Rain! In Paris! Ce n'est pas possible! According to the French videos I watched to learn to parlez a little Francais, it only rains in Angleterre (England), never in France. They lied! When we went to bed last night, it looked like this picture...
We were about to venture out this morning for a day of adventure when the skies opened up and we scuttled back in to watch from our room. Once Beth got back inside, she was overcome with fatigue and has been sleeping for 2 hours. I'll take the time to catch up on yesterday's adventures.
Living the Bohemian life in Paris is hard: ten hours of sleep, up at 10am, a fresh continental
breakfast (a real one, not the fakes you get from cheap American hotels--see my previous post for the complete rundown) served in the room, chased out by the maid at noon so she can make the bed, shopping all day at the neighborhood shops.... Uh oh, I can feel the steely gaze of Mrs. Thompson from grade school--we're just going to have to teach those children something useful today. So we ducked into the Musee Carnavalet, a nearby museum of 17th, 18th, and 19th century Parisian history. You can check it out here:http://www.paris.fr/portail/Culture/Portal.lut?page_id=6468
After that we walked 2 or 3 blocks to Place des Vosges, one of our favorite spots in all of Paris. This is a full city block of connected houses, 3 stories high like almost all of Central Paris, built by Henri IV in the early 1600s for his cronies, so as to avoid too much contact with the riffraff. (This was before Louis XIV, the Sun King, levelled his dad's paltry castle in Versailles, outside of Paris, and built the Palace of Versailles, his cozy 600 room playboy mansion. More about this another day, perhaps.)
In the center of the Place des Vosges there is a very nice garden that is almost a block in size, since the buildings that surround it are only a couple of rooms wide. We sat on a park bench in the garden and people-watched for an hour or so, then made reservations at Coconas, one of our favorite restaurants in all of Paris. It's located in one of the buildings surrounding the garden, and not far from one of the most exclusive and expensive restaurants in all of Paris, L'Amboisie
(we ate lunch there when we were here last year, and I think I'm still paying off the credit card). Anyway, we left the Place des Vosges and visited Victor Hugo's house nearby on our way back to the hotel. He was a fascinating guy with a big appetite in every way, a larger-than-life character even for France where characters are welcome. Here's a website:http://www.hugo-online.org/090200.htm
The shopping in the Marais district is very nice and very pricey, so we looked but didn't touch. After freshening up at the hotel, we headed back to the Place des Vosges to have dinner at Coconas. It's named after a purported French explorer from the 1500s who apparently settled down after his exploits to start a bar & grill so he would have people around to tell his stories to. I'm a little suspicious about the veracity of the story, since the engraving of Mssr Coconas on their business card looks quite a bit like Hernando Cortez. The French have always been a little jealous of the Spanish, and have never forgiven them for going and getting their Armada sunk by Lord Nelson just when Napoleon needed a ride across the English Channel to take over England. It's too bad he didn't wait a bit, since now he could just take the Chunnel train and never get a bit wet.
But I digress. Coconas has wonderful food, served lavishly with bonne humeur, and doesn't use up too many of one's Euros. Since it's almost dinnertime already, I'll dispense quickly with the menu: an "amuse bouche" (freebie little appetizer from the chef so you don't bang your utensils on the table out of hunger waiting for the waiter), fresh cold tomato soup with a viniagrette to sweeten it a little, a Greek salad with toast points spread with the most delicious spicy cream cheese (think Southwestern style). Beth had the fish special, again with a lovely French sauce and several kinds of mushrooms. I had a cote de veau, veal cooked in a sauce in a cast iron dutch oven with gnocchi and morel mushrooms (the chef must have gotten a Sam's club sized package of mushrooms from the market).
For dessert, Beth had a lovely creme au chocolat (thick dark chocolate pudding) with madeleines, and I had a "rainstorm" of strawberries flooding what looked like a coconut macaroon biscuit which actually contained sorbet de fromage blanc (think really good rich vanilla ice cream). To finish, an espresso for me and herbal tea for Beth, and apres dessert, a sort of after dinner amuse bouche of little cookies and mini creme brulees that they bring if you order coffee. I forgot these wonderful little macarons, financiers, and creme brulees last year too, so we were a little overstuffed when we waddled back to the hotel and deposited ourselves in bed. Another exhausting day as a Bohemian in Paris. It's a tough job, but as you can see, we're up to it.
Tomorrow, the rain in Spain fell mainly in Paris today...
No comments:
Post a Comment