Back in Paris

Which, I just noticed, was also the title of my last post, which included an unfulfilled promise to blog about our visit last summer.  Oh well.  

Anyway we are here, with everyone in the family plus cousing Alexandre.  We arrived-- when?  I'm in that stage when I have no sense of time-- yesterday noontime, met Alexandre off his plane, coped with the usual lost luggage (Eden's, finally delivered today, and good for 100 euros in shopping money), napped, and headed out.

First stop was the Village de Noel, what they call a Christmas Market, at Trocadero, across the bridge from the Eiffel Tower.  It's a liitle craft market, basically, the usual scarves and producteurs of local food of one kind or another, hot mulled wine and hot chocolate.  At the top of Trocadero there is what was advertised as a skating rink, but it was actually a little pathetic, maybe a thirty foot oval that had turned to slush, but people were dutifully pushing themselves around it.  We don't like to skate much anyway.

After the walk we headed to dinner at what has become our favoritie bistro in the neighborhood, Le Casse Noix, or nutcracker.  It is a typical tiny Parisian bistro, maybe 10 tables, an unbelievably small kitchen, and a chalkboard.  We were the only Americans in there.  The fixed price menu came supplemented with items on the chalkboard, most of all of which were an extra five euros or so over the fixed price.  I don't usually feel the need.  They start you with a chicken liver pate, soft and mild, served in a little long dish like one of those things you see in the US for serving olives all lined up.  Great bread.  Then most of the kids had scallops sauteed with pumpkin, pieces of bacon, and salad.  Carol and Alexandre had the house pate de campagne (with a jar of amazing cornichons), and I had tete de veau.  Tete de veau is the kind of thing you see a lot in France, made from the fattier parts of meat, in fact the parts where the meat has turned halfway to buttery fat.  Pigs feet are the same way.  Anyway it is what it sounds like, meat from the head, mixed in with fat, pressed into a soft patty, dipped in bread crombs and fried until it is crisp on the outside.  I know, but I love it, it's decadent.  For dessert CAM had tarte tatin, there were those little chocalate cakes with the runny centers, their amazing rice pudding that comes with a little crock of hot caramel to pour over it.  I had the cheese plate, a robluchon, a chevre and a brebis, the latter is always served with a little jam, in this case black cherry,  Amazing.  Went home and conked out.

It rained all night, and it is dark here in the morning anyway.  At 730 it was still pitch black and people woke up slowly.  We had planned to run but it was just to cold and rainy so we hung around, drank coffee, and finally by 1030 or so everyone was ready to head out to the market, which is Wednesday and Sunday morning.  Our friends Sandy, Philippe, Steve and Moulane are coming for dinner tonight.  As usual I paid too much for the meat, two big chickens, but it was worth it for the show.  They sat in the case with their heads hanging down, and once I chose them the butcher made a big production of chopping off the heads and feet (I saved the feet for soup), pulling out the gizzard and livers and carefully trimming them, tying everything up, all the while joking and asking whether I wanted things done this way or that.  In the long run it is too expensive to actually buy meat in the market, it is 20% less in a butcher on the street, and half that in a supermarket, but I say that every time.  I got potatoes to roast, a huge bag of fresh spinach, stuff to make soup with the chicken trimmings, so other than the chickens it wasn't too much.  I have to start cooking soon, come to think of it.

Then it was on to lunch, at a place we have been trying to get to for a while:  The Cabane a Huitres, the Oyster Cabin, over by the Tour Montparnasse.  It was closed the last couple of times we tried.  This place is really tiny, maybe four tables, and the menu, in its entirety, is:  first a dozen oysters or foie gras, followed by duck pate, smoked salmon, or foie gras if you got the oysters to start.  Four of us got the oysters, little tiny ones served with lemon and bread and butter, which is apparently how the French eat them, butter on bread plus an oyster.  Pretty amazing.  Manning and Alexandre looked a little horrified by soldiered through their platters.  They served the kids wine, without comment.  Great foie gras, wonderful bread, the smoked salmon that the non-oyster people had was great too.  Nice people, too.  The table of businessmen next to us, in suits, were there when we arrived and there when we left, working on their third bottle of wine.  

On the way home we stopped at the Museum of the French Resistance, which didn't amount to too much, mostly a bunch of old posters and photographs.  More than anything it was a little depressing to see all the documentation of the occupation and the Vichy collaboration.  It is in one of those ugly 70's buildings that seem to be left over from the French flirtation with the Soviets back then.  Big concrete plazas with no one on them, buildings that must have been designed to look sleek but don't age well.  It's good that the Parisians have gotten over the impulse to "modernize" the city.

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Back in Paris

It's been a while since I have posted anything here, as in a couple of years. Oh, well. CAM and I are back in Paris, no kids. CAM has a scientific meeting out at the Expo Center at Porte de Versailles, which is where she is now. It's pouring out, so it seems like a good time to hole up in this hotel room and write.

The reason I am in a hotel room instead of in our apartment is that the place is rented for a couple of days. So we are in the Hotel Sevres Saint Germain until tomorrow. It's nice enough, although it serves as a reminder of why staying in an apartment is a pretty good deal in Paris. We are paying 170 euros a night for a room that is just a little bit bigger than the double bed it contains, looking out over a courtyard with no sun. The staff is nice, but it is by no means a luxury hotel. Plus, it is entirely populated by tourists, obviously. For 170/night you can get an awfully nice apartment, with a kitchen, etc. For a little more than that you can get our apartment, with plenty of room for four adults or a couple and some kids, plenty of sunlight, away from the tourists.

The hotel is in the 6eme, off the Rue de Rennes and Rue du Cherch Midi, a very nice left-bank neighborhood, a little higher end than our area in the 15th. It doesn't make me wish our apartment was here, though. The price you pay for the tonier neighborhood is higher prices for everything, from the cafe on the corner to the patisseries. And especially this time of year, when the Parisians are starting to leave town for August, a good quarter of the voices on the street are speaking English. In the neighborhood, we had coffee this morning at the Cafe Nemrod (I wonder what that means in French? Where does the old insult nimrod come from in English?) Cafes are one of those French institutions that don't vary much in some ways. They all have the canopies over outside seating at the little round tables that people sit all on one side of facing the street. they all have a few tables inside, and a bar, usually metal, where you can order a coffee to drink standing in the morning, while watching the odd collection of workers and nicely dressed old ladies downing beers or strangely colored aperitifs at 830 in the morning. They all have food, amazingly elaborate food by American standards, but usually routine on a French scale. They differ in how nice the people are there, how much they go out of their way to make sure you spend a couple of pleasant moments there. Kind of like hotel staff, who can either do their job routinely or act like they actually care about looking after you. Anyway the Nemrod is really nice, beautifully taken care of, and the waiter was willing to engage us in French, making jokes, bringing us little glasses of water (no ice of course) with our coffees. We'll go back tomorrow and he will remember us.




We had lunch yesterday in a wonderful little place CAM found in the 14eme called L'Atelier d'Antan (Old-fashioned Workshop, sounds better in French). It is tiny, maybe eight or nine tables, with a little bar in the back, run by a man named M. Alcaraz, which I know because he had a big diploma from some cooking instate up on the wall. His wife waits on the tables, he supervises the kitchen and runs the bar and schmoozes all the customers. The food was wonderful, simple and homey. CAM started with a pate de poisons, mostly salmon, a light pink slab with a little salad on the side and a dollop of wonderful homemade mayonnaise, one of those pleasures that you wouldn't know existed in the US. I had a terrine de a little crock of pate-type pork (innards, probably) with pieces of toast and cornichons. Then CAM had a sauté of veal, c common lunch dish here, pieces of veal sautéed in butter and flour and served with in its brown gravy. My main course was wonderful: swordfish (espadon, I think) which was just incredibly well cooked, it tasted as though it had been infused with butter somehow, and then roasted at high temperature so the whole rim of it got dark brown and crunch, while the inside just oozed slightly salty fish-juice and butter. Amazing. It came with ratatouille on the side. Really great. We skipped dessert.



One mysterious story. There was a gentleman sitting next to us, eating alone. Maybe 65. He got up to leave before we did, said goodby to the proprietors (they knew everyone in there except us) and walked out, leaving his cell phone on the table. CAM said excuse me, Monsieur, your mobile, and he said, oh no, I make a habit of leaving it here and left. The wife came over, caught Carol's eye, so Carl smiled and said oh I thought Monsieur left his mobile. The woman said oh no, it's mine. She then started to make up the table, and when she set down the napkin, she carefully folded the cell phone inside, so it was sitting next to the place setting. Does the guy come back for dinner, and always expect his cell phone there? I don't get it, and we didn't ask. No way to say, Hey, what gives with the cell phone in the napkin, to a proprietress of a nice French restaurant in Paris. Not with my French, anyway. More later. One more try to get a photo into this stupid program....

Location:Paris, France

Le Socialisme Francaise

M. and I actually had a long conversation about this sitting in a cafe the other day. We had visited a bakery in the morning, via a little outfit that arranges visits to traditional French businesses. This was a tiny traditional place in the 18th, on the back side of Sacre Coeur from Montmartre. It was owned by a thirty-something couple who had inherited it from her father. The visit itself was cool, everything happens down in the basement, with 100 year old brick ovens and mixing machines that look like they came out of a factory in 1905.

The wife was supposed to be doing most of the talking, but after a while the husband, who was supposed to be making croissants, warmed to the audience and got rolling. Like most French businessmen, like most businessmen anywhere, he complained. He busts his ass, works 14 hours a day six days a week, he and his wife barely see each other because he works all night and she runs the shop all day. And for what? It's impossible to make any money, because there are 112 bakeries in the 18th arrondissement alone. Multiply that by 20 arrondissements, some of them a lot bigger and more populous than the 18th, and that's maybe 2,500 bakeries in Paris. They all make essentially the same thing, and they are all required by law to charge exactly the same for it. A baguette here is one euro, and it is better, by far, than anything you can get in the US. Well, in Cville, there is exactly one bakery that makes bread on that level, and they get three bucks for a baguette. The guy was amazed that anyone could charge like that for bread.

It's the same question I always ask while I am in the Grenelle market. How can there possibly be three wonderful fish stands within 100 yards of each other in the same market? They all sell the same thing, and they all charge more or less the same, though I don't think there is a law about fish the way there is for bread. The answer is that the markets are all rigged here, the various shops aren't really competing with each other. So the whole system is just a step away from some kind of Soviet deal where there is a ministry of bakeries that produces everything that people eat. Presumably Soviet bread was terrible, like most American bread turned out by giant corporate free-enterprise conglomerates. Yet somehow it works here.... the bread is great, the fish is wonderful. But that hard-working baker can't get rich, he is stuck grinding it out for a (I would guess) very basic middle-class income.

I have a conservative Republican friend who I sit and argue with every week or so. He teases me about spending time in France because it is anathema to the Fox News crowd, the ultimate example of a place where big government has their jackboot on the neck of the average man (he doesn't really talk like that, but lots of people do). But he does seem to think that I am a little crazy to want to spend time in a place that is less than perfectly free, as though I had bought an apartment in North Korea. But it doesn't seem that way once you are here, moment to moment it seems just as free as the US. You can go where you want, say what you want read what you want, just like anywhere else.

But I guess you can't make money like you want, and that says something about why liberals are liberal and conservatives are conservative. Economic freedoms are mostly lost on me. I always feel a little guilty at tax time, because I don't really care about paying taxes. All that Republican outrage that it is OUR money just doesn't bother me. I work in an "industry" where there are thousands of professors turning out more or less the same product and getting paid more or less the same amount of money. I could never live anywhere that was on the one hand entrepreneurial but on the other politically repressed. Singapore, I guess, where you can be busted for chewing gum on the street but it's every man for himself in the marketplace.

Anyway, Western Europe puts the lie to all the nonsense in the US about socialism. It's not that I necessarily think that the US needs to transform itself into Sweden, but it is certainly the case that Western Europe has shown that something like democratic socialism is possible to one degree or another. That Fox News meme that national health insurance is just one step away from the Soviet Union circa 1973 is just wrong. In the US, sooner or later one of the bakeries in the 18th would do a better job than the others, sell decent bread for a little less, force most of the other bakeries out of business, open up a big bread factory somewhere and supply everyone with crappy bread while the lucky, or talented, or hardworking bakery owner got really wealthy. Is that better than having a state-supported system that manages to turn out first-rate bread for a buck and a quarter a loaf, at the price of denying bakers the opportunity to strike it rich?

Location:Rue d'Ouessant,Paris,France

Meals so Far

A nice thing about having a home here is that not all the meals so far have occurred in restaurants, though of course meals in Paris restaurants aren't exactly a hardship. But at my age I do find that eating out day in and day out here does eventually wear me out, it gets to be just too much rich food, never mind the wine, and so it is nice to be able to take a meal off from time to time and eat leftovers out of the frig like in real life. Plus it saves money, of course.

When we arrived on Saturday we wanted someplace quiet and in the neighborhood, because we knew we would be exhausted. We selected Marie Edith, which is just a metro stop down on the Rue Cambronne.




Yay... the photo tool seems to work on this (fairly crummy, actually) blog app. Anyway, we had a wonderful meal. Running down everything that everyone had would take a while and might get a little boring. Let's see, I started with a terrine of oxtail, served room temperature, basically a pate to be spread on bread and eaten with little cornichons. Then I had duck confit, a simple bistro standard here. Confit is duck, in this case a leg, which is cooked slowly in duck fat, after which it can be stored in the fat inside a crock for a long time. Then to prepare it, they just put it under a broiler to crisp up the skin. Nothing fancy, and it wasn't the best confit I have ever had, but it was good, and it came with wonderful roast potatoes, which may have been why I ordered it. I was tired and wanted comfort food. All three girls had the salad de chevre chaud first, it's a family favorite. Little round pieces of chevre (crottins) put under the broiler to brown and soften them, then placed on a salad with vinaigrette. This one came covered with little slightly sour red berries that we thought were pomegranate seeds but weren't, and the waiter couldn't come up with an English word for them
L. just informed me that she actually had ravioli first, homemade and basically just in butter. M. had joue de boeuf, beef cheek, which is a cut of beef slow-stewed until it is very soft, served in a wine and meat reduction. I don't think it is literally the cheek... maybe the butt cheek? Not sure, but it was very good, tender to the point of falling apart. Classic french desserts: oeuf a la neige (egg in snow.... I don't have my dessert expert here at the moment, but a concoction of meringue and cream), creme brulee, dark chocolate cake. All in all not great but delicious, and basically what we were looking for on our first night. Comforting.

Sunday we had our friends Sandy and Philippe over for our first homemade dinner. Sunday is market day on the Rue de Grenelle, so in the morning I set out to find things for dinner. I thought I would buy fish at one of the two or three amazing, and virtually identical, fish stands in the market. I think I have said before that if any one of these were in the US, it would be the best fish market within 100 miles. Dozens of varieties of fresh fish, and an old-fashioned fish-guy who asks you how you want it prepared, filleted, skin removed, etc. I decided on salmon, and for the second time in two tries got a little snookered by the fish guy (it was the butcher last time). I asked for a kilo and a half of salmon, the guy grabs a piece, throws it on the scale and says, in very rapid French, It's 1.9, is that OK? I am already really nervous about conducting this business in French, there is a line behind me, so I figure keep it simple and say, sure, and wind up with 50% more salmon than I really need, since I was estimating high to start with. And they don't give it away, it isn't a whole lot more expensive than a nice piece of salmon at a good market in the US, but it isn't a lot cheaper, either, even with the dollar a little stronger than it has been recently.

So I wind up with too much salmon, added some little potatoes and beautiful French green beans (which I realized later were exactly the vegetables I bought when Sandy and Philippe came over to our rented place on Easter, under these new circumstances I guess I go with what feels safe.) This time I boiled the potatoes instead of roasting them, served them in butter and parsley. The butter here, even in the supermarket, is noticeably better than back home, and the bother you get from the little cheese stands in the market, made at some farm somewhere, is just out of this world. Oh, that's what butter is supposed to taste like, you think. Sandy and Philippe brought wine and cheese, including a Brebis from Basque that was wonderful, we crowded ourselves around the little four person table and various couches and chairs, the windows open so the breeze could blow though, and had a wonderful time. A fruit tart from the market for dessert.

Well, CAM and E. aren't back yet, so I'll keep going. Monday night we ate at La Regalade, a place that CAM and I visited a couple of years ago, and is now open in a new location.


The general trend here is that each meal has been a little better than the one before. L Regalade is a step up from Marie Edith fanciness-wise, slightly more expensive, and a little less traditional. It is possible to get bored with traditional French bistro food if you eat too much of it. There is so much UPDATED bistro food here, though, that it doesn't really matter.

Anyway, I had a modified gazpacho first, a cold tomato broth pureed with peppers, surprisingly spicy for France, with roasted shrimp and fennel greens sprinkled on top. Then, for a main course, I had poitrine de porc, which was just amazing. Poitrine means chest, but this is pork belly, a rectangle three inches long and an inch high, layered with fat and meat, slow roasted until the fat is running, the meat brown, and everything falling apart like pulled pork, sitting in its juice and little tiny French lentils. M. had a deconstructed lasagna first, big wide noodles baked with cheese and basil. He then had pork belly with me. The girls all had foie gras first, mi-suit (half cooked) in little slices lined up on a plate with slices of baguette. CAM rarely passes up a foie gras opportunity. Then the girls had risotto for the main course, topped with a chicken breast stuffed with the liver, which I got to eat in both cases. CAM had a saute of veal.

It was a truly wonderful meal, with wonderful service, but I am going to lodge a small complaint. I notice on the menus lately that they advertise, say a menu for 30 euros, entree main course and dessert. Then, half of the choices on the menu are labeled with "supplement." So the lamb chop is supplement 6 euros etc. They can charge whatever they want, but at some point all the supplements kills the original point of the fixed-price menu, which is to relieve you from worrying too much about money while you order your meal. I don't like having to worry about whether it is worth it to order one of the expensive items, or whether it is OK if one of the kids orders it.

Location:Square de La Motte Picquet,Paris,France

Finally at Home in Paris

So after all this time we are finally in Paris together staying in our apartment. It's Monday afternoon, we have been here since Saturday, and already we have done so much that I feel like it I can't write it all down. But anyway the apartment is beautiful, the renovations complete, and it has been completely furnished by ParisPerfect, or they have finished whatever part of the furnishing that we didn't get done when we were here in April. In fact the truth is they have done most of it. It's all quite nice, some of the various pictures and furnitures and chothckes aren't exactly what I or we would have picked, but it's here. We have to pay them for all of it if we are going to keep it.

For the moment, no pictures, other than what you can see online, at,

http://www.parisperfect.com/apartments-for-rent-in-paris/quincy.php

I am sitting at the table pictured here... can I insert a photo directly? I am working on my Ipad, not so good for advanced editing.

http://www.parisperfect.com/g/photos/apartments/large_135568077-1273569550-french-dining-table-paris-perfect-apartments.jpg

Today we had just the kind of day I wanted to make sure we had while we were here for two weeks. Not full of activities, just hanging around and doing whatever. M. and L. (17 and 14) are late sleepers, so E. CAM and I got out to run at 9:00 or so, ran three laps around the Champs de Mars, we were home by 10:00 or so and the other kids still weren't up. We brought back some pastries and made toast, which slowly got them going. It then took quite a while to get all the beds put back together and the place straightened up. It's tight in here for all five of us. CAM and I get the nice bedroom, L. gets the pull-out sofa in the second bedroom with the double doors to the living room, and E. and M. get the two twins that open up from the couch in the living room. They are very nice convertibles, but still, when they are all open there isn't a whole lot of room to move around.

We also got the dishwasher and washing machine going for the first time. You wouldn't think standard household appliances would be as different as they are in Europe. Washer/dryers in particular are completely incomprehensible. In the many apartments we have rented over the years I have never felt as though I actually figured one out. Because we are tight for space, we have a "combination" washer-dryer that is supposed to perform both functions, and fortunately ParisPerfect provides very good instructions about how we are supposed to use our own stuff. It took me about half an hour, but I got the washer going. One thing about European washers is they take forever. The timer settings are calibrated in hours. And the dryer function... the ParisPerfect instructions say that they are a different "style" than American dryers, which is to say they aren't the style that actually get the clothes dry. It took me a long while to understand why not: by and large European dryers aren't vented to the outside, so they keep spinning the clothes and collecting the water to drain it away. Since we are on the top floor I thought it might be possible to install a vented dryer, but when I suggested it everyone looked at me like I was crazy. Why would you want that? Plus the buildings are very strict about poking new holes to the outdoors, presumably. Anyway, when we got home hours later the clothes were clean, and damp. They have been out on a laundry rack since then.

Another one of the necessary appliances in ParisPerfect apartments is an Expresso machine. We don't have one at home. This one is a Nespresso, the kind that works off little pods of coffee that you insert, making one cup at a time. It's really good, so there is a lot of coffee getting drunk around here in the morning, including by me, though at home I have quit in favor of green tea. M. and I went to the Nespresso store today to get more pods. It's quite a production. You are greeted individually, then led to a counter where an agent hands you a menu and offers samples of the various varieties. After about three sample cups of Espresso I could have flown home, but it was fun and not as expensive as I thought. The pods run about 40 cents each, more than a homemade cup of coffee but a lot less than a cafe.

On our way out of the apartment today we stopped at the metro and bought Navigo cards, which work as passes for all the metro lines and busses in the city. We had read that is was a hassle, but it turned out to be relatively easy. CAM had brought passport sized headshots, and after some protestations the guy at the ticket booth took our money and gave us the cards. It's odd that you have to conduct this business at the regular window where people buy their regular tickets, because it took us fifteen minutes, while a long line of impatient commuters stacked up behind us. No one complained though, it seemed normal to them.

And it turned out that the Navigo cards unlocked another long-time Paris mystery, the Velib system. Velib is a citywide system of bicycles that are stationed everywhere around town, locked into little stands. You take one, ride it where you want to go, and return it to another stand. M. and I had tried to buy access at the little automated kiosk next to the bikes, but it had never worked. Something would always go wrong, or it wouldn't accept my credit card, and we would be rerouted back to the beginning with no explanation. But M. noticed that the kiosks mentioned Navigo cards, and before we knew it everything went through and we (M. and I) were on bikes. We escaped major head injury, dodging buses on the way down Boulevard St. Germain, wound our way around the Luxembourg Gardens and found our way home. It was really fun, and without CAM along (she and the girls were shopping) I actually had to navigate my way around the city, which is good for me.

After that we took our gloves and baseball and played some catch on the Champs de Mars in front of the Eiffel Tower. It all felt out of place in a nice way. Stopped for tea and cokes in a nice little cafe on a side street in between the tower and home (The Cafe Presle, on Rue de Presle), came home and have been hanging out since. Girls still out, they will no doubt show up exhausted just in time to make it to dinner.

I am going to see if I can find a blogging app for ipad. That, and I have to convince the girls to mail be some pictures from their cameras so I can post them. More later.

We are live!

Many fun stories still untold, but in the meantime the apartment is done!  You can see it live at the rental site,

http://www.parisperfect.com/apartments-for-rent-in-paris/quincy.php