A Long Day in Paris

     We had met a German couple at the Opera, who recommended that we check out the Musee de Chatelet in the Marais district of Paris. I had never heard of it, but we decided to take their recommendation and head over on Sunday.

Marais means swamp, and apparently the area used to be a swamp, before it was drained in the seventeenth century. It then became a fashionable district for the nobility until the rise of Versailles. The brief boom that the area experienced left the neighborhood with a lot of wonderful seventeenth century buildings, one of which houses the Musee de Chatelet—a small museum that tells the history of Paris. Because the museum was smaller than the more famous galleries, it didn’t get as much tourist traffic, and even on a Sunday there was plenty of room to breath. The downside of this, however, meant that there were no signs in English, and a lot of the time I had to guess what it was we were looking at. The museum had a lot of random things in it; my favorite exhibit was a collection of old French shop signs. Apparently merchants in the olden days would advertise by hanging a big picture of whatever it was they were selling. This is all well and good when the wine merchant hangs a bottle of wine outside his shop, but there were some really bizarre ones. My favorite was a surgeon whose sign was a huge bronze hand with a tumor on it.

The museum went through different centuries in Paris. Each century had a room that was decorated as if from the time period. Apparently the French were really into porcelain and print wallpaper. There was also an involved exhibit on the French revolution and the rise of Napoleon, but I could only understand about half of it.

After the museum we stopped into a patisserie for thick slices of quiche and a French dessert (pain au chocolat for me and a fruit tart for Katie, delicious) and then we walked around the district for a bit, which housed the Jewish quarter of Paris. There are no Jews in London, which has been a little strange for me. I’m not exactly a practicing Jew (I didn’t even Bat Mitzvah), but London has made me feel very Jewish because I’m the only one around. I can’t say I felt more at home in the Jewish quarter of Paris, but it was refreshing to see challah in shop windows. I had missed hamintashin (spelling?) season in London, and we tried to find some in the Jewish boulangeries that lined the streets, but we couldn’t find any.  

Katie wanted to see a production of La Cantatrice Chauve that was playing, so we hopped the metro to get to the theater to buy tickets for that night. When we got to the theater, however, it was closed, so that was too bad. We spent the rest of the time walking around the area where the theater had been, which took us into French Chinatown. Katie had heard that they have Coco Cola Black in France, a new version of Coke that is coffee flavored. We decided to try and find it to taste, but everywhere we went didn’t have it. We kept seeing signs for it, but every restaurant, tabac, and convenience store that we tried didn’t stock it. After a while we followed the large boulevards out of Chinatown and ended up at the Place de la Republique. Apparently there were riots there while we were staying in Paris, but I didn’t hear about that until after we had left.

We decided to consult the guidebook, and realized that the Musee D’orsay wouldn’t be opened on Monday. We rushed to the metro to try and get there, but we arrived just as it was closing.
It was too bad to miss the museum, but the metro ride had taken us to the oh so artsy left bank (the most elegant neighborhood in Paris, according to the guidebook). We walked around some more, and ended up by the Sorbonne, which had armed guards stationed on every corner. Probably because of the riots and civil unrest that we didn’t see, but I can’t be sure. We went up to the Pantheon, which is a large church on the top of the hill in the Latin Quarter. They were having a daffodil festival there in honor of Marie Curie. There was a parade and people on stilts and unicycles, all carrying daffodils. The Pantheon itself was covered in Daffodils, and there were even snowmen with daffodil faces. We each bought a daffodil, which they were selling to benefit Cancer research.

We decided to go out for a fancy French meal that night, and settled on a Brasserie that our guidebook recommended called Le Petit Prince. It wasn’t wildly expensive, and the food was amazing, although I can’t be sure exactly what I ordered because the menu was in French. We both went for things that we’d never tried before. Katie had a Camembert crème brulee, which was amazing, and I tasted rabbit for the first time. I actually really liked it; I just had to think of it as a mystery meat called lapin rather than an innocent bunny. Katie had veal for an entrée as well, so the meal was not very PETA friendly, though very very tasty.

Because we couldn’t go see a show that night we decided to do the Eifel Tower instead. The tower looked gorgeous, lit up in the night (it’s actually quite ugly when you see it in the day time) but going up it made me uncomfortable. I don’t mind crowds, and I’m not afraid of heights. I think it was just my tourism anxiety kicking in. I didn’t hear French spoken once around the tower. The view from the top really was excellent though, and they don’t call Paris the city of lights for nothing. I kept thinking how amazing it must have been to see that thing when it was first built. It’s still amazing in 2006, but in 1889 it would have seemed like a miracle that anything could be so tall.

That night we were exhausted from all the walking around and heavy eating. We were planning to get dessert after the tower (we had been too full at the restaurant, and it’s a shame to miss a day of dessert in Paris) but in the end we just went back and went to sleep. We missed so many things that day—the play, the Museum, but we had seen so much of Paris that it was worth it. I’m glad we got to see so much by foot because it gave me a feel for how the city was laid out. That night I conked out as soon as my head touched the pillow, it had been a long day.