake and myself a delicious lemon tart.







I can't get a really lemony dessert in the US. I'm not sure why. It seems the only flavor we're not scared to pile on is chocolate.

After this we collected ourselves, grabbed some hot ham and gruyere crepes for lunch, and hopped on a city bus tour. It was an open air tour on the top of the bus that took us to many o the attractions we'd not seen yet like the Arch d' Triumph and the square at the other end of the Champs Elysees where everyone was beheaded in the revolution.

Other than that, it was damn cold up there and we were glad to finally get back to our room. A very fun day!!!

TUESDAY-Dessert

We grabbed some dessert on the island next to the island that Notre Dame is on. This is a seriously high real estate district, being on an island and all. I really want to emphasize the word island in this post. Island.

I checked off another French food item! Jeri got her much beloved crepe with nutella (I'm gonna have to make these now) and I got... (wait for it) floating island!

It's a delicate vanilla flavored liquid, a lot like creme anglaise, and there's a big hunk of meringue floating in the middle of it. This is one of my fav desserts, but you almost never see it on the menu. It's delicate, light, sweet, and it sort of forces you to eat it slowly and enjoy every bite. Yummers!

Night all!

TUESDAY-Notre Dame

Stopped in to Notre Dame on the way back from Pere Lachaise. It's that big, old church on a island in the middle of the Seine that you see pics of a lot? You know, where the hunchback rang the bells and all that jazz?



Yup, that's the one.


It wasn't as big as I thought it would be. We didn't plan to go inside and they didn't have the windows lit at night, bit of a bummer there. But the gothic sculpture and carvings all over the outside, the double flying buttresses in the back, that was all pretty cool.

TUESDAY-Dinner Au Nord Point

Just across the street from the giant grave yard of Pere Lachaise is Au Nord Point. It's were I was able to check off another great French dish! Escargot!

What were they like? Chewy, buttery, drenched in garlic and clarified butter and something green. I'm not sure what it was, but I think it might have been pureed fiddleheads (fern buds) judging from the grassy herbal note. They were a lot like clams actually, but maybe a little less savory. They were pretty good though, especially with some baguette and I'd order 'em again. Yummers!

Jeri got a gorgeous looking bowl of French onion soup with the requisit crouton and melted gruyere on the top. She was very kind and let me have several tastes. Dark, dark toasty onion flavor, sweet and salty, and just a tiny bit of fresh minced onion in it that gave a bright texture and veggie crunch to something that can be a little dull: warm wonderfulness on a cold rainy day. I can't imagine anyway it could be better.

I had a steak that was cooked too fast over too much heat, but I really liked that it came with this little pile of rock salt on the steak that I could distribute at will. Very nice frieze salad and the potatoes were a masterpiece. Simple mashed potatoes in a dish that was covered with guyere and tossed under a broiler. Magnificent.

TUESDAY-Pere Lachaise

The coolest attraction of the trip to me so far was a trip to Pere Lachaise, the largest cemetary in Paris. They built it in the 1800s when the rest of the city graveyards had become so full of corpses they were truly spilling out. Think oozey. Yup, like that.

They built Pere Lachaise, dug up most of the rest of the cemeteries, and moved all the bones deep under the city into the catacombes (which are currently closed for repairs so we can't see them this time). So relatively speaking Pere Lachaise is pretty young.

And pretty fresh. If you get buried there (or cremated - yup, they've got their own ovens at Pere Lachaise *crackle! crackle!*) if your family doesn't keep up payments on your plot, it goes back to the cememtery and someone else can take up residence. You might be there 10 years or so and then it's out on your duff for some new dead person. Your remains? No worries, you'll join a mass grave with the rest of the people who defaulted on their rent. Misery loves company, no? :)

So you can see there's all theses cool above ground monuments, but there's no one in them like you'd expect if they were vaults. Everyone is under them. 10 to 12 feet under them. They bury 'em deep at Pere Lachaise. No clawing to the surface.

It was also the day after All Saints Day when the French decorate their graves and almost every relatively active grave was flowered, usually with mums. Even very old ones of popular historical figures got flowers, some covered in them.

Our guide told us if your loved one is being cremated, you can even wait for them to finish. Yes, you get to see the box pushed into the oven and then you wait while your loved one is flame broiled. He's even seen people handed the hot remains in an urn and then inter their loved one with oven mitts on. I'm not makin' this up (you know how the French are about fresh baked goods. No serious, i'm not makin' this up. Oven mitts.).

The more I thought about it, I really liked the idea actually. It reminded me of funeral pyres of the past and the places along the Ganges where even today you can have your dead burned on a pyre while you and other loved ones look on. Having lost a couple of people I was very close to, the closure of this would have been very reassuring to me.

The cemetary is massive. I've been in some pretty big ones. Sleepy Hollow has a huge cemetary; Meterie in New Orleans is enormous. But this is truly grand.

And hilly as hell. Our guide, Malcolm, had an encyclopedic knowledge of Pere Lachaise and at probably 60 kept us at a steady double time trot up and down hills on nasty worn cobblestone and wet slippery leaves. I definitely worked off my croissant from breakfast.

The place is truly amazing and beautiful though. Those of you who know me know I not only really love Halloween, but also graveyards; I've got a little morbid streak. The aged and sometimes falling in tombs of Pere Lachaise with the wet, dark day in a grave yard filled with cats and crows, tombs marked with owls and bats, were like a dream come true for me and I'm pretty sure I took over 200 pictures.

We saw a number of composers' tombs, lots of Napolean's generals, poets, Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison, Seurat, and just a load of cool stuff. Our two hours or so there went by like a blink for me. I will never forget it.

Why not be familiar with places like these, I think. We'll all be spending a lot of time there.

TUESDAY-Marche St. Germain

For the first time on this trip, I was filled with deep emotion. Swept up into near mania and then pained to my heart. We visited the market, Marche St. Germain.

The selection of vegetables is gorgeous. The selection of butters, creams, and cheeses is breath-taking. The selections of beef, veal, liver, beef knuckles, dried hams, sausages, poultry, pates, ox tail, and other gorgeous cuts made me sigh.

The selections of fresh fish, mussels, periwinkles, sardines, great slabs of salmon, drifts of sole, the glutenous mass of a whole octopus, mounds of prawns, piles of calamari, grand chunks of tuna, and ... oysters... mountains of fresh oysters... made tears come to my eyes.

I was in rapture. All time stopped as I saw all and smelled all my culinary dreams come true. Behind me veggies, before me fish, to the right beef, to the left every baked good I could want freshly made that morning.

Then I remembered. I had no way to cook. *Cue overhead spiraling zoom shot as James looks up, center camera and screams 'NOOOOoOOOOOOO!!!!!!' *

So much before me and no way to truly partake. No soups, croutons, bouef dishes, or my beloved sole munier would be made by me today. *sigh*

Luckily I was able to assuage my grief with a shave. If you've not done this before guys, I highly recommend. A straight razor shave by someone who really knows what they're doing. Sure your face feels like it's being ripped off torwards the end, but it's a very, very relaxing ripping. If I could, I'd get a shave like this every morning.

TUESDAY-Sputnik

I know I mentioned Sputnik when we first got to our room (he escorted us into the lift and up to our room, and sat on the bed while we unpacked). But he's such a great kitty, he deserved his own entry.

Sputnik is about 16 and very well mannered for the most part. He was named Sputnik because he ran around and around like a nut when he was little. He's on the front desk every morning and most of the day and greets everyone.

In the evening, he's in his favorite chair in the foyer. We often sit with him for a while at night and read and pet him. He seems ok with this.

This morning he was at breakfast with us downstairs. We shared some croissant and hot cream with him. He seemed to enjoy this.

He's got a great meow and is so special, I just wanted to make sure he got the attention he deserved here :)

MONDAY-Dinner

Stopped into a large bistro that was near empty. Maybe a bad sign, but we were game.

We had kir's again that came with some tiny crackers. Jeri had an open face croque monsieur (ham & gruyere with a little French mustard) that was wonderfully browned and yummy. I had cod with a burre blanc sauce. Just ok, the burre blanc was nice, the cod was over cooked, but tasty, and the noodles (good god, why the noodles?) were noodles. Blah.

Waitress was a little pissy too.

The highlight of the evening though was my first French pate of pork liver, served with onion jam. Yup, it's like braunschweigert, but like about 10 times better. Especially with French baguette. :) Fan-fricken-tastic.

And of course, I'm in Paris with my lovely wife. :)

MONDAY-Interesting stuff

Bamboo
I'm not sure what the climate is here, but lots of people grow it in doorways and balconies, and there're patches of it in parks.

Internet
You can't watch Netflix instant watch movies or listen to Pandora outside the US.


Asian Stuff
There are sushi restaurants and Chinese restaurants all over the place in the Latin district. Lots of shops selling fabric, housewares, and all sorts of Asian stuff. Seems like a craze here.


Bookstores
As my mother might say, you can't swing a dead cat in Paris without hitting a book store. There are chain ones sprinkled around, but tiny boutique ones everywhere. Specialty ones for polish lit, for medical lit, for antique books, you name it.


Orangina with pulp
Orangina is an orange soda drink. It's really got orange juice in it and in Paris you can get it with pulp in it (which I can't find at home), which is great. Orangina rocks. Drink Orangina.


Coke
Coke and Diet Coke always comes in a glass bottle here, with a glass with lemon. It rocks.


Street cleaning
There's these cool things in the gutters towards the tops of hills that blast water out at certain times for the sole purpose of cleaning the streets and gutters. There's always some dude helping it sweep down. Very clean city.


People are very friendly
Everyone we've interacted with in even small ways has been great. Not a turd in the bunch.


These people can dress
Everyone - everyone is at least engaged in fashion in some way, even if it's not your style. The vast majority of people are so well-dressed (and i'm not even saying expensive dress) it makes your coolest outfits feel a little dull. This will say it all: men here stop on the street to ogle shoes in shop windows. 'Nuff said.


Lots of little kids with eye-glasses
I don't know why.


Kids are very receptive to strangers
They're well-behaved for the most part and smile hugely and wave to strangers. Parents seem very good with this.


No salt at table
Usually you don't need any; the food is often just right. But not always.


No butter after breakfast
Now what the hell. This is probably the best butter on the planet and they make maybe the best bread. Why can we only get butter at breakfast? I think it's something they do to torture fat tourists who take pictures of their food with their cell phones.

MONDAY-Lunch

Lunch was at a tiny bistro next to the Sorbonne. To a couple of MAs in the humanities just being next to the Sorbonne was so cool. IT'S THE FREAKIN' SORBONNE. You other liberal arts people will get it.

Jeri got a great looking cheeseburger with fries and I had another French dish I'd longed to try in France: Duck Confit. It's duck that's been cooked and then stored/preserved in duck fat, and reheated when you order it.

Those of you familiar with duck know it's the pork of the poultry world and duck skin is the bacon of the poultry world. It's very thick and the fat under the skin is heavenly... how do I describe... Sort of like if bacon were mixed with butter. It's like that.

This confit was good, but I wish they would have pan-seared the skin a bit for some color and some more flavor. Very very good, but soooo close to being out of this world great. They were content with a B- when they could have had an A+. The potatoes were mealy and watery and unremarkable.
Yes! I'm complaining! I'm in France - it's their patriotic duty to make great food!