Un Mélange

This post is actually meant for tomorrow, Sunday the 17th, but we have an early morning, so I'm posting it at 10:30 pm Saturday night. Sorry, there will be no deliveries on Sunday.

The last few posts have been rather heavy duty, I’ll admit it. I’m not apologizing for that, I’m just acknowledging the fact. The last thing I want to be is a casse-pieds (a bore), and risk losing the few readers I have, just because I want to pontificate on some outlandish or obscure subject. A few of my faithful readers (actually, I’m afraid there are only a few readers, period, never mind any faithful ones) have e-mailed me some comments, but not having permission from them to post them to the site, the rest of you will just have to imagine their glowing praises of my prose. Any and all are welcome to join the blog and make up your own praises of my prose, or give the electronic version of a raspberry if you like.

Today I plan to keep it light and fast-paced, making this post a mélange of sorts. First off, an admission: when I left home with everything but the kitchen sink, electronically speaking, I searched frantically for the CD-ROM for our digital camera’s upload program. I couldn’t find it anywhere, and the Sony website didn’t allow online downloads of the program, so I have a disconnect between my digital camera and everything else digital, including this blog. Thus, all the lovely pictures you’ve seen on the posts have been uploaded to the blog from the internet. I have my own photos of all these things, mind you; I just can’t get them out of my camera. Also, the few I had on the computer from last year’s trip are so large (2 megs or so) that they take a lifetime to upload to the Blogger.com website. You probably would have never noticed that Beth and I never appear in the photos, but I just had to get it off my chest.

While sitting at the Metro Café on Boulevard St. Germain this afternoon, a couple took the table next to us, and their 2 whippets sat under the table for the whole meal. This despite a veritable parade of other dogs, some on leashes, some not. Children came and admired the dogs, thousands of people passed by (it was a grand afternoon for people watching on a very busy street), and the dogs never moved a muscle. Pippin and Buddy would have torn their necks out of their collars, chased the other dogs, cats, children, and motos, ultimately meeting their frenzied end under the wheels of a cranky taxi. The French must have some secret medicine they feed their pets to make them behave so well in public. I wish I could get the recipe, but the French are notoriously bad about giving out their recipes. Something about pearls before swine…

Some favorite books about France from our collection: Paris to the Moon, by Adam Gopnik, a collection of essays from the New Yorker magazine written over a 5 year period while he lived in Paris. OK, I’ll admit it, I would love for my posts to be compared with Gopnik in some kind of favorable light, but I certainly plan to keep my day job for now. Almost French by Sarah Turnbull is another lovely story about Sarah, an Australian girl who meets and marries a Frenchman, and slowly becomes assimilated into French culture, but not without a lot of funny and poignant escapades, all told from a bemused (and sometimes confused) Anglo point of view.

Anything by Peter Mayle is wonderful: A Year in Provence, Encore Provence, A Good Year. Mayle is a Brit who worked in advertising mostly in New York, and upon retiring decided to by and renovate a run down old house in Provence, in southern France. The first two books detail his own cross-cultural adventures in France with gentle humor and self-deprecation, and the third book is one of the latest in a long line of novels. A Good Year is due out in November as a major motion picture, with Russel Crowe as Max, the stud banker who loses his job and inherits a vineyard in southern France. Albert Finney and Abby Cornish co-star, and Ridley Scott directs…

As far as guidebooks go, our number 1 choice is anything from publisher Dorling Kindersley. Their guides are accurate, tell all the goodies about what you are interested in, and have absolutely stunning photographs, maps, and diagrams. This book is worth buying even if you never travel to France, if only for the 3 dimensional cutaway drawing of Notre Dame—it’s incredibly detailed and fascinating enough to look at just for the fun of it. Their big book is just called France (Eyewitnes Travel Guide). They also have a series called Eyewitness Top 10 Travel Guides; the one we have is Top 10 Paris. All have excellent maps, including one of the Paris subway, bus, and RER train system. Check them out next time you are in the bookstore: we have several guides for cities we will probably never visit (see my previous post about my bookaholism). We have numerous books, CDs, DVD series, and internet sites for learning French, but I won’t go into detail on these. Suffice it to say that, in 5 lessions with Marguerite (http://www.frenchasyoulikeit.com/) , Beth and I have both gone far beyond what we learned in the books. There is no substitute for live learning. In Paris.

We were inadvertently caught in a technofest along the rue de Rivoli this afternoon. The roads were virtually shut down as thousands of ravers and clubbers descended upon the otherwise quiet Marais. Large flatbed semis hauled DJs, dancers, and HUGE speakers slowly around the quarter, blasting techno and rave music while young people clogged the streets dancing, milling around, and yelling. We quickly exited to the north along rue Vieille du Temple to find respite in the relative quiet there. We passed a young lady pulling on the lead of one of the tiniest Chihuahua’s I’ve ever seen, shouting “chien mechant! Chien mechant!” (Naughty dog!). It just struck me funny that this girl was so frustrated with a creature that she could have stuffed into her sock or purse. I suppose I’ll find out just how frustrating a little pipsqueak can be when our adoption goes through…

Well, we did it: we went back to the Artisanats des Monasteres de Bethleem store on rue Gregoire de Tours, and bought statues of Mary, Joseph, baby Jesus, a manger, the Magi, shepherds, a camel, donkey, ox, ewe, and a star, all in dolomite (crushed stone and resin) and hand painted by the friars and nuns of the monasteries. Together, they weigh probably 40 pounds, and would cost too much to ship, so we will be taking them in our carry-ons for the flight back. I can already imagine the faces of the baggage inspection people when they look in the X-ray machine at 13 statues in two bags. We plan to get to the airport early, and wear clean underwear, because a strip search is almost certain.

Yesterday, after our epiphany in Pere Lachaise cemetery, we did what we usually do to recover: we went shopping. GalFriday had emailed us a list of “cheap chic” stores on the outskirts of central Paris where designers sell last year’s lines at steep discounts. The area is south of Montparnasse at the intersection of rue d’Alesia and Avenue du Maine, almost at the very end of the #4 Metro line. While we didn’t care for the Sonia Rykiel designs from last year (or this, for that matter), we found a whole bunch of great boutiques and overstock stores with Parisian chic that fit Midwesterners’ budgets. We bought several very nice things (Italian dress shirts for $18 each), and Beth promises to wear on the airplane the dress boots she bought, because I know they are not going to fit in the suitcase.

My guess is that I will be wearing ALL the clothes I brought along on the airplane home, because we still have 6 days left in Paris, and no room left in the suitcases or carry-ons…