Gooooooood morning Chocolat Pain! Well its another warm and sunny day in Paris and we are preparing to depart tomorrow morning after our all too brief stay in this lovely city. Preparations of course mean a trip to a supermarket for vittles, finding a suitable fuelling point and discovering a way to store indefinitely 3 gross of croissants, Pain au chocolat and other sundry perishables. Yesterday was a strolling day which started with a run! Mairi found a track called the Promenade Plantee from the Arsenal to the Bois de Vincennes. The track is along a disused viaduct which has been planted out to make it a pretty green thread through the city. As she ran I made my way to the nearest local flea market to nose around the stalls and see what the hoi polloi had been throwing out this week. It turned out that the market was mostly fruit and veg with an indoor portion for all the meats and fish. Mairi and I were supposed to meet there but we missed each other somehow so she headed back to the boat as I searched for a coffee and my favourite 11ses, a jambon and emmental baguette. One thing we have found in Paris is that their baguettes are a lot firmer than their country cousins in the North. When we met up back at the boat we turned around and headed out to the Tuileries for a stroll around the gardens and to take in the sights. I wanted to use one of the rental bikes (OMG did I just say that?) that you find in stands all over the city however Mairi persuaded me to take the Metro from the Bastille. We bought our tickets and descended into the bowels of the city to get on a train that was bulging with life. We only had about four or five stops to go but after one we were both in need of some cool air. We had deliberately dressed for a sunny day with our lightest clothing but the Parisiennes were walking about with overcoats and scarves on! The net effect of having a closed metal tube stuffed like a sardine can full of eskimos was that the ambient temperature had rocketed around us and it was like standing fully clad in the worlds busiest sauna that smelt slightly of poo! Sorry about that last reference but anyone who has spent any time at all in France knows that no matter where you go you will always get a whiff of the sewer system. I even had to move on from browsing in Cartiers window later due to this very phenomenon. You really would think that if you were going to shell out the equivalent of the UKs health budget on a pinky ring, the last thing you would want was to step out of the shop and get a smell of poo as your abiding memory of the event! But I digress, again! We finally were disgorged from our sweaty chariot at the Tuileries and headed in for some horticultural wonders. It was wonderful, if you like paths and lawns! Ok, there was the occasional fountain and some installation art but really its mostly just a big path filled with thousands of other people looking around for some flowers. The art on display was the kind that makes you think. You look at it and you think, that is truly crap! Some of it I could not even be bothered to photograph. Examples that did not make my camera for posterity were as follows; 1) An old bike with as many building bricks piled on it as the artist could balance there. Have a look on Google and youll find a photo of some Albanian with exactly the same set up, twice as many bricks and hell be riding it too! 2) About 20 machine cut blocks of granite lying randomly about in the middle of the path. Again folks, I ask you? Have you ever had the builders in or gone to Miller Plant Hire? If you have I bet you didnt realise that you were witnessing art in the making! 3) Something called Standing Figures. Basically do you remember back in art class when you were given plasticene to create something with? Well there was always some geeky type who would set about theirs with one of those scrapy tools and end up with a pretty fair likeness of Batman or the Houses of Parliament whilst the rest of us art remedials would roll ours into a large sausage, put two lumps at the bottom and sit back to admire our newly made nob! Had I only known back then the fame and fortune that could have been mine had I only taken two of those nobs, mashed them together at the base, used a bike pump to inflate them to the size of a caravan and voila - Standing Figures. Anyhow after this surfeit of right brain stimulation we needed some caffeine and a light lunch. Rather un-surprisingly the Tuileries have facilities onsite to cater for this so we headed off towards the nearest which was just beside where the French used to exercise their horses. We sat down with memories of Mairi sipping her orchid tea in the Salon du The at Compiegne as the waiter turned up, sneered at us whilst handing us the menu and saying Eenglish, yes? Once this had been confirmed he rattled off the menu for us which consisted of such French delicacies as Lasagne, Omlette and Baguettes. We picked the Baguettes which arrived with our coffee in due course. I could see why the French brought their horses there, you needed to use their teeth to get through the armour plated baguette! We did enjoy the sunshine however and we sat happily watching people go by as we sipped our cafe au lait and used the railing around the pond to break off another morsel of sandwich. After our installation lunch (I felt like laying the remains of my sandwich alongside the granite blocks) we wandered off to the Place du Concord which surprisingly did not contain any planes. From the square we walked up the miracle mile towards the opera house. We passed shops that made us feel like we were the little kid cycling the Hovis loaf up the street. Virtually every expensive shop that Posh Spice has ever been in was represented here. Each doorway contained a large man in an expensive suit whose face said If that bulge in your jacket is not a wallet stuffed with bankers bonds then just keeping walking! Its amazing how the smaller an item gets in this street, the more expensive it becomes! We were however on a mission at this point. Laura Muir had challenged us to find a Laduree shop and buy a cake to eat. Well we found the shop, the window was an installation in macaroons, the highly polished brass plate outside confirmed our destination. We entered the shop stood there for fully five minutes in a queue that Justin Bieber would have been envious of and then left empty handed. To be honest neither of us could be bothered waiting all that time in line for what, admittedly, may have been the best and most expensive macaroon on the planet - our cake consumption as witnessed on these posts, Im afraid is more by speed and quantity rather than quality. Moving on past the Opera House, Mairi finally got religion - we had found the Galeries Lafayette which is like Harrods for the French. I say she got religion because I have never seen such a shrine to overt consumption as this place was (see pics). The worlds finest cathedrals pale into mere buildings compared to the internal architecture in this place. After a short shopping spree we retired to the other small nondescript building they had, which housed the blokes bit along with the food hall. We know our place. The light was going from the day as we made our way back to Notre Dame where we sat in a bandstand looking at the building whilst Americans went past talking about Noter Dame, Japanese took photos and one bloke stood on his head in front of the main door praying loudly! I looked at the detail in the stonework and said to Mairi that I doubted if any of the artists whose work we had seen in the Tuileries could match this for craftsmanship. So feeling smug about my condescending attitude and as a result feeling strangely more like a waiter, we headed off to find a restaurant before getting back to Avilan. The lovely Beaurepaire Café Restaurant met our needs and our waitress, who was Spanish and also spoke perfect English was great. She told us that she was an actress who had worked in both film and TV in Spain who had moved to Paris because she just loved the French. Good luck KATIA KLEIN maybe one day well see you in the movies! With full stomachs we headed back to Avilan taking one or two more shots en-route. And to think - today will be just the same as yesterday! Oh the terrible ennui of life! How shall we bear this torture? Right Im off to find out why macaroons are such highly prized biscuits and then perhaps get a cartoon made of myself by some bohemian, struggling young artist who will suffer the agonies of taking my money for his output. Bon Journee as they say over here! R. xx
Posted on: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 11:18:59 +0000
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