boots08

My husband and I (mid-50s) and daughter (mid-20s) traveled from southern California to Newark the night before we would fly to Paris for a 2-week vacation in mid-October. We opted to do this over flying non-stop from LAX as I dreaded the idea of spending more than 7-8 hours on a plane. I also thought that one night in an intermediate time zone might somewhat lessen the effects of jet lag.

We used Priceline to bid on a room in Newark and got the Wyndham Garden Airport Hotel. It was quite an ordeal to navigate through EWR to get there, but we finally boarded our shuttle after a 30 min wait - not bad given that some had been waiting an hour.

The room was okay, an older but decent 3.5 star. The restaurant served up a very good diner-style breakfast, and the tiny but well-stocked convenient store was great for last minute purchases.

Our flight would depart at 9:30pm, and as recommended we got to the airport 3 hours in advance. This allowed us plenty of time to enjoy a leisurely dinner. We chose a restaurant called Riviera, and despite the bad reviews on Yelp, we found our meals to be quite good.

The flight was delayed by 30 mins, but we told ourselves it could be a lot worse. We had booked Economy Plus seats on United, and though the width of the seats are the same as coach, the pitch/leg room makes for a much more comfortable flight.

In the few weeks preceding the trip, I'd tried to gradually adjust my sleep schedule to sync with France time. Once on the plane, I set my watch to Paris time, read for a bit, took some Theanine and Tryptophan supplements, and donned my eyemask and earplugs to get into sleep mode. The duration of the flight was only 6 hrs 45 mins (the pilot said he gained time), and though we didn't get a full night's sleep, we didn't care - we'd arrived in Paris!

(More to follow...)

TPAYT

Ahhhh! Paris! CDG must have been welcome affter EWR.
I'll follow along with much interest.

powhatangal

Me, too!

boots08

PART 2

We made our way through Immigration (where the Mademoiselle was so busy chatting, she stamped our passports without even looking up at us 0_0), found baggage claim by following arrows that looked upside down to us (pointing downwards means ahead, not below), and were glad to find an ATM just to the right of baggage claim in Terminal 1. We took out about 100 euros (where is the symbol for euros on my keyboard?) and followed more inverted arrows towards ground transportation. We asked for a taxi that accepted "une carte de credit" (many don't), and were excited to be on our way to the Latin Quartier.

We rented an apartment on Rue de Bievre in the 5th arrondissement through parisrentalservices.fr. The quiet and charming street is right near the Seine, dates back to the 1200's, and houses Francois Mitterand's old private residence.

Our check-in wasn't until 1:30pm, but the Monsieur at Soumamm, a "restaurant Berbere" a few doors down, beckoned us in for dejeuner and was kind enough to store our luggage while we lunched on tagines and couscous. The meal was quite good, the atmosphere warm and cozy.

A bit of background: I am a Canadian now living in the US (the last 6 years), and though I attended French middle school as a child, I have had little opportunity to practice the language here in SoCal. Though my husband proudly tells people his wife is fluent in French, I elbow him and inform them that it is quite a struggle for me to master whole, coherent sentences.

In preparation for the trip, I brushed up on the language by reading Le Petit Prince (St. Antoine de St. Exupery) side by side with the English translation. As many of my fellow Canadians and Quebecois know, there are vast differences between Canadian and Parisian French words and expressions.

My husband is English but speaks some French and understands most of it quite well. My daughter very little, but her love for all things French makes her an eager student.

What I have found to be most challenging is how fast the Parisians speak. We asked our cab driver a few questions, and with his back to me, I could only understand some of what he was saying.

When it came time to order wine from the Monsieur at Soumamm, I'd forgotten how to decipher the liquid measurements on the menu - 25cl, 75cl ? To add to the confusion, I was taught metric measures in grade school, but had to relearn imperial measures when I moved to the US. Throw in a bit of math dyslexia, some jet lag, and I have my work cut out for me.

So I did my best to order my daughter and I each one glass of vin rouge. When the Monsieur came to the table with a brand new bottle, I tried to explain that we didn't want the whole bottle but only two glasses. In a fairly animated way, he explained that even if you order a single glass, reputable restaurants will show you the label and uncork a new bottle in your presence to ensure that the customer gets what they ordered. Having had a mere glass brought over to the table numerous times in N. America, I'd forgotten about this French custom, and quite like it!

We linger over our delicious dejeuner while periodically checking the time to see how close we are to meeting up with "Alice" at the apartment. She calls my husband's cell and says she has arrived. We ask for "l'addition s'il vous plait", pay our bill, gather our luggage, and walk down the street - a little tired but much excited to check into our Paris apartment.

LCBoniti

Great start - looking forward to more!

taconictraveler

Yes, this is a great start! I like your writing style and will await more chapters happily.

bitsy1

Hi... Just one thing my mind locked in on. You withdrew only 100 Euros? My first thought, the more times you withdraw from an ATM, the more times you're going to get dinged for Foreign Transaction Fees by your bank, unless you have an upgraded ATM status of some sort. Something to think about. If you're concerned at carrying too much money, split it up between you, different pockets, or put some in a money belt.

boots08

Thank you for your words of encouragement. For someone to say they like my writing style is a rare compliment!

bitsy1- We took out 100 euros for ourselves and 40 for my daughter. My husband used a card that doesn't charge transaction fees.


PART 3

Our apartment is lovely and charming. We chose it because it has a separate bedroom on the top floor (daughter will sleep on pull-out sofa on bottom floor), and because it has a kitchen. As much as I love a fresh croissant or brioche from the patisserie, I need a protein breakfast to start my day. So a kitchen provided us the means to make eggs and toast and coffee each morning, something we don't mind doing even on vacation. Also, the washer and dryer meant that we could pack less clothing.

Alice took us through a tour of the house showing us how to work various things. When she explained how the dual washer/dryer unit worked, she may as well have been telling me how to launch the space shuttle. But if we had any difficulty, there were instructions in the "blinder" - a term she repeatedly assigned to a white binder that contained additional info for the apartment. As a tribute to our dear Alice, we would continue to refer to it as the "blinder" for the remainder of our stay.

When she left, we unpacked and then set our alarms to get up after an hour and half's nap. It was REALLY hard to wake up went it went off, but we knew we should if we wanted to adjust to Paris time and get a decent sleep that first night.

note: there is a highly recommended supplement I brought called Jet Lag Reset (or No Jet Lag) which one takes on the first night in the new time zone. It doesn't cure your jet lag as much as it helps you adjust. You can read about it and its numerous good reviews on Amazon. I found that it really helped remove some of the fog the next day.

We ventured out to find a restaurant for dinner, and ended up at a café/brasserie on Blvd. St. Germain. We sat outside at a café table and ordered light dinner fare. I had one of my fav French salads - salade au chevre chaud. My daughter ordered the cheese plate and I forget what my husband ordered. Blvd St. Germain is busy and the traffic quite noisy but we enjoyed our meal and people watching.

An old dog kept wandering around our tables - I wasn't sure if it was a stray, but we later found out that it was the owner's dog. It came and went, in and out of the restaurant, and we found it to be quite sweet and unobtrusive.

We strolled down the street and found a grocery store where we bought eggs, coffee, cream, sugar and orange juice for the morning. We would buy our bread fresh the next morning at the boulangerie "La Parisienne" just around the corner from our apartment.

We stayed up as long as we could, then fell into a deep sleep as soon as we hit the hay.

brubenow

Looking forward to more of your report! I didn't know the custom of uncorking a whole bottle of wine, even though you are ordering only one glass.

TPAYT

I'll be interested to hear about your use of the washer/dryer combo. The one we used a while back took about 4 hrs. to complete the cycle and everything came out wrinkled. I think we did something wrong.

I like the custom of bringing the bottle to the table even though you are only having a glass is such a nice way of doing it. You actually see what you are drinking instead of taking a chance on getting a lesser wine than you have ordered.

Love all the details. They add so much to your trip report.

boots08

PART 4

We'd been wanting to do Paris for some time, but trying circumstances in our family kept getting in the way of our making it happen. At the end of August, my daughter said that if we don't just go ahead and book the trip, we may never go. She had a point - and so we did.

We'd agreed to do very little in terms of excursions so that our vacation would be one of leisure and refreshment.

So each day was much the same as the other: we would wake up between 6 and 8 am, gingerly walk down the spiral staircase so as to not awaken our daughter, tiptoe to the kitchen to make our coffee, then sit at the dining room table to read. Our daughter was awake most of those mornings, and would later tell us that the sound of us coming down the stairs in the morning was something she would miss the most.

I would then start breakfast while my husband went on a quest to find some fresh baked bread. Some mornings it was croissants, others brioches or a baguette. One morning I made "pain perdu" with our day old baguette. I soaked the sliced bread in a milk and egg mixture, pan fried it in hot olive oil, then spread a bit of honey on the slices. Served with sausage on the side, this turned out to be one of our favorite breakfasts.

note: I read that baguettes with a rounded end are machine made, whereas the ones with a pointed tip are handmade. We would grab one of these whenever we found one.

After our petit dejeuner, we would shower, get dressed and venture out on daily promenades to various sites or neighborhoods. One day it was Place des Vosges, another Rue de Mouffetard for a bit of shopping, another Pont Alexander III, etc. etc.

However the one thing we definitely wanted to do was the Louvres. We'd never been because the one day I had planned to go years ago happened to fall on France's Memorial Day, and it was closed.

The older I get, the less I want to do things that involve crowds or lineups - things synonymous with the Louvre. However, we got our heads around the fact that these would be a necessary evil if we were to go. After some research, I determined that the best time to go would be Wednesday evening, when the Louvre stays open til 9:45pm. When we arrived, we were delighted to see that there was virtually no lineup by the glass pyramids. We also got through security quickly, and were well on our way within no time.

We located the "vestiaire" to store our coats. It was a bit of challenge for us (and many others) to figure out the security lock, but we discovered that you have to find one that is already unlocked and swings open. Many are empty but no matter what you do, you can't open/unlock them.

Our wish list was to see a Vermeer, the Mesopotamia exhibit, Napoleon's apartments and the Winged Victory statue. We saw all of the above within 1.5 hours. There is something about the latter that I find quite mesmerizing. And Napoleon's apartments are a must see. My daughter's tongue-in-cheek caption for her pics of it reads, "Minimalist".

Though we didn't really care about seeing the Mona Lisa, we wanted to get a picture of all the people taking selfies/pictures of it as we'd heard that this frenzy had become an exhibit in and of itself. We were somewhat disappointed to see that relatively few people were there. Ironic that we got an up close and personal viewing of a revered painting we hadn't really cared to see.

The one thing I regret is not getting there early enough to visit the store at the lower level before it closed. Museum and art gallery stores are some of my favorite places to shop and we'd been told that this was one of the best places to buy souvenirs. Tant pis!

boots08

I don't know how long the cycle on the washer/dryer took as we always loaded it just before venturing out. However it was complicated to figure out, and yes, the clothes often came out wrinkled and slightly damp.

Adelaidean

Sounds wonderful.
I like your detail and writing style (who knows, your TR might be THE ONE that convinces my husband that 2 weeks in Paris would be a great idea...)

DonTopaz

Excellent report so far, boots08. Given the location of your apartment, I hope to see the word "Berthillon" in one (or more) of the installments.

boots08

PART 4

This post is dedicated to dining and eateries.

As I mentioned earlier, we ate our breakfast "at home" every morning. For lunch, we would either eat at whichever caféa our promenades led us to, or we would have charcuteries, bread, cheese with wine at home.

We would purchase the above at the open market on Rue Monge or other markets like on Rue Mouffetard. We remember enjoying a cheese in Normandy years ago called Pont L'Evesque, and were delighted to find some at the market down from our street. It has the look and consistency of Camembert, but the flavor is slightly more pungent.

We ate dinner out every night and would sometimes research a place with good reviews on our tablets before heading out. There were a couple of places we ate at that we wished we had've checked the reviews for. One such place was L'Atlas on Rue de Buci. The atmosphere was decent, the wait staff nice, but the food was mediocre.

Another was St. Victor (possibly on Rue Monge?) - though we'd had a nice lunch there one afternoon, the steak we'd ordered for dinner on another night was as tough as leather. We couldn't get past two bites. The waiter could see that we'd eaten hardly any of it when he gathered our plates, and to our chagrin, he didn't comment on it.

My husband ordered a Caesar salad, as we often will for an appetizer in the US, but they always come with a chicken breast, and are sometimes served as an entrée. ("Entrée" in France is an appetizer and "plat" is the main course.)

In one case, we enjoyed a dinner at a restaurant on L'Ile St. Louis that had bad reviews - Le Chaumiere. Yelp users gave it only 2 stars out of 5, but I thoroughly enjoyed my poulet roti (roast chicken) with haricots (green beans) and pureed carrots. And my daughter loved her canard. My husband's fish dish was just okay.

Chez Gladines a is reasonably price Sud-Est/Basque brasserie on Blvd. St. Germain. The atmosphere is super casual, but the waiters are friendly, and the dishes copious and good, if a tad rich. My husband and I each ordered a salade chevre chaud avec lardons (thick salty bacon) but we couldn't finish them due to how large the bowl was and how rich and overkill the lardons were. One bowl with 1/4 of the lardons would have sufficed for two people.

One night when my daughter stayed in, she asked if we could bring her home some chocolate mousse. The patisseries were all closed, and French restaurants, resistant as ever to letting you do take out, refused our requests, but the young waiter at Chez Gladines was kind enough to let us take home a "mi-cuit" (semi-baked) chocolate dessert - similar to a chocolate lava cake. When he had trouble finding a container for us to carry it out in, he actually said that if we were staying close by, he would put the desserts on plates if we would return them the next day! How's that for service?

There is a non-descript restaurant down towards the Seine on Quai de la Tournelle called L'Oie Qui Fume that we enjoyed dining at. Nothing fancy (red plastic tablecloths), but the service was good and the food decent and well-priced. Our 2-course meals with two glasses of Bordeaux came to 36 euros.

This was also where I learned how to order steak. When I asked for medium-well, the young waiter somewhat impatiently replied, "Medium-well n'existe pas en France", and told me that the choices were "bleu" (super rare), "saignant" (rare), "a point" (medium), or "bien cuit" (well-done). After finding my steaks too under cooked when asking for bien cuit, I learned to ask for "TRES bien cuit" - which is the French equivalent of med-well. All stages of cooking are slightly rarer than N. American standards.

My favorite restaurants were Le Procope, Beaurepaire, and Le Petit Chatelet.

The first is said to be the oldest café in Paris. The décor is fancy, the service impeccable, and the prices are quite reasonable given the ambience and quality of food.

An interesting thing happened when the serveuse cleared our dishes to make room for dessert. She picked up my bread plate and tossed the bun that was on it onto the table in front of me and walked off with the plate. I found this odd until I got back home and read that one of the many differences between an American and a French person is that the former puts his bread or bun on a plate, whereas the latter puts it on the table.

Beaurepaire is in the same area as L'Oie Qui Fume and is another not-so-fancy but good eatery that serves up Basque-style fare. When the waiter saw that I couldn't finish my undercooked steak, he said I should have told him and he would've returned it to the kitchen "avec un sourire". The lady next to me ordered l'agneau (lamb) au jus and it looked very good.

Le Petit Chatelet (French for little cottage) is a sweet, cozy little place right beside Shakespeare and Co. They cook a very large steak over a wood fire that's large enough to serve two. The two profiteroles they serve as dessert are as big as baseballs. As with many French restaurants, the tables are closely crowded together, and the waiter had to pull the entire table out for to get in/get out. We don't mind this though as it lends itself to conversing with other diners - (should we desire to do so.)

Interesting thing a young Washington D.C. woman seated next to us there said - she was looking forward to trying McDonald's French fries in Paris because the ones in the US have a multitude of ingredients in them, whereas the ones in France have only 10 or so. Leave it the the French to have high standards even for fast food.

More confusion with my wine order at Chatelet - I asked for 50cl of Cotes du Rhones wine for my daughter and I. The waiter brought us the whole bottle, uncorked it, had me taste it, then after pouring our glasses, he left it on the table. Well we ended up drinking more of the bottle, but were relieved in the end to see that it only cost 25 euros. So much cheaper than buying a whole bottle in the States!

Our one splurge meal took place the night before we had to leave. My daughter googled something like "Paris restaurants with ambiance" and arrived at choosing a place on the right bank with great reviews called La Fermette Marbeuf. The sumptuous style of Napoleon's apartments at the Louvre influenced her decision to choose this restaurant because of its "belle epoque" style and décor.

The service was fussy the brushing of bread crumbs off table) and the food was top notch. I'd ordered the scallops which were very good, but the dish my daughter ordered was the best of all - homard bleu en feuilete (lobster in puff pastry). Apparently this is their specialty, and understandably so. Two appetizers, three entrees and wine came to 140 euros for the three of us.

I almost forgot to mention that we had lunch at Café des Deux Magots. My daughter wanted to sit at one of the outside tables to write and people watch but there were too many smokers. The menu is limited and a bit overpriced, but of course you're paying for the tradition of eating here. I'm glad we checked it out but despite the number of locals that were there, I didn't find it particularly special in any way.

boots08

Sorry that the above post was a little on the long side.

DonTopaz - I'm thinking that Berthillion is the ice cream place on L'Ile St. Louis? If so, no we didn't sample any. Even the best of ice creams hold little appeal when the weather is on the chilly side!

LCBoniti

Loving the details and. IMO, there is no such thing as a too long post when it's about Paris.

ParisAmsterdam

>>>No Jet Lag<<<

This stuff is absolute rubbish. Save your money. This is a homeopathic concoction and therefore contains no worthwhile active ingredient. If you look at the picture of the box it comes in you'll see the ingredients with a number and the letter "C" after each. The number is the dilution rate. All have been diluted 30 times. What does this mean?

"30C means 10 to the 60th power! On average, this would require giving two billion doses per second to six billion people for 4 billion years to deliver a single molecule of the original material to any patient." Wkipedia. Yes, yes, I know about Wikipedia but you can look this up elsewhere if you like. Or watch a video on Youtube of James Randi swallowing 4 boxes of homeopathic sleeping pills in one go.
Guess what? He doesn't fall asleep! ;^)

So can it work? Of course not. Any effect is strictly in one's mind. It's called anecdotal evidence. I'm sure you think this helped you but odds against are billions to one!
So save your 11.95 next time but do take the other preventive steps you used... that's what beat your 'fog' the next day.

Sorry to sound so grumpy... enjoying the rest of your report immensely.

boots08

PART 5

Shopping:

Monoprix is the Parisian equivalent of Target, albeit much smaller. There were a number of them on the Left Bank, my favorite being the one on Rue des Rennes near Café de Flore and Deux Magots. It was here that I bought...

- shampoo, conditioner (apres-shampooing), and bubble bath. I love the ones that are made in Marseille.

- my husband needed another sweater, so we bought him a wool one for 39.99 euros

- the rectangular mitt-like facecloths they use in France. We love those and like to give them as gifts.

- a hair straightener. I brought an older from home thinking that if it got ruined using an adapter/converter it would be of no great loss. Well it happened to work perfectly! However, I did buy a new one that looked good (a Babyliss that cost 29.99 euros), but didn't like it as much as my old one. Also, my daughter mentioned that we had one at home that had a switch on it for duel voltage. This is something I'd never noticed so you may want to check to see if the one you have has that too.

The numerous tacky little souvenir shops had a few items I liked - a Paris mug, a little makeup bag with pictures of macarons and other patisseries, some playing cards, drink coasters...

Besides food, the open market on Rue Monge had a nice selection of scarves, from polyester, to wool, to silk. Vendors also sold handbags, gloves, men's wallets, baby clothes, ladies' clothing, jewelry...

We noticed that many men in Paris wear scarves - either wool or a more lightweight striped kind. When my husband heard my daughter and I praising the look, he later said, "I'd to buy a scarf." We helped him pick out a grey plaid wool one at the market. He wasn't sure of how to wear it so we showed him how others were wearing theirs: fold it end to end, place around back of the neck, pull the loose ends through the looped one, et voila - you've never seen someone strut their new French look more proudly.

My daughter bought several gifts for her friends from a shop called Blue Lemon. They have very nice jewelry (around 7-20 euros) and handbags in several colors. Even though it has an English name, the mademoiselle informed me that it's a French company.

She also told me about a place near Rue de Buci that sold soap of every kind and color, cut with a large knife in front of you from large slabs. I will check it out next time as these would also make for nice gifts.

Franprix is a grocery store chain that can be found throughout Paris. The one on Rue de Mouffetard was quite good, and there was a nice one on the corner of Rue des Anglais and Rue Dormas. I purchased some very tasty breakfast sausage here, as well as some butter, the taste and quality of which was superbe!

Our closest boulangerie was La Parisienne on Rue Monge. This would be our go to place for bread or dessert indulgences. I never eat baguettes at home - I don't really care for them and don't need the white, refined flour. However the authentic French baguette is one I can barely resist. It is moist and delicious, and also very good toasted with butter and confitures (jam). The croissants are also very good - super moist and flakey.

We saw "macarons' everywhere, but for whatever reason they just didn't look that appealing to my daughter and I. Perhaps because of the bright colors? We decided that we should at least try one to see what all the fuss is about, but ended up leaving Paris before we could. Et bien - a la prochaine fois!

powhatangal

Boots08: I'm enjoying your report and the detail! The soap store on rue de Buci is called Lush. There's one where I live (Richmond Va).