Thursday, September 07, 2006

Les Grands Magasins and "we shoulda taken the Metro"


Marguerite, our new French instructor, asked us when we first met her whether we were still jet-lagged. I said no, but I didn't tell her why: we have a secret weapon against jet-lag. I've heard all kinds of tricks to use when travelling east versus west, and while some of them work a little, here's what really works: if you keep going to bed 16 hours after you woke up, and then sleep for 8 hours, you never feel jet-lagged. It works! There's one small incovenience: since Paris is 7 hours ahead of CST, that means we have to keep going to bed at 6am and waking up at 2 pm to stay on schedule. Darn it all if the maid doesn't keep knocking around 11am to see if she can make up the room!

Seriously, we don't go to bed at 6 am, but being night-owls naturally, the time change has made it almost impossible to go to sleep before 1am, or to wake up before about 9am. It's not really a problem in "the City of Lights" because people are out and about until 1 or 2am anyway, so we seem to fit right in. The only real problem (if you consider it a problem: I don't but Beth does) is that the stores all close at 7 or 7:30pm, so if a day of shopping the department stores (les grands magasins) is in the plans, you have to get going early or you'll miss half the stuff by closing time.

Suffice it to say, we missed more than half the stuff today which was fine for me but a frustration for Beth. We got out the door at the usual hour (noon or so), and decided to walk from our hotel to Printemps, one of several HUGE French department stores (pictured above). It is located between the Madeleine church and the Opera Garnier north of the Louvre museum. It's quite a walk, maybe 45 minutes on foot, but even at that, we took the long way: we stopped to shop in shoe stores along the way. You have no idea how many shoe stores there are on the rue de Rivoli in a 12 block stretch. I went crosseyed looking at all those shoes, boots, sandals, loafers, ballet slippers, pumps, etc. Girls, you can snicker, but you have no idea what it's like to be a guy shopping. The walking is no problem, since guys are usually the ones with the low-heeled, comfortable shoes, and the girls are tottering around on high heels or in sandals made of tiny pieces of leather better suited for a keychain than a shoe.

No, it's the actual store that's the problem. I've looked into this, and I've figured it out. Trust me, I'm a doctor. Here's the problem: just like Superman, the average guy is able to take all kinds of abuse with a superhero's patience, like hanging wallpaper and having dinner with the in-laws. But just like our Man of Steel, every guy has his Kryptonite. You know, the glowing blue mineral that saps his strength and reduces him to a damp spot on the floor, crying "I'm melting, melting...." For most guys, their Kryptonite is located somewhere near the center of any mall or shopping district. The closer we get to the epicenter of shopping, the weaker (Beth says crabbier) we get. We weren't even close to Printemps at this point, and I was already a goner.

Fortunately, there is an antidote for the average guy's Kryptonite, and it's (surprise): food. After completely exhausting myself over the shoes, I practically crawled to the Tulleries, a large garden/park near the Louvre museum with just enough strength to order "deux boules des glaces et une boteille d'eau minerale" to which the server replied, "you want 2 bowls of ice cream and a bottle of mineral water, right?" It turns out that French is not obligatoire everywhere in Paris, especially where a lot of Americans congregate. After consuming the flavorful small scoops of coconut and dark chocolate ice cream (nothing in Paris is Texas-sized), we felt revived enough to tackle Printemps, knowing that the Place de la Madeleine was waiting afterwards.

Printemps and its competitor, Galeries Lafayette, are les grands magasins (the large department stores) in Paris. Printemps has 3 large buildings and 7 to 9 floors each, depending on the building. One building for women (9 floors there, of course), one for the home, and the smallest for men (what guy in his right mind would go to a place where he has 9 floors of stuff to sift through?). As a mercy to the male reader, I will forgo detailed descriptions of this section (first we sifted through the cosmetics, then the hair doodads, then the designer clothes, etc.). From my standpoint, we went up and down the escalators to every floor at least once, mostly in the women's building, and looked at everything. Veni, vidi, vici. Obviously, Julius Caesar never went shopping in Paris, or he would have never been able to say that. Fortunately, there is a terrace on top of the building with a scenic view of all of Paris, and a cafe (pictured to the right), so again I was saved from perishing by coffee and pie.

Beth is quite budget-minded, and rarely buys much when we shop. Fortunately we don't go to any stores like Best Buy here in Paris, because I'm not nearly so disciplined, and we would be dragging home a flat screen TV or something like that instead of some stationary, rubber stamps, hairbrushes, and a microwave egg cooker.

Having conquered Printemps, we marched to the Place de la Madeleine, where the best of the best of Paris delis compete with one another: Fouchon versus Laduree versus Hediard. You can tell from the little puddles of drool in front of the windows which one is winning on any given day. We wandered through all three, bagging some tea in Fouchon and macarons in Laduree. The macaron is one of the delicacies closest to ambrosia, the food of the gods, and the sweet filled cookies have a price to go with their taste. One doesn't eat a macaron, one savors it, taking in the delicate outer crust, the tender, chewy middle, and the sweet and contrasting filling. Beth's favorite flavors are pistacchio and caramel, mine are cafe (coffee) and caramel. These are entirely unrelated to coconut macaroons, which while tasty, are very terrestrial when compared with Laduree's ambrosia. We did not sample the package, but tucked it safely into another bag and set out for home.

On the way back to our hotel, we shopped along the rue St. Honore, which evidently has been weakening men and accessorizing women since the 1600s when it began as a chic shopping district. In my ever-weakening state, I became convinced that someone had moved our hotel several miles further to the east, and I realized belatedly that we should have taken the Metro back to the hotel. Finally we spotted l'Hotel de Ville (City Hall, which is hard to miss and is close to our hotel), and I knew I would live to survive another day in Paris.

Nearby, we popped into a Supermarche, which is brand of grocery store that is anything but a supermarket by American standards, being little larger than a Holiday gas station, minus the gas. We bought some lovely smoked ham and chocolate, and had a little picnic in our room with the bread, pain au chocolat, croissant, and kiwi fruit left over from breakfast. Then we savored our macarons and daydreamed about the Elysian Fields. We toiled for an hour or two over our French assignment, made a reservation for a Louvre museum tour with a company called Paris Muse for Monday morning, and put the day to bed.

Before I go for the day let me mention that everywhere we go we see cell phones, and people talking constantly. Interestingly, we see very few Ipods. Like I've said already, the French like to talk. This culture seems to be more relationship based, and less productivity or privacy obsessed, than ours. Interesting.

Tomorrow: when the going gets tough...

No comments: