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Running away from home: Nikki's trip to Paris

Running away from home: Nikki's trip to Paris

Old Mar 26th, 2012, 09:58 AM
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I'm loving your report! We are staying in this apartment in May with our 8 year old grandson. Our first time in this area and we are really looking forward to it.

Can't wait for more!

Jo
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Old Mar 26th, 2012, 10:15 AM
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Excellent, Nikki. Waiting for more, along with everybody else.
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Old Mar 26th, 2012, 01:24 PM
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Thanks for the encouragement.

I have not gotten to my photos yet; they are on two different cameras plus my new smart phone that is smarter than I am, and I am putting off the task of organizing them until I have finished my trip report, or at least until I am well into it.

The shiny things are necklaces.
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Old Mar 26th, 2012, 02:31 PM
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Enthralled! More svp. You write very expressively...I am enjoying this so much!
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Old Mar 26th, 2012, 02:33 PM
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Monday, March 12, I meet Abby at the Omnivore World Tour, a food festival held at the Maison de la Mutualité, a convention center in the Latin Quarter. We buy half day tickets and plunge into a demonstration where a chef is putting the finishing touches on some chocolate concoction, just in time for the samples to be handed out.

There are separate rooms for demonstrations of main courses, pastries, and chocolate. We move on to a pastry demonstration where a fourth generation patissier is making citrus meringues. Much of the audience consists of culinary students. One of these engages the pastry chef in an earnest discussion about the ethics of selling previously frozen pastries to the public without advertising the fact.

We have to leave before the meringues are finished (thereby missing the tasting) so that we can catch the beginning of the demonstration in the main auditorium by the chef of the restaurant Thoumieux. We watch fascinated as he beats a scallop into a paste and presses it between sheets of plastic, then slices it into strips and fries them, placing them in a salad. He also makes a scallop in a more conventional manner, then demonstrates some kind of meringue with a melting filling.

Young assistants are scurrying around the building carrying ingredients and tools and previously prepared items between the kitchen and the various demonstrations.

The last demonstration we watch is a chef who is smoking shrimp and red peppers in a pan. We get to sample this, and the peppers are distinctly smokier than the shrimp. Very interesting.

We finish up the morning circulating in a large room of exhibitors, many of whom are giving away samples of chicken, chocolate, artichokes, frozen yogurt, all sorts of stuff. We each snag a large tote bag filled with promotional items and make our way out of the exhibit hall. I am fairly certain I will be the only person in my local Whole Foods store with this particular shopping bag. And probably one of only two people in Massachusetts.

Monday night is the large get-together of people from the Fodor's message board. It had started innocently enough when I read on Fodor's that Ann, a British poster from Cornwall whose posts I have read for a long time, would be in Paris the same time as my trip, and I suggested we go out to dinner together. The group grew to ten, and then diminished a bit to eight, while we had long discussions about possible places to meet. I am meeting five of these people for the first time. Abby and Tomas are there, Ann and her husband Bill, Patti and Mark from Los Angeles, and Merri from Kansas City.

Most of the group meets elsewhere for drinks before dinner, but I join them at the restaurant, Neva Cuisine, near the Gare Saint-Lazare. Patti has been here before and we are here on her recommendation. The staff is cheerful and helpful, the company and conversation top rate. I have been to a number of gatherings of this type, and they have all been entertaining. It is fascinating to meet people after reading things they write for years. It feels like you know each other.

I love the food here. I order foie gras, sweetbreads, and a dessert that consists of a chocolate sphere filled with ice cream over which they pour hot chocolate sauce while you watch it all deconstruct in front of you.

We close the joint down, the time has flown by, and we all regretfully say good-bye to our new old friends.
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Old Mar 26th, 2012, 02:45 PM
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I wished we'd had the time to squeeze in Omnivore but I'm so glad we didn't miss the GTG.

Keep it coming!
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Old Mar 26th, 2012, 03:57 PM
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bookmarking to read later
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Old Mar 26th, 2012, 06:16 PM
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Oh, this is such fun to read. You are having the trip of my dreams! I fantasized about coming to Paris at the time you all were there, but it really was only a dream this time.

But thanks for making it come alive. Looking forward to hearing more of your well planned trip. How do you manage to get tickets to all the cultural events you attended? Sounds like you really are a veteran Paris-goer.
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Old Mar 26th, 2012, 07:48 PM
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Nikki, you are very fortunate to be able to run away from home so often. I am enjoying your report, though I wish you'd told us what the American movie was that you'd watched on the plane. Looking forward to your photos whenever you become smarter than your new smart phone. No pressure...
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Old Mar 26th, 2012, 09:10 PM
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I got all my tickets on line. I checked the websites of the Paris Opera, the Comedie Francaise, the Theatre des Champs-Elysees, the Opera Comique, and the Cite de la Musique. I also checked the discount ticket website http://www.ticketac.com/

Leely, I'm not sure why you want to know this, but the movie was Crazy, Stupid, Love. Now I bet you're sorry you asked.
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Old Mar 27th, 2012, 04:17 AM
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Tuesday, March 13, I join Abby and Tomas, Patty and Mark for lunch at Au Passage, in the narrow Passage Saint-Sébastien, off rue Amelot near the Cirque d'Hiver in the 11th arrondissement. Lunch here is a set menu with no choices. Two courses are served for the bargain price of 13 euros, and if I remember correctly you can have four courses, including cheese, for 20 euros.

The food is wonderful here. I start with a trout appetizer and move on to duck breast served very rare. We are served by a friendly young waiter with perfect English. I talk to him in French until I realize his English is substantially better than my French. At some point I ask where he learned English, and he tells me he is British. I'm feeling rather stupid.

I leave the rest of the party as they head off to a cooking lesson at a bakery where they learn the intricacies of baking baguettes. I take the bus to the Collège de France for the course on Beaudelaire. I have been following this course on line once a week since it began in January. This coincided with the purchase of my new Kindle. I discovered you can download books for free whose copyright has expired if they have been put on the internet, including books in French. And that by downloading a French-English dictionary, you can put your finger on any word you don't know and the definition will pop up in front of your eyes. This has significantly increased both my reading speed and comprehension.

So now I have the complete works of Beaudelaire on the Kindle and have been reading them in short segments between other readings. The thing about the Kindle is that I started reading everything at once. A few pages of one work, a few pages of another one. At some point I realized I would never finish a book at that rate, and I set myself the goal of finishing everything I had begun and starting nothing new before getting to Paris. I more or less have met this goal.

The lecture hall is completely full a half hour before the class begins. Standing room only. I remember this from last year, so I am here an hour ahead of time, with plenty of company. The course title is "Beaudelaire moderne et antimoderne". Today's topic is Beaudelaire's ambivalence toward the crowds to be found in nineteenth century Paris. Beaudelaire writes about giving oneself to the crowd, becoming drunk on the crowd, prostituting oneself to the crowd. Becoming drunk on humanity gives rise to art and drama.

Is this why I am here? I could just watch these lectures on line in the comfort of my Massachusetts dining room. But I have chosen to immerse myself in this crowd in Paris and be part of some kind of communal experience. I smile at the image of prostituting myself to this crowd of four hundred middle aged French intellectuals with their (and my) turtle neck sweaters and sensible shoes. And turning the experience into the art of the trip report.

I am no Beaudelaire.

The second hour of the course consists of a seminar by a guest speaker whose topic is Beaudelaire and numbers. He makes a point about the poet recalculating the world, projecting the finite into the infinite. I sense the profundity which I do not quite grasp. But perhaps it is that sense of suspension over a depth that the poet and the lecturer are seeking to evoke.

According to the speaker, Beaudelaire's writing illustrates both the desire to escape from order and structure and the fear of such an escape. And it is this ambivalence that reflects the tension between tradition and modernity.

As if I had planned it this way, I spend the evening at a dance performance which exemplifies this very tension. I see the ballet at the Opéra Garnier, and there are two works on the program. The first is Dances at a Gathering, choreographed by Jerome Robbins. While this is a modern work, it has a traditional structure.

The dancers are accompanied by a pianist playing works by Chopin. The first dance is a Chopin Mazurka. When my daughter was learning the piano, she played a Chopin Mazurka and I went out and bought the whole set of them with the intent of reading through them myself. They sat on the shelf for ten years. In keeping with my new motivation to read the books that have been staring at me from my shelves, I pulled down the Mazurkas within the past few months, read through a couple and picked one to work on. This is the one that opens the program. The one that I can't get out of my head at home.

I guess I am not meant to get it out of my head.

The second half of the program is Appartement, choreographed by Mats Ek. This is a contemporary work to the accompaniment of an instrumental group called Fleshquartet which plays on stage behind the dancers. The dances are interesting and witty. The piece opens with a woman dancing in, on, and around a bidet. One number has the music imitating bagpipes as the performers dance with vacuum cleaners. I love this, and the audience appears to agree with me, except for the older Spanish couple sitting next to me who are not applauding. And here we have it: the tension between tradition and modernity in action.
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Old Mar 27th, 2012, 04:57 AM
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Brava for your intellectual pursuits! The "Appartement" dance sounds interesting.

"I ask where he learned English, and he tells me he is British." I had the same thing happen on a train to Chartres. Complimented a woman on her English and she said "I guess it is, I'm an American." Know how you feel. This lucky lady had an apt. in Paris.

And I sigh as I read your wonderful TR.
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Old Mar 27th, 2012, 05:49 AM
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Loved your trip report!

Funny about the gloves. I usually travel to Paris in October and make it a point to buy a new pair of leather gloves there every time I go! If it's cold enough to wear a winter jacket, I always need my gloves.
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Old Mar 27th, 2012, 06:52 AM
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Thanks for the continuing comments.

Note to self: proofread more carefully when you are jetlagged. Note spelling of Baudelaire. And Patty. My apologies to both.
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Old Mar 27th, 2012, 07:36 AM
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No mention yet of marrow bones....... don't tell me you skipped them this trip !
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Old Mar 27th, 2012, 07:42 AM
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Thanks for sharing, Nikki. As always, I love your style!
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Old Mar 27th, 2012, 08:21 AM
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Nikki, La Voile on Newbury St serves marrow bones.
They relocated here from the Cote D'Azur.
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Old Mar 27th, 2012, 08:51 AM
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I'm in awe of your ability to attend a lecture in French on such an academic topic! Wow. It seems you go at everything with gusto, which makes your trip report an extra-special treat.
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Old Mar 27th, 2012, 09:14 AM
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There are marrow bones ahead for those who stick with me. And good to know they are available in Boston also.

Coquelicot, I find it much easier to follow an academic lecture in French than a movie or actual conversation. Lecturers speak more slowly and clearly than people do in normal speech, and they tend to use fewer colloquialisms. I do miss quite a bit of the offhand comments and humor, though, and I am always pleased when I catch a joke.
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Old Mar 27th, 2012, 09:20 AM
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Wednesday, March 14, I have lunch at l'AOC. http://www.restoaoc.com/ There is a 21 euro menu for two courses at lunch. I start with salade normande, which turns out to be a little bit of lettuce and a big piece of camembert melted in cream. Then I have langue de boeuf, prepared in such a way that I am not certain the waiter has brought me the correct dish. "Mais si," he tells me and I feel stupid once again. I have to develop a higher tolerance for feeling stupid when I travel. This does not however stop me from enjoying it very much.

I spend the afternoon at the Cité des Sciences, where I view the exhibit "Les Gaulois".
I hope that by arriving at 2 PM I will avoid the rush of school groups, but I am wrong. Much of the exhibit consists of hands-on archeological activities for just such groups and it is packed with little diggers.

The beginning of the exhibit displays pictorial representations of the Gauls before the archeological evidence revealed an entirely different society than the one lodged in the imaginations of many people. An example of the misconceptions which have come down through history is that the Gauls were "hairy", based on a reference by Julius Caesar. It turns out that Caesar was describing the country's vegetation rather than its inhabitants.

Groups of little boys are giggling around a picture of naked women. I wonder how they cope with the advertising posters displayed all over Paris; I haven't seen children giggling over such pictures in the métro.

The last room of the exhibit displays artifacts from the time of the Gauls (and some copies). This is fairly interesting, but my overall impression is that it is not worth the long trip out to the museum and through some construction which makes access from the métro long and difficult. I have seen exhibits about Pompeii in Boston and the Dead Sea Scrolls in New York within the past few months, so I felt I should see this one too, but those were better.

Wednesday evening I see Molière's play Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin near the triumphal arch of the same name. I enjoy the production very much. I seem to be specializing in Molière this winter. I was in California last month and went to a production of Molière's The Doctor in Spite of Himself at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, and I will be seeing Le Malade Imaginaire at the Comédie Française later in this trip. Thanks to the Kindle, I have now read all three in French, which helps me follow along with much more success than if I had gone in with no preparation.

On the métro ride home, I realize that every time I have traveled through the Saint-Ambroise station, the one just before my own stop at Voltaire, there have been homeless people lying on benches and gathered on the platform. I have not noticed this at other stations, and I wonder what makes this one particularly attractive to this population.
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