TDudette, keeping my French speaking current is the hardest part. I can work on reading and listening with books and magazines and the internet and podcasts and music and movies. But I have nobody to talk to unless I am actually in France.

I have improved very gradually over the past several years because of my intensive reading and listening to music. I pick up phrases but have no confidence in actually using them. Reading has helped my vocabulary but I have only the faintest idea which nouns are masculine and which are feminine. And most people are too polite to correct me when I am struggling to put a sentence together.

I resist making phone calls in French; I have to rehearse to myself what I am going to say first, although it usually works out OK.

Ann, it sounds like bad behavior in the theater is not limited to little boys.

Tonight I am going to hear the singer Bénabar at Le Zénith in the Parc de la Villette. A well dressed woman about my age sits next to me on the métro and says something I do not completely understand but which I gather is a comment on the general incivility of people. I mumble something more or less agreeable and we talk a bit. She says I have such a nice accent, am I English? No, American, I tell her. "Même plus jolie!" she says. I have trouble thinking about it this way; I would prefer to have no accent at all. I am picturing Mr. Siegel, my eighth grade French teacher. He would not have thought my American accent was jolie and I would like to strive to keep to his standard. Of course I love the sound of a French accent in English, but it is hard for me to accept that it works the other way around.

Le Zénith is a large, bubble-like structure. According to the website, it holds about six thousand people. Before the concert begins, there are people walking through the stands selling drinks, ice cream, candy, and baguettes with ham and cheese.

The opening act is a talented young performer named Charles-Baptiste, who sings his own songs and plays the piano. After he finishes, the lights come back on and the vendors come around again. I buy his CD from one of them. A jumbo screen shows trailers for American action films. I don't get out much. Is this what it is like at pop concerts in the US?

The lights dim again and Bénabar comes out. Suddenly lights appear throughout the audience, reminding me of the circus when the kids were little and everyone had a souvenir flashlight. It takes a moment before I realize it is a sea of cell phones recording the moment.

I think about why I am here. I could listen to my recordings at home. But being here feels like participating in some kind of cultural communion. Sort of like the classes I have been attending. While I am in the midst of these thoughts, Bénabar mentions that the concert is being broadcast live on the radio. He echoes my thoughts, saying the radio audience is getting everything except the experience of being part of this live audience. And the topless performers. And the elephants on stage.

He is making that last part up. Or maybe I am, but I think that's what he said.

I love the show. Bénabar sings most of the songs I like the most. He has great energy and bounces up and down a lot. The audience responds enthusiastically. The cameras come out when he performs his older songs. And when he sings the song about how he'd rather sit home and watch a movie about extraterrestrials in Saint-Tropez and eat pizza than go out to dinner with his wife or girlfriend at her friends' house, the audience (especially, it appears, the men in the audience) are pumping their arms enthusiastically in the air. It seems to strike a chord.

During the song about the life of a house, the band starts dancing with some floor lamps on the stage. I am transported back to the Mats Ek dance L'Appartement with the vacuum cleaners that I saw last week at the opera house.

The métro is packed as I head home with some percentage of the six thousand people who have seen the show. It used to be that when you heard people talking loudly to themselves in a large city it was because they were deranged. Now it usually means they are on their cell phones.

Well, the guy standing in front of me does not have a phone. He is speaking loudly and angrily right in my face in a language I can not identify. A man brushes him aside to get to the seat next to me, muttering gruffly to the angry fellow to calm himself and move away. I shoot the new guy a look of gratitude for removing him from my immediate vicinity. The angry guy is quiet for a minute or two but he can't stop himself and is soon ranting again. I gradually realize with increasing horror that the language I could not identify is probably English.

The angry guy finally gets off the train, and my neighbor and I exchange a word or two. But our relief is short-lived, as he is replaced by a tall young blind man with a small dog standing right in front of me. The newcomer makes a loud and repetitive pitch to the crowd, punctuated by the hope that he is not disturbing us.

When I finally get off the train, my neighbor and I exchange some words that neither of us understands and say goodbye. Theater of the absurd.

LOL...lOVE THIS LAST POST!

I remember your concern about going to this concert. It sounds like you got your money's worth.....and then some.

Your trip report is excellent as usual and as many have testified before me. I don't think of you as a tourist as much a visitor who immerses herself into the cultural life of Paris. I have great respect for your hard work in learning the French necessary for these visits. Everytime I read one of your cultural reports I resolve to work more diligently on my French. Unfortunately life generally intrudes but I am ever hopeful that I can one day improve my French. My accent will probably never improve though. sigh

I really appreciate your joining me for the visit to the Omnivore Food Fest. I am still wondering what the guy in the Sucre room was trying to make and kicking myself for not picking up another Silpat to try that scallop pasta.

I seem to be in a state of inertia about my own trip report, but I am thoroughly enjoying those of others! It was truly wonderful to meet all of you at the GTG Nikki, thank you for letting me jump into the group.

I thought about going to the ballet at Opera Garnier, I now so wish I had, and if we had chatted about it I might have horned in on that too!

I am enjoying your trip report so much.

I love Le Comptoir! Always good! So I am very jealous.

Nikki - your report of the metro journeys reminds me of why I no longer live in London!

that concert sounded a lot of fun - i am so impressed that you managed to find out about all these interesting things to do, so i am sure that your french is a lot better than you are letting on.

as for speaking french, [or any other foreign language] as opposed to reading/writing it, I decided a long time ago to resign myself to the fact that I will always have an accent and live with it. and I shamelessly jumble masculine nouns with feminine adjectives and vice versa, get my tenses wrong, and generally slaughter the language. Tant pis!

toucan2 - me too. how hard can it be to write a TR about [in my case] a 5 day trip? must stop slacking!

Friday, March 23 is my last full day in Paris. I've had just about as much culture as I can take. My feet are shot. I still have plenty of things on my list that I haven't done, but they will have to wait, possibly forever. I'm OK with that. The day promises to be warm and sunny and I decide to take advantage of my garden and spend the day at home.

I catch up with my journal. Read in the garden. Shop for lunch fixings. Think about organizing the chaotic pile of purchases, books, and paper that surrounds me so it will all fit into my luggage. And make dinner plans, bien sûr.

For my last night in Paris I meet Marcy and her daughter Kerry at Chez Gladines, a lively, casual Basque restaurant in the Butte aux Cailles neighborhood south of the Place d'Italie.

On my way there I take a little detour into the past. When I learned French in school, starting in seventh grade we used a method which consisted of slides and tapes about a French family. Voici Monsieur Thibaut. Monsieur Thibaut est ingénieur. Monsieur Thibaut habite 10 Place d'Italie à Paris. Voici Madame Thibaut. Voici les enfants, Paul et Catherine. I followed the lives of the Thibaut family for three or four years, getting to know them fairly well. When Monsieur Thibaut asked Catherine why she was home one day she replied cheerfully, "C'est jeudi Papa!" I still remember her tone of voice as she said it. In Mr. Siegel's class we all copied her accent. I envied those French kids, getting Thursday off from school.

When I was in college, I spent the summer of 1972 traveling around Europe. My friend Ellen and our friend Lar and I spent five days in Paris sharing a room in the cheapest hotel the tourist office could find us. The door to our room opened into an alley with laundry hanging. The facilities were down the alley. Across the alley was a room where we befriended an American girl who came to use the shower in our large triple room. The landlady noticed and charged her for it.

My cultural agenda on that trip was even more packed than on this one. I saw Die Walkure at the opera house and Cyrano de Bergerac at the Comédie Française. Ellen and I went to a jazz club in the Latin Quarter. We ate at, I believe, Chartier, where we tried to get a waiter to explain to us what we would get if we ordered tète de veau. (The waiter got an English speaking waiter who came up and translated for us with great dignity, "head of veal". Yeah, that's what we thought.)

And I took a walk down to the Place d'Italie. I took a picture of the front door at 10 Place d'Italie. I sent a copy to my high school boyfriend, who had learned French with the Thibaut family as well, asking if he could guess what it was. He could not. I still have the photo.

So now it is 2012. I am in a taxi riding around the busy traffic circle that is now the Place d'Italie, and I pick out that building, 10 Place d'Italie. It is still there. I do not think quickly enough to shoot another photo. And I apparently only come here once every forty years.

The restaurant is on the Rue des Cinq Diamants. The driver says he will settle for just one diamond. I tell him he can have all the diamonds in my pockets, but he says if I have five, I can keep the other four. Very generous. I tell him about the Thibaut family. He says maybe they are still there.

I meet Marcy and Kerry in front of Chez Gladines. We have been warned to get here when they open to avoid a long wait, and we snag one of the last free spots. We share a table with three young French people. There is a very young vibe here and in the neighborhood in general, as far as we can tell. I would come here often if I lived in the neighborhood.

We all order salads at about ten euros apiece, which are huge and delicious. I would like to try everything on the menu, but the salad is more than enough. I do manage to save room for a piece of gâteau Basque for dessert. The waiter leaves the check and we give him cash (no credit cards here). We are waiting for change when the hostess comes and says she can't let us linger because there are people waiting for tables. We will stay until we get our change, Marcy tells her. The change comes and we leave. I guess it's a hectic place to work.

The night is young, so we head to St. Germain where we go for drinks and jazz at Café Laurent at the Hotel d'Aubusson. This is a comfortable bar with live music from 9 PM until midnight Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights. There is no cover charge but a minimum drink order of ten euros. When we arrive it is nearly empty and there is a trio playing. We enjoy music, drinks, and conversation until the room starts to fill up and become too noisy to converse at a reasonable level. A guy at the bar tells us to be quiet. I feel like I've been the ugly American, impeding his enjoyment of the music, until Marcy points out that he is also shushing a couple at another table whom I haven't even noticed.

The street scene outside the café is lively and I feel it would be fun to explore. But I am done.

Saturday, March 24, I make a final trip to the bakery. A final pain au chocolat, a final tarte fine aux abricots. I pack my things and head to the airport. The shuttle driver points out a Moroccan wedding we pass along the way. He reads the prices in the large street market we pass and tells me he would rather support the vendors at the markets who are trying to survive than the shop owners who sell the same produce at much higher prices. I tell him about the gleaners I saw at the Marché d'Aligre. It's better than stealing, he says. He says the same thing about the jugglers we see in the street just before the entrance to the Périphérique.

There is a sign on the highway announcing the speed limit is reduced due to pollution.

The airport is strikingly empty. I breeze through baggage check-in and security. The flight is uneventful, just the way I like it. There is even a vacant seat next to me, and unlike the theater, nobody moves over to fill in the empty space. My husband Alan is waiting at the airport in Boston, and I am happy to be running back home.

Absolutely lovely report. Thank you.

I agree with bazinga. I have loved (and admired) every moment of it. Thank you. I also showed the apt. to my husband with the idea of renting it the next time we are in Paris. We have never stayed in that area. CJ

Thanks to all of you who stuck with me to the end.

Abby, I had to google Silpat to see what you were talking about, but it is evidently available all over, so while you won't have a French one, you can certainly get something to try that scallop trick with.

Toucan2, you didn't get to the ballet, but if I remember you were headed to the circus. How was that? I suppose if I had stopped spouting off about education and politics at dinner our conversation might have made it around to the ballet, so I apologize.

Ann, I find the best way to make sure I write a trip report is to just start writing. I force myself to start as soon as possible; otherwise it may never happen. Like that five day trip I took to California last month.

And that metro ride felt familiar and oddly comfortable, like the New York subway in my youth.

Supurb!

We now have alot to share about Paris next time we dine out together. Good friends , good times.
As Tomas says, Life is Good!

I loved your report, Nikki - well-written and so thoughtful.

Thanks.

"Thanks to all of you who stuck with me to the end."

I'm sure everyone will echo the sentiment when I say,

My pleasure.

Thank you, Nikki, for my mini-voyage this afternoon. Feels just as though (ok, not quite) I've been to Paris. However, I don't think I'll ever have the energy to do it the way you do.

Your trip report is extremely well written, with just the right amount of detail.

Merci mille fois.

LOL Nikki, no apologies necessary! Lots of topics to cover in a single night of meeting

The circus was fabulous. An interesting combo of dance (sort of hip hop, with balletic aspects) acrobatics(amazing), an incredible juggling display, a hard to describe trampoline tableau, and more. A great night out, thanks for asking.

Again, truly enjoyed your trip report.

Thank you for a wonderful report. I didn't want it to end.

Again, a wonderful TR. We too had a "story" in French class but one of the boys always forgot his homework and the teacher admonished:" Toujours la même histoire, Paul!" I love the phrase but don't get much chance to use it!

Sigh.