Home at last!

Well, after a trip that can only be described as eventful, we’re finally home! We left our rental house in St. Andrews yesterday at 8:30 in the morning, local time in Scotland. I had gone for one last run on the Lade Braes at six in the morning while David finished backing the last bags, and though we got up quite early, we still ran out of time at the end. As the taxi pulled up at the front of the house, I was hanging towels out on the line and David was stuffing stuffed animals into one last carry-on bag and prioritizing the contents of the refrigerator to decide what items were worthy of an attempt to get through security (does Nutella count as a “gel”?). I mopped 800 square feet of tile in about 29 seconds, which must be some kind of record somewhere, and we got out of the house only fifteen minutes later than we had planned. Our hour ride to the Edinburgh airport was uneventful—the sun was out and the kids were completely silent in the back seat, just looking out the window at all the little villages we passed through so many times in our semester in Scotland for one last time.

When we arrived at the airport, we learned that our flight to Newark was delayed, and there was a long, long queue of people waiting to check in. Most of them were golfers returning to the States from St. Andrews, and they had one big hard case of golf clubs and one small carry on suitcase. David and I, on the other hand, looked like two tinkers pushing our enormous carts piled high with duffels and suitcases and warm coats and pillows and more stuffed animals towards the check-in counter. When we arrived, the airline representative behind the counter eyed us warily and said, “You know you can only have one bag each, then?” We ended up checking eight bags, all of which came at least 2 kg under the weight limit (and since David had used the scale in the house to check the weight of the bags by holding them while he stepped on the scale, I could see him do some quick mental calculations with the hope that the scale in the house was a bit off and he hadn’t gained as much weight as he thought on this trip!). We were left with six very heavy carry-ons plus the kids backpacks (filled mostly with stuffed animals, of course) to get through security. That was no problem in the end, though two of our bags were flagged for a search because they had the kids’ metal water bottles (which were empty) in them. I set off the metal detector for some reason and was treated to a full arms-up-legs-apart body pat-down while David and the kids chuckled, which wasn’t as bad as it sounds. I emerged feeling as if I had just been treated to a free massage!

The flight itself was fabulous…it was light outside the whole time and we each had one of those in-flight entertainment systems in front of us loaded with movies and TV shows. They served us two meals and lots of drinks while the kids watched “The Tooth Fairy” and David and I cycled through movies with titles too embarrassing to name—movies we would never choose to watch on our own, but which ended up being quite good. We landed in Newark at almost 3:00 pm, and quickly went through security, and then customs. I was worried that the sheer volume of our luggage would warrant an immediate search through all of them at customs, in the hopes by a customs official of finding an undisclosed can of haggis or boxes of shortbread that totaled more than $800 in total value in our bags, but they basically just waved us through in the end. So I was feeling quite good that we had made it back to the States in the end with no problems! And then the fun began…

I’ll back up one quick step to explain that our travel arrangements were a bit odd to begin with, because in the fall, as we were booking our trip, the university’s travel agency “forgot” to book the last leg of the return trip, which would return us all the way to Syracuse for an hour drive back to Hamilton. There was a bit of back and forth between us and the travel agency and Colgate’s off-campus study office to decide who had made the mistake, and what to do about it. In the end, it was decided that we would just collect all of our bags in Newark and be met by a limo service for the four hour drive back to Hamilton, since it would probably take as much time in the end for us to recheck our bags onto a domestic flight, wait for the connection, fly to Syracuse, collect our bags and drive home. So, when we emerged from baggage claim with our two trolleys, our limo driver took one look at us and said, “You know, your travel agency sent a sedan, right?” A sedan. As in a car with four to five seats and a trunk big enough for two good-size duffels and no more. I stared at him blankly for what felt like an eternity, wondering how on earth a travel agency could send a sedan to pick up four people from an international flight, especially when they had booked the airplane tickets for us in the first place, and knew that we would have been in the UK for five months and therefore likely had more luggage with us than just two duffels! So, we stood in baggage claim for well over an hour, running through all the options (hiring a second cab to take the luggage to Hamilton was going to be over $600, asking our limo company to send a car for the luggage the next day would be $500, after we paid to have the luggage stored for a day, shipping the luggage was going to be $700, etc…). In the end, we decided that our only option was to send all of our luggage in the sedan with the driver (and I might add that it barely fit by itself…with the trunk, the back seat and the passenger seat fully loaded) and then for us to rent a car at Newark and drive home. The idea of this wasn’t appealing, as it was now about 11:00 pm Scotland time and we were just ready to sleep, not to drive four hours. We also didn’t have a map with us, and we don’t know the drive well enough to do it without directions. So, we rented a GPS system as well, loaded into a car, and started inching through Friday-evening interstate rush hour traffic.

The drive wasn’t easy. David did all the driving while I tried to keep him awake by saying, “What are you thinking about now?” repeatedly. I figured it was better to have him awake and annoyed than falling asleep at the wheel. An hour in, we pulled off the interstate when we saw a sign for a Wendy’s, but we never could find the Wendy’s in the end, and just ended up getting rerouted through an hour of 30 mile-per-hour roads near Parsippany, NJ. After we finally got onto another interstate (I-84) our GPS went out, so we were on our own from there (though were more familiar with that part of the drive, fortunately). We still hadn’t had dinner and the kids were alternating between sleeping in the back seat and moaning about how uncomfortable they were. In Clarks Summit, we finally pulled off for some dinner, and I switched seats with John and put him in the front with the seat all the way back so he could sleep without his head banging into the door all the time. Emma was propped up on my shoulder and John’s reclined seat was in my lap with my right leg trapped between it and the door. At about that point, as we got off I-81 and onto the two-lane highways for the last 90 minutes of the drive, a police officer pulled us over. She must have been quite shocked to see the seating arrangement we had fashioned for ourselves, and I craned my head around David’s shoulder to explain the whole thing (“You see, we live in Hamilton but we’ve been in the UK for five months? So we flew into Newark and rented this car? And we’re not really used to the time here yet, which is why they’re asleep like this? And I normally wouldn’t let him sit up there, but his head was banging against the window because he’s so tired?”). She ignored me, and turned to David instead and asked, “Do you know how fast you were going, sir?” He shrugged sheepishly, and muttered something about not being used to the speedometer on the rental car, and she let him go without a ticket, so we drove off, while I was still calling out to the officer through the opened window, “So in the UK the car speedometers are marked in kilometers, you see, but the road signs are in miles? So it can be kind of confusing? And this car is a Chrysler, which neither of us have ever driven before?...”

We finally made it home at about 10:00 pm U.S. time (really, really late Scotland time) and met the limo driver at our house (he was sleeping in his sedan in the driveway when we finally arrived, probably an hour and a half behind him). I put the kids to bed while David carried in all of our luggage and we went right to sleep, with just enough energy left over to peel my contact lenses off of my eyeballs and to exclaim how incredibly, ridiculously comfortable our own bed was after sleeping on not much more than a box spring for the last five months!

One last dinner on the beach...

We're nearing the end of our trip: the suitcases are (mostly) packed, the boxes of books are (almost) taped and ready to be taken to the mail room, and the refrigerator is (nearly) clean. The kids are at school for their last day today, while David and I are finishing all the cleaning and packing and errand-running. It has gone smoothly so far, though since we're only about 75% of the way finished, I probably shouldn't say that yet, and should instead expect things to get quite hairy later tonight. We did have one close call earlier today, when I was in the midst of cleaning the gas stovetop and we needed to leave briefly to meet next year's study group leader to hand over some books and binders. We were gone for about 15 minutes, and upon our return, were quite appalled to note that the house smelled like the inside of an LP gas canister. Apparently, I bumped the gas knob with a rag just before we left, and nearly blew the house away! I suppose that would have negated our deposit...

Barring any additional near-explosions, we are planning to finish with the errands and the packing late this afternoon, and then to walk into town after dropping off our rental car for some dinner on the beach. With an empty house and no books or toys for the kids to play with, we figured it was best to just get out and about, one last time. I'm sure there will be much cleaning left to do after dinner, but our taxi doesn't come to pick us up for the Edinburgh airport until 8:00 am tomorrow morning, so that should leave plenty of time for scrubbing John's fingerprints off the walls, blotting the stains off the suntrap carpeting, and reglueing the tiki bird sculpture on the fireplace that we broke in February!

Isle of Iona and Isle of Mull

We’re just back from a last weekend of travelling in Scotland, and we chose to visit the Isle of Iona, which is just about as different a place as can be from Paris, where we were last week. On Friday, we drove across the country to the western port city of Oban. We had a quick lunch at the pier (David and I had a plate of mussels and some scallops, but since the fisherman at the stand was bringing in crabs and lobster as fast as they could cook them behind the counter, the kids were enthralled and disgusted, and neither of them would eat a thing. We drove our car onto the ferry for the crossing to the Isle of Mull, which took about 45 minutes. Mull is one of the bigger islands in the Hebrides on the western side of Scotland, and a popular tourist destination, especially in the summer. The whole island has a population of only about 2,500 people, but tourists probably outnumber residents 3 to 1 in some months of the year. When we arrived on the island, though, we drove straight across the southern part, towards the very small port city of Fionnphort, to take another ferry to the even smaller Isle of Iona. The drive across took over an hour and was mostly on single-track road with various passing places marked along the way with tall black and white striped posts. It was a lovely drive, after David sorted out the proper protocol of wait-or-go-for-it when we met an oncoming car on the single-track road! In Fionnphort, we gathered a small collection of some of our suitcases and left our car, then boarded an even smaller ferry to Iona. At this point, the sun was just starting to disappear, and a proper Scottish fog was coming in off the ocean, so our view of the blue ocean and the mountainous islands in the distance was just beginning to disappear.

Iona is a very, very small island (population 125!) that is most well-known as the spot where St. Columba landed from Ireland in 563 to start a monastery, which later became the center of the British monastic system and played a role in the conversion to Christianity of the Picts and the Anglo-Saxons. It’s also one of the spots where Celtic crosses (the tall stone crosses with a ring around the intersection to hold up the heavy arms) were first sculpted, and the island still contains several of them today, including St. Martin’s Cross from the ninth century. The Iona Abbey is still standing as well, which was built in 1204, though it has undergone lots of restoration through the years. There’s also a convent, in ruins, that was built in 1208 for Benedictine nuns. Other than that, the island has two hotels, one road, one tavern, a one-room primary school, and the smallest post office I have ever seen. Since it’s Scotland, there’s also a golf course on the island, though it’s really just a huge plateau of machair with some tin cans sunk into flat patches every few hundred yards, and the grounds crew consists entirely of sheep. To say that the island is peaceful is a gross understatement…and that’s even after we had arrived!

When we walked off the ferry, the fog was quite thick, so even though the island is small it took us a while to get our bearings. We were staying at a hostel on the very northern end of the island, and though the only decision we had to make upon arrival to figure out how to get to the hostel was to turn either left or right on the only road, we were still a little worried that we were headed in the wrong direction since we couldn’t see anything. We walked along the road (really a gravel path the width of a golf cart path) for about a mile, watched intently by a flock of sheep and a few cows who probably hadn’t seen that much traffic in quite some time. When the road ended, we still weren’t sure we were in the right place, until Emma saw a small outbuilding behind the only croft around and pointed us in the right direction. As we walked towards the building, a man came to meet us and confirmed that we were in the right place after all, which was a great relief after almost an entire day of travel. He showed us around and we settled

in and made dinner. The hostel was also home for the night to two Americans, each travelling as singles, and an English couple. The two Americans were quite chatty and were trying to engage the English couple in a conversation with little luck. One of them was completing a masters’ degree online, so their conversation centered on the benefits of an online education (no boring professor yammering at you from the front of the room for hours!). The other one was from Upstate New York (I overheard…) so I was hoping to avoid a conversation with either of them, but wasn’t that fortunate. I got away with only answering their rapid-fire questions for about five minutes (the Upstater asked, when we told him that we had brought a group of American college students over to St. Andrews for the term, if it was, “like, a Montessori-type program?” and the online-degreer asked John what the hardest thing about playing football was…so that gives you a sense of how that went). After we ate, the fog had lifted a bit, so David took the kids to the beach (our hostel was on a tip of land on the northernmost part of the island, so surrounded by gorgeous sandy beaches!) while I went back to the room with a glass of wine and a book to calm my nerves!

The following morning, the fog was gone and the sun was out, so we got to appreciate the beauty of Iona to its fullest. We ate a quick breakfast then we back to the beach, and the kids set up a “jewelry-making shop” on a flat rock—they would pound pointy shells with a small rock until the very tip of the shell wore away, then would string them all together on a piece of black seaweed to make necklaces and bracelets. When they tired of that, they started climbing the huge sand dunes, then launching themselves off the very top to fall into the sand below. They actually convinced me to try it a few times, and though I realized when I got up to the top that it was WAY too high for them to have been doing that kind of thing, I admit that it was also really fun, so I reluctantly told them that we couldn’t jump from that high any longer (but only after jumping four or five times myself…) We walked back down the “road” around lunchtime and had something to eat at the bar in town (fish and chips for David and a ploughman’s lunch for me), which has a big concrete terrace overlooking the pier and Mull in the distance. Then we continued down the road to the southern part of the island. We wanted to make it to Columba’s Bay to see where he landed from Ireland, but once the “road” stopped it looked pretty difficult to navigate our way across the rocks, so we turned around and headed back. We stopped at the Iona community gift shop and a few art galleries on the way, and got the kids a book about St. Columba and another about the Highland clearances. Then we went back to the beach and let the kids play for a few more hours while we read. The previous guests of the hostel had checked out and a new party arrived—this one a large group who were celebrating the completion, earlier that day, of one of their party’s having climbed the Ben More on the Isle of Mull, which is a munro (a hill over 3,000 feet), and marked his having climbed all 283 munros in Scotland—a feat that was five years in the making. They arrived with a case of wine and two cases of Foster’s, so we decided to give them their space and stay on the beach until the sun went down (which is at about 10:00 pm these days!).

On Sunday, we checked out of the hostel and visited the Iona Abbey. We arrived just after a service began, so wandered around the grounds and the cloisters until it was over. I think David would have liked to attend the service, but the kids would have found that (or made that, actually!) difficult, so we settled for touring the abbey ourselves. Then we caught the ferry back to Fionnphort and reloaded our stuff back into our car, then began the drive to the northern part of Mull, where we planned to stay for two nights in the fishing village of Tobermory. We stopped just outside Fionnphort at a tavern for some lunch (the kids had nachos, David had the roast lamb dinner, and I had a collection of tomatoes and beans that was called “chili” on the menu but which had not yet met up with any kind of spice…) then continued our drive up the western coast of the island. The distance between Fionnphort and Tobermory was about 50 miles, but the roads are so narrow and windy, and one has to pull over repeatedly onto the tiny passing places jutting out over the cliffs for oncoming traffic, so it took us about 3 hours to get there. While we drove, I was amazed at the size of the island and how much of it was vast, undeveloped land. I suppose that the low population density of the islands is still related to the Highland Clearances following the Jacobite uprising in the 18^th century, combined with the lack of infrastructure (no electricity lines or sewer systems here…), but it’s still surprising to see that much dramatic, gorgeous coastline with nary a soul around!

By the time we arrived in Tobermory, the clouds had returned and it was starting to drizzle. We were a bit early to check into the hostel (one of the many brightly colored buildings along the often-photographed port of Tobermory) so we wandered a bit among the shops, and stopped in at the co-operative grocery store for some dinner. When we finally arrived at the hostel, we learned that there was a bit of a misunderstanding with our reservation (long, long story here, from which I will spare you…) which was to result in our staying together in a private room for the first night, but in single-sex dormitories the second night. We actually had to fight for the private room for the first night, and David had to sort of “steal” it back for us from a large group of French tourists who arrived just a hair behind us. None of us were too happy at this, so we glumly dropped our bags and headed to the kitchen to make dinner. The French tourists were

there as well, and I did manage to engage in a five-minute conversation with them in French (causing John to whisper to me at one point, “Where are we again?”). After we ate, we had only enough energy to make it up the three flights of stairs to our rooms, where we all read until we fell asleep. I had trouble sleeping—worrying about the hostel situation the next night, theworsening rain, the laundry I would have to do upon my return, unanswered Colgate emails, packing to return to the States, the card I needed to write to the head teacher at Greyfriars, where my charm bracelet was, did John have enough socks for the rest of the trip…you know how that goes! At about four in the morning, I gave up and turned on a light to read, and by the time morning came around, I had decided to call it quits on the last part of the trip. We had planned a trip to the beach, a castle and a hike up Ben More the next day, but I just didn’t have any of it in me, and wanted to go back to St. Andrews instead to enjoy one more day together in the house before heading home to New York. When everyone else woke up, they agreed with me, so I called the ferry company to move

our trip up by one day and we got out of the hostel as soon as possible. We did drive to Calgary Bay on the way to the ferry, and took a very short walk around the sandy beach, and were still in Craignure where the ferry arrived with an hour or so to spare…time for yet another tavern lunch (venison burger for me and filled rolls for everyone else) before the ferry left. We arrived back on the mainland in Oban at four, and after a quick stop at a Waterstone’s and the bathroom, we began the three hour trip back to St. Andrews, with one planned stop in Dundee for a last meal at Emma’s favorite Indian restaurant. Needless to say, we were all thrilled to be back to the St. Andrews house that night, instead of dormitory rooms in rainy Mull!

One Week to Go...

Though we haven't yet finished unpacking from Paris, we have started the long and arduous process of sorting through all of our things here in the house, figuring out what belongs to us and what belongs to the house, in preparation for packing it all up and sending it back to the States. We learned yesterday that, while checking one bag in excess of our baggage allowance on Continental Airlines will run us $200 PER BAG (after paying for the bags we are "allowed" of course!), we can actually ship some things of our own much more cheaply. We already have to pay to ship David's boxes of books back, and so if we add two more boxes to the shipment (especially light boxes) it only adds about 20 pounds to the overall fee. So now I'm trying to figure out what we'll bring back with us, and what we can afford to live without for a few weeks as they take a slow shipping boat across the Atlantic.

We're also packing suitcases again for one last weekend trip. We'll take a ferry to the Isle of Mull on the western coast of Scotland, then will drive across Mull and leave our car, then take another ferry to the Isle of Iona, where we'll stay for a few days. I have seriously questioned the wisdom of taking yet another weekend away when we have so much to do here, but I also see the value in getting out of this disaster of a house, and just leaving it all for the last 48 hours, when I'll just stay up as late as I need to in order to get it all into bags and boxes in time for our departure next Friday morning.

As our last few days in St. Andrews wind down, we're taking advantage of being here as much as possible. Yesterday we took the kids to the beach so they could play on the rocks they love, which overlook the town and the first tee of the Old Course. It's a lovely spot, and they were content to stay for over an hour just scrambling up and down the rocks, and poking the various organisms in the rock pools with sticks, while David and I sat on benches and read. It's certainly high on my list of places I will miss greatly when we leave, along with the Lade Braes, South Street in town, the sea wall along the harbour, St. Rule's tower...

But I have decided that I'm not going to think about what I'm going to miss about St. Andrews in the next few days. Instead, I'll make myself feel better by starting a list of things I will be more than happy to leave! First on the list is the necessity of talking on the phone to people who speak with a thick Scottish accent. I really, really struggle to understand them without seeing them and using their gestures or expressions or surroundings as context. Every time the phone rings, I hope it's just a telemarketer, and not the school secretary or the woman from the car rental company or someone else who will begin by asking, as they always do here to start a phone call, "Is that Mrs. Dudrick then?" I am also greatly looking forward to never, never seeing again the menacing face of the next door neighbor, "Miss Manners," glaring out her window at us to make sure that our feet don't brush against any blades of grass on her lawn. David jokes that, as we drive away for the last time, he's going to drive right across her lawn and burn out a huge patch of her grass by spinning the tires, then shouting, "Oh, so sorry! We didn't want to walk on the lawn!" And I certainly won't miss the fact that the sun comes up at about 3:15 in the morning here, and yet every morning what wakes me up is not that, but the sound of gunshot coming from the sheep farm down the road. And that's all I'll say about that!

Au Revoir to a Fabulous Trip

Our last day in Paris started with a bit of rain outside, and a bit of last-minute flurry inside our lovely little apartment as we tried to pack up a week’s worth of clothing, toys and food into two suitcases and to have them weigh no more than 20kg each. Most of this was up to David, who is in possession of an impressive ability to pack into one suitcase what most people would barely be able to put into two and a half suitcases, while I was charged with cleaning the kitchen and returning the living room furniture back to its original arrangement. David’s talent is especially helpful as he is also in possession of a desire to always have with him all of the items that he might have even the smallest chance of needing at some point during the day. This worked out well for the four of us on this trip, since he was always toting around a backpack full of water bottles, rain jackets, extra shoes and the like, in case any of us needed anything while we were traipsing around Paris. You can imagine the surprise and disappointment, therefore, of the young woman who stood right behind him on Line 1 of the Métro a few days ago, pretending to read a tourist map while helping herself to the contents of the outer pocket of his backpack. For her efforts, she came away with only a handful of rumpled napkins and a pulverized fruit bar!

We managed to tumble out of the apartment only twenty minutes later than our firm check-out time (though no one ever showed up to usher us out, fortunately), only to discover that, though the rain had stopped and the sun was out, it was still a brisk morning. Our planned leisurely walk through the Marais therefore turned into a purposeful march, as we all wanted to get somewhere warm. We ended up in front of the Centre Pompidou, home to a collection of modern art and space for theater and film, and known for its wacky, colorful inside-out architecture and crazy fountains in the square outside. We had stopped on the way to buy a few croissants for the kids’ breakfast, but they were too cold to eat sitting along the fountain, so instead we went into a small café and ordered espressos for us and butter and sugar crepes for them. The café was empty and warm, so we stayed for a while, and the kids worked on some postcards to send to their classmates at home. Then we did a bit of shopping in the area around the Marais, and the kids found some souvenirs for themselves while we picked up a few gifts. We walked back towards our apartment, stopping at the Musée Carnavalet, which houses a collection of items (paintings, sculptures, models and furniture) related to the history of Paris. I wanted to see some of the paintings of streets in 16^th century France and the portraits of Madame de Sévigné, once considered the most beautiful woman in Paris, along with the paper which Robespierre was in the process of signing when he was seized and taken to prison, but the kids were a bit restless and ready to move on to the next thing. We breezed through as a result, though we did see the paintings of death by guillotine of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, as well as a few of her personal items, so it was worth the short visit.

We then stopped at La Poste to mail our postcards, then walked through the Marais one last time on our way back to our apartment to pick up our luggage. Our driver was waiting for us when we returned to the flat (again, well worth the money!) so we grabbed our bags and hopped in. John fell asleep on the way up to Charles de Gaulle, while Emma looked out the windows wistfully at the Seine as we drove away. David managed to finish most of the bottle of wine that we had left on the ride to the airport, which was a good thing, because when we arrived, our terminal was in total lock-down mode and surrounded by French soldiers wearing camouflage and carrying American-sized machine guns, so he benefitted greatly from being so relaxed going in. I on the other hand was a bit alarmed, but our driver just shrugged, and said that this happens pretty much every day. Inside the terminal, a huge queue had formed while the terminal was reopened, and we inched our way through security. John was having a ball riding on the luggage cart, while Emma was making faces at all the Euro Disney-clad kids in line. David kept them in stitches with a fake French accent: “Come on, kids, ALLON-ZEE!” he would say, then lean over to me and say, “What does allon-zee mean again?”

While we waited, we all talked about the American man who came into a bakery after us one morning and said to the girl at the counter, “Hi there, uh, polly-VUU ann-GLACE? Oh, great, then, I’ll have one of those things there, a cra-SAHNT, right? And how about one of them pieces of bread there…the long ones?” Lovely! By the way, I did notice that most French people I spoke to (in French but obviously with a native-English-speaking accent) asked me by default if I was English. “Vous êtes de l'Angleterre?” I wondered at first if we were wearing or carrying some kind of clothing or bag that was from the UK that gave them that impression, but later in the trip realized that it’s probably more likely that the French might be afraid that asking a native English speaker if they are American could be a bit insulting, just in case the person is actually English or Canadian. I suppose that asking someone if they are English is the least likely way to offend someone of a different nationality, and they only risk offending the Scottish by doing so!

So, we returned to St. Andrews last night at about 7:00 pm, had a quick dinner of frozen lasagna and a big glass of Pimm’s and lemonade (thinking the whole time of our meal in Montmartre), then went to bed. The unpacking can wait…

The Champs, a portrait and a lovely meal

Another lovely day in Paris: Emma and I stopped in at Paul, the boulangerie a block away from our apartment on the Rue de Rivoli, for our usual baguette, croissant and pain au chocolat order. We had breakfast with the boys in the apartment and tidied things up a bit, then got on the Métro to the Champs-Elysées. We started at the Arc de Triomphe end, and took the stairs to the top. Then we walked down the avenue a bit, and stopped at Ladurée for the multi-colored collection of macarons that I have been promising Emma. Macarons, for the uninitiated souls, are small cookies of egg white and almond, sandwiched together with buttercream or fruit filling. They are sold all over Paris, and are simply delicious! Emma, John and I picked out eight flavors, which was not easy to do, while David sat outside on a bench, watching the world go by. After we paid for our purchases and were given an elegant little box in an elegant little bag, we joined him to sample some of our treats. Then we walked a bit further down the street, which is lovely, but full of people shopping at Nike and Virgin Megastore. Without the Arc de Triomphe in the backdrop, one could easily be in New York City.

We took another Métro to the northeast corner of Paris in the 19e arrondisement for the Parc de la Villette, which is a large modern development that replaced decaying slaughterhouses in the 1980s. The park was designed by a well-known French architect (with a little bit of help from Jacques Derrida, apparently!) as a post-modern architectural experiment—he wanted to create space for interaction and activity, rather than for relaxation and self-indulgence, to create a design that would act as a means of deconstructing the traditional views of how a park is meant to exist, and used space and form and their relationship to a person’s ability to recognize and interact. Or so says my guide book!

The result is a trendy collection of green spaces along a canal, dotted with large red linear buildings and topped by a wavy metal awning. The complex includes a science and industry museum, a music venue and a large geode-like IMAX theater, but since all of these are closed on Mondays, the park was rather quiet when we arrived. We were overdue for lunch, and intended to eat at a bistro overlooking a canal, but when we arrived we found that was closed as well. In the end, the only place that was open was a large, slightly run down restaurant next to the museum that served le fast-food…I think the name of it was something like Quick Hamburger. We shrugged, and went it. The menu looked like something out of an urban Burger King, with no vegetarian options in sight. I ordered a greek salad for me and Emma, a chicken salad for David and le hamburger for John. Our bill was only €20, which is almost nothing in Paris, and we took our food upstairs to a balcony with umbrella-ed picnic tables to eat. In the end, the food was actually delicious…our salads had huge olives, hunks of feta cheese, and a red pepper tapenade on them, and David’s had small rounds of goat’s cheese, slivers of pears, and a mélange of beets, all topped with a peppery crispy chicken—likely the best “fast food” we have ever eaten! We finished our meal with a few more of the Ladurée macarons, and headed out to the playgrounds. There are several in the park with names that translate into the Garden of Shadows, the Garden of the Dragon, and the Garden of Things that Scare Children (the latter is full of nothing more sinister than some spooky noises coming out of speakers hidden in patches of bamboo…). We started at the Garden of Dunes, which has huge humps, ziplines, air cushions and big steel hamster-wheels for kids to use in the expense of energy. Ours did just that, while David and I sat in some chairs that were so deconstructed that it took us a few minutes to figure out how to actually use them. Emma and John spent a bit on the zipline, then, after a near-trip-ending accident that involved John and the steel hamster-wheel, met two kids that spoke French and English, and were from Tanzania. The four of them played for quite a while, running around on the humps and jumping on the air cushions, finally returning to us a sweaty, dirty mess. We finally left the playground at 4pm, and waved goodbye to the kids’ new friends.

Next, we took the Métro to Montmartre, a hilly neighborhood in the northern part of Paris known for the Sacré-Cœur Basilica and the former home of painters like Van Gogh, Monet and Picasso. It’s now quite touristy in parts, and there are also parts near the Pigalle Métro stop and the Moulin Rouge cabaret that are certainly not for children (I noticed that David almost crashed right into a Frenchman at one point on our walk as he took a long sideways glance at a newsstand!). We stuck to the parts at the top, near Sacré-Cœur, and took a ride on the little funicular railroad that takes you from the Anvers Métro stop to the top of the hill (though the train car is so tiny and packed with people that you work up just as much of a sweat inside as you would by climbing the hill anyway…). We paused at the top for a view of Sacré-Cœur, then walked to the Place du Tertre, where we splurged and had a portrait made of each of the kids. They were both quite excited to sit for one, even though each portrait took about 30 minutes, and a small crowd gathered around both of them as they sat side by side with two artists working on their likeness. It was quite impressive to see Emma’s eyes come through on the paper like that, and fun to eavesdrop on the conversations about the works, and about the kids, going on around us. One Spanish woman engaged David in a lengthy conversation, in English, about the differences between the two artists, and we talked with two young guys from California about which artist was better (David preferred the portrait of John, but I thought the one of Emma was better…). I had to leave at one point to look for an ATM (I said it was a splurge, didn’t I?), and asked for directions, in French, at a small chocolatier. The woman there gave me a set of lengthy instructions, in French, and spoke rather quickly, but I followed it, then followed her directions and found it with no problem. Thank goodness for those podcasts!

When the portraits were done, we walked a bit in search of a spot for dinner, and ended up at a lovely little spot, recommended by my guidebook, on a terrace just below Sacré-Cœur. The name of the place was L’Été en pente douce, which seems to me to translate into “summer softly sloping” or something like that (anyone?). We sat outside on a lovely little patio under an awning, and engaged in the wonderful Parisian tradition of people watching. David and I shared a decanter of rosé wine and the kids had water with syrup. For their meal, they both had homemade tagliatelli, and I ordered a salmon and spinach quiche. David ended up with un plat du jour, and though it was delicious, we’re still not quite sure what it was. It was billed as a supreme, and when I asked, qu'est que c'est? she said, “uh, like a chicken, but not…” We ordered it anyway, and it was great…some manner of small bird roasted in a saffron sauce and served with roasted potatoes. Yum! We had a great dinner, despite the typically French-service (read sloooooow), but of course how can one complain about sitting around for a long time with a decanter of Touraine on a lovely shaded square at the foot of Sacré-Cœur? I’ll take very slow service in a spot like that anyday!

Photos of Day 4

Le Marché, Guignol et Manet

Today, we took a more relaxed approach to our sightseeing and tried to spend a Sunday as the French might. We started our day at the Bastille Market, just a few blocks away from our apartment. The market was filled with its fair share of tourists (I overheard a woman taking a photo of her husband in front of a fruit stand, and prodding him to really get his hand in there. “Pretend like you’re buying something, Michael! It makes it look sooo much more authentic!), but was also full of Parisian residents doing their daily shopping. We started at a fruit stand, where I asked for cherries—mostly because I had purchased some the day before for lunch and the dialogue had gone well, so I felt confident making the request. As I paid, David motioned that I should also buy some fresh figs, which caught me off guard because I had no idea about the word “fig” in French (turns out, it’s “fig” by the way…) so I had to point with a “je voudrais deux, s’il vous plait.” The guy at the stand was quite nice, though, and put on a bit of a show at completing our order, and singing some kind of “we-we-we” song to the kids. We also bought some incredibly sweet cantaloupe at a second stand, and then I braved a very crowded cheese and sausage spot. I began by asking if Emma could have a taste of one of the cheeses (and I might add that cheese shops in France are by far the most confusing because there are SO many choices and I understand so few of the words used there…), but of course she didn’t like the petite tranche de fromage he cut off for her, so I had to give up my space in line and ask for a few more minutes to decide. Finally, I pointed at a huge wheel of goats’ cheese and asked for a small slice, but the cheese guy suggested instead that I might like one that is less dry…un peu moins sec, peut-être, pour la fille. So I went with his suggestion, thankful that I could pick out enough of his words to understand. Then I asked for a certain sausage just because the sign on the front of the basket of sausage was facing me and I could pronounce all the words, but then he suggested a different kind of sausage that came in big powdery-white papered curls, because it was dry and peppery and easy to eat with bread (or at least that’s what I think he said…) so I went with it. We also got yet another crepe for the kids, and a buckwheat galette with chorizo, tomato and goat cheese for me and David to share.

At the end of the market, a guy was selling some bottles of wine at a pretty good price. I asked for a bottle of red wine, and he was quite nice to me as we completed the transaction. Then he asked me something that sounded like “What region are you from?” so I explained that we were American but were living in Scotland for a while. He accepted my response, and began to talk about how lovely northern Scotland was. Then he added that he had also been to the coast, and that it was lovely as well. I was following him for the most part through it, and nodding at the right points and making small interjections in French. Then he seemed to say that in Scotland people like white wine, and wondered then why I was buying red wine. I became a little less confident at this point, and he might have registered my confusion, because then he changed the subject and began to ask why we were in Scotland…did I work there, or perhaps my husband? I explained the whole thing, though I was a little concerned that the word “philosophe” might have some strange connotation in France. But he seemed happy with my response, and then I tried to end the conversation by thanking him and backing away a bit. Honestly, I felt good at having engaged in my first full conversation, but the whole three minutes was absolutely exhausting, and when it was over, I wanted to go right back to the apartment and watch some English-language tv! The feeling didn’t last, though, and after I stopped sweating, we moved through the rest of the market. Part of the market was also a bit like a flea-market, so we bought a few scarves and some candy as well. We all felt like we had a successful outing, though I think at one point David bumped into someone and said “Excuse you!” instead of “excuse me.” Also, I think I have been so worried about greeting people the right way that I greeted one woman at a booth with a “Bonjour Monsieur!” accidentally. Oh well---c’est la vie! In the end, we took all of our purchases back to our apartment, spread it all out on the table, and had a heck of a delicious lunch!

After a bit of a rest--where David showed the kids the Flight of the Conchords video to “Foo Doo Fa Fa” (highly recommended, by the way…) a few times—we hopped on the Metro to the Jardin de Luxembourg. The garden was built in the early 1600s by Marie de Medicis, wife of Henry IV, and modeled after a garden in Florence. It’s lovely and elegant: palm trees, marble steps, statues, stone urns full of flowers, and a large Grand Bassin and fountain in the middle where kids push boats around on sticks. Emma asked me how it worked a few times, since it seemed that the kids launched the boat with a long pole, and then the boat would sail into the middle of the fountain and stay there. “I get how it works,” she said, after I explained it again, “but I don’t understand the FUN part of it!” I loved the garden, though I have to admit that I find it a bit puzzling that all the parks in Paris feature dusty white central paths where everyone walks. In a city known for fashionable clothing and footwear, I can’t understand how people find it acceptable to walk around coated with a fine white powder everywhere below the knee. On the subway, I have seen many, many women wearing incredibly expensive shoes that look as if a large bottle of baby powder has just been dropped on them! It’s yet another Parisian enigma that I don’t understand (right after this: in a city chock-full of croissants, how come so many of these people are so darn thin? I know it must be all the walking and the cigarettes, but still, do you know how much walking it takes to burn off an 800 calorie croissant?!).

At the park, the kids entered a large fenced-off playground while David and I sat outside, reading Foucault and studying maps of the St. Germain area (am assuming it’s unnecessary to explain which of us was reading what…). At 3:30, I took the kids to see the Guignol puppet show in the park. Guignol marionettes are another Parisian institution: they feature the classic French puppet hero Guignol, who is a bit like Goofy from Mickey Mouse, except with a long black ponytail and a Chinese-style coat. He means well, but he’s a bit of a bumbler, and so as he goes about his adventures, all the kids in the audience are shouting directions to him. The name of the play we saw translates into something like the Metamorphosis of Prince Charming, and it did have a bit of a “Snow White meets Cinderella meets Franz Kafka” story line: a princess is about to be married to Prince Charming, and for some reason that I couldn’t follow, her evil brother kidnaps her and hides her away in his chateau. Guignol offers to help Prince Charming find her (after a bit of back and forth that involved a bit of slapping in the face, which I also couldn’t follow, but which everyone else in the theater, including Emma and John, quite enjoyed…) and return her in time for her wedding. Guignol and Prince Charming go off to the chateau, but when they try to enter, the evil brother threatens to turn them into some kind of animal. Prince Charming risks it, and is turned into a squirrel. Guignol stores his new furry friend in a hidey-hole, rescues the princess, and reunites them. When the princess learns that her betrothed has been transformed into a squirrel, she is rather distressed (she doesn’t throw any apples, though!) and seems to waver a bit on the idea of marriage. Guignol finds the evil brother’s wand (he somehow became a sorcerer half-way through the show, but I’m not quite sure how or why…) and offers to turn the princess into a squirrel as well. She doesn’t like this idea too much, so the characters ask the kids in the audience for advice. That part was quite fun for us—well worth the price of admission alone to hear 100 little French kids scream “le renvoyer à un prince!” or something like that.

After the show, we walked through St. Germain and stopped at Amorino for some gelato. The line was out the door, but for good reason: the ice cream here is fabulous, and gorgeous. Each cone comes with a small ball of one flavor in the center, and another flavor around the sides shaped like the petals of a rose. David, who had been just a wee bit disappointed in the ice cream from Berthillon a few days before (he keeps asking me, “So, let’s go over this again: I know the word for ice cream in French is glace, but that must mean something more like frozen-fruit concoction than frozen cream, right? Is that why it tastes so much like sorbet?”) ordered a fabulous coconut/chocolate concoction that took the award for best combination, though Emma’s passion fruit/vanilla selection came in second. And in John’s defense, I may have mistranslated his order to the girl making his flower, so he wins the “bad-mom-ice-cream-order” award for the day. As they ate their ice cream, we walked back to the Métro to the Musee d’Orsay. The museum has a show on Manet right now that David wanted to see, and we made it through the doors just as they stopped admitting people for the afternoon. I took Emma to see the few Degas works that I remembered from my last visit, and went off in search of the Gauguin that I thought John might like. Halfway through, we came upon an exhibit about the Opéra Garnier, which included a huge model of the building (a palace to house opera, built by Napoleon III during the Haussmann reconstruction of Paris) and a model of the building set below a plexiglass floor, as it appears from the top surrounded by the 9e arrondisement, which visitors can walk on. John loved this, and plopped down in the middle with his small sketchpad to draw the building from the top. We sent David off to try to get into the Manet exhibit (which he did, but really only by sheer luck at the very, very end…) and after the kids tired of the Opéra, we walked through the building. I tried to take them behind the big clock (the Musee is in an old train station, so the clock at the front of the building is its most famous feature) but part of the museum is undergoing repairs so we couldn’t get all the way up there. We wandered through the sculptures on the ground floor instead, and when David met up with us, the museum was just closing. So we took the Métro back to our neighborhood and strolled off in search for a place for dinner.

We were all a bit indecisive and grouchy (actually, that was just me…) so it took quite a while for us to make up our minds. We finally ended up at the Hippopotamus in the Bastille, which is a bit like a Parisian Applebee’s. The restaurant was a bit pedestrian, thought the food was actually quite good. David had a steak frites that came to us pretty much rare though I had ordered it “a point” which means medium, but it was probably even more delicious as a result, and I had a salad of salmon and puy lentils, along with a kir (white wine and cassis), which I remember from my last trip to Paris. It was a bit sweeter than I remember (but of course I was 16 at the time and I probably liked it for that reason), but still seemed like just the thing to order on a warm evening in Paris. I think I did a passable job of ordering our meal in French, and was even able to communicate to the waitress that she had given us the wrong bill at the end. I think I did inadvertently tell her that we only wanted one mousse au chocolat for John at the end of the meal instead of two (David’s meal was supposed to include one as well), although it might have been that she wasn’t listening when I said “une autre pour lui, s’il vous plait.” No matter—we had more than enough, and we paid our bill and took a nice walk back to our apartment for the night.

Photos from Day 3

The Seine, a Market and the Eiffel Tower

Emma and I left the apartment early this morning for a quick walk down the rue Rivoli in the Marais for some breakfast. We bought a kilo of cherries (they’re in season here, along with apricots and fresh almonds, which the French coat with olive oil and salt then grill…) at a fruit shop and a baguette, a croissant and a pain au chocolat (John’s favorite…like a square of croissant pastry with chips of chocolate squished inside), and took it all back to the apartment to share with the boys. Then we walked towards the Hotel de Ville to buy tickets for the Batobus, which is a boat that goes up and down the Seine all day, allowing you to get on and get off at any of the stops. I wanted to ride only one stop over and calculated that the boat would take us right there, but when the boat came I realized that it was going in the other direction, so we were treated to an unplanned tour of the entire city of Paris by boat. That was fine by me, and I took lots of pictures of the bridges, but the kids got a little restless after a bit, especially when it started to get hot. We finally got off the boat in the Left Bank, at the Jardin des Plantes, which is a botanical garden. We strolled through on our way to the Latin Quarter, an area of Paris in the 5^th arrondissement so called because it’s near the Sorbonne and other French universities where the Latin language was spoken in the Middle Ages by academics and scholars. We walked towards the Rue Moufettard, a narrow pedestrian area of winding cobblestone streets that features a market a few days a week. The market was full of people, food, wine, great smells, flowers…just what I picture a French market should be. I made a few purchases at some stalls, and tried to be a bit more confident with my French: at the cheese shop, I asked for two different things, and then when the woman gave them to me along with my change, she asked if Emma and John would like to sample a different kind of cheese, I said yes, and thanked her for her generosity (sounds simple enough, but it took me a while to work out what she had asked me in my head!). I bought some fresh apricots at a fruit shop, then a roasted chicken from a woman who David overheard being rude to a few previous customers, and felt triumphant that she was merely curt to me. And when I bought a baguette, I also got a little brioche au sucre wrapped up in an elaborate swirl-shape, but only after asking the girl at the shop if she thought it was something the kids would enjoy.

Then we stopped at a Franprix for some napkins and drinks, and walked to the Arenes de Lutece to eat our picnic lunch, which are the remains of a Roman amphitheater constructed in the first century that once seated 15,000 people for gladiatorial events (I omitted that part of the spot’s history for Emma), discovered in the late 1800’s when the nearby Rue Monge was constructed. It’s now a popular (though dusty) park, and was filled with kids playing soccer in the stage area, and families and couples perched all along the “bleachers” area. We enjoyed our lunch, though John struggled with wanting desperately to play soccer with the kids below but being intimidated about joining in without knowing the language (and I can’t say as I blame him…and kids are much harder to understand in a foreign language than adults anyway). After our lunch, we headed back to the Seine, stopping at a bookshop where I bought a Where’s Waldo-type book about all the sites in Paris for the kids (including one that is the exact view from the windows of our flat) and a French copy of Le Petit Prince for me. Then we got back on the Batobus and took it to the Pont Alexandre III, a bridge that goes from the Grand Palais to Les Invalides. We were headed to the Musee Rodin, but were left with a bit of a walk to get there, and had to search a bit for an ATM on the way (and I have no idea how to say “ATM” in French!), and by the time we arrived, the Museum had just closed. I had promised the kids (and David!) some ice cream in the gardens of the Museum, so they were quite disappointed (all three…) and we began a long, long walk from the garden in front of Les Invalides (where Napoleon is buried) to the Champs de Mars, the park in front of the Eiffel Tower. We were on the lookout for ice cream along the way, but couldn’t find any (surprisingly) so ended up at the park a grouchy, tired bunch. I had purchased tickets ahead of time online for the Eiffel Tower to avoid the long line (and wow was it long when we arrived!) but we had about 45 minutes left to wait, so we walked down to the Seine to sit on the steps and eat the remains of our picnic. While we were seated, David turned to me and said, “You know, I really never liked the Eiffel Tower…” I ignored him, chalking it up to a lack of ice cream, and told the kids a simplified story about the tower: it was built by Gustave Eiffel for the World Exposition in 1889 and at first considered by many Parisians to be an eyesore. After a time, though, Parisians came around and began to love the monument—all except Eiffel’s rival designer William Morris. He began to call the tower the Giant Asparagus, and refused to visit. And when he finally did visit the tower for the first time and people asked him why, he said, “Why on Earth have I come here? Because it’s the only place in Paris I can’t see it from!”

At 7:30, we presented our previously-purchased lift tickets, and cut to the front of the line for the elevator (John did a little victory dance as we walked, shouting “See ya later, suckers!” to all the people in line, who I hope did not speak English!). We rode up, and all very much enjoyed the view (even David, despite not liking the tower and despite having his opened bottle of wine from our picnic lunch confiscated before we were allowed to enter the queue…). John spent some of his souvenir money on a little bear with a shirt that said “Paris” on it and the Eiffel Tower embroidered on his foot, that goes with the Scotland and London bears we already have, and Emma got a little purple keychain of the tower from one of the many, many plastic-tower-hawkers outside. It’s possibly the world’s cheapest trinket, but it made her very happy! We walked back down to the Seine, got on the Batobus again, and rode back to the Hotel de Ville, in the Marais. We took a stroll through the neighborhood, and the kids said they were hungry, so we stopped at a creperie on the Rue de Rosiers. I ordered a crepe with butter and sugar for John, and when the guy making the crepe put on lots of sugar, I said, “And now he won’t be able to sleep…!” I had to repeat the sentence a second time to make myself be understood, but when he did get it and smiled, I felt quite triumphant. We walked a bit more in search of falafel for Emma but found that the spot we had stopped the first night was closed, so returned to the crepe place for two more…one for Emma and one for David. This time, when David held John up to see the process and Emma was struggling to see on her tiptoes, the man making the crepes first encouraged her to cross the small street and stand on a door stoop to see, then told her to come into the shop and around to where he was standing. He then proceeded to let her help make her own crepe, which was very sweet (I noticed that he kept glancing up a tv screen showing the Barcelona-Manchester United football game while she was making the crepe, and I figured that he must have been a Barca fan and was in a good mood). I took a few photos of her working behind the counter, since I’m guessing the experience will likely end up being the highlight of her trip!

So, we took our crepes and walked through the Marais eating them, which was fabulous. The streets were crowded, and we were all having a great time. It was certainly one of those moments that David and I will always remember about being in Paris. The kids are having a fabulous time, too--Emma loves the markets and the shopping, even though we haven’t yet bought much other than food and wine. John keeps proclaiming, “This is a really good city” as he walks through all the neighborhoods with us, and he has also started to show his appreciation of French food by kissing the tips of his fingers and opening them with a flourish and a “supoib!” when he tastes something he likes. And, when he overhears someone speaking French, he comes out with a loud “Oh la la…croissant!” in a French accent, which actually gets funnier each time he says it. We’ve got two little contests going: one, to find the thinnest woman, and two, to spot the most French-looking man. I think I’m in the running on the first one, after having spotted a pregnant woman in the Jardin des Tuileries pushing a little boy on a slide and wearing four-inch high heels on legs that weren’t much wider than cigarettes. David’s winning the second, as he saw a man on a bicycle wearing a red scarf and a black and white striped tshirt, though Emma and I did see a man outside the Louvre who was able to smoke a cigarette, pick his nose and text on his cell phone all at the same time. We’re trying to provide photographic evidence to support our entries, which can sometimes prove difficult and requires us to use the kids as a “photo-foil” from time to time. Our contest will continue, and we’ll see what we come up by the end of the trip!

I posted some more photos from our second day at: Paris 2 Photos

Une Journée Complète

Our first full day in Paris was a full one indeed! I am realizing that I may have been a bit ambitious in my itinerary-planning and that I may need to ease up in the next few days, to keep from returning to St. Andrews as an exhausted, burnt-out bunch! We left our apartment at 9am and went straight to a boulangerie for croissants and a baguette. I chose one near our apartment that I had read about in a food blog, and it was a quick walk, just on the other side of the Place des Vosges. We took a quick tour of the square on our way (and took some photos too…), and found the bakery with no problem. I went in with Emma and stood behind a woman, trying to eavesdrop on her conversation with the woman behind the counter to make sure that my rehearsed French was going to come out ok. When it was my turn, I blurted out a quick bonjour and asked for what I wanted in French without having to resort to pointing at the items. The woman behind the counter nodded, gathered the items as I listed them, and gave me my total and then my change with a curt merci. I thanked her and left, but was just a wee bit put out that she wasn’t a bit nicer to me (though I did greatly appreciate that she didn’t automatically speak English back to me, and carried out the transaction en français). Then I remembered that I hadn’t greeted her with the required bonjour Madame! and she probably thought I was quite rude as a result. And what’s worse—I left without saying merci Madame as well. So, all of this means that I’ll have to find a new boulangerie for our morning bread today!

We planned to take a very early Métro trip to the Cathédrale de Notre Dame, but were delayed a bit when our intended Métro station of departure was closed for repair, and then when the second Métro station we visited only sold tickets with a chip-and-pin credit card or with Euro coins. We intended to buy a carnet (or 10-pack) of tickets which would run us €12 and we didn’t have that much money in coins. So, we went to yet a third Métro station, which thankfully did accept bills and we were on our way—though we were halfway to Notre Dame by that point anyway. The Métro proved to be very easy to use, after we figured out that we actually had to open the doors for ourselves, missed our intended stop, rode to the next stop, switched directions, and rode back to the previous stop again. The kids thought it was a real adventure, though, and I made it through my first Métro ride without having my purse stolen, so all in all it was a great success.

Notre Dame was lovely, and we spent a good deal of time touring the inside. I had billed the visit to the kids, though, as an opportunity to see all the gargoyles from the tower, so as we waited in the queue to get into the cathedral, they were anxious to pass through quickly to start the climb. Unfortunately, when we arrived at the tower, we learned that the towers were closed because of a workers’ strike. I remembered that this happens all the time in Paris, and am assuming that it’s probably about job cuts, but I did think for a moment that if I lived in a city as lovely as Paris, I might be swayed to see the benefit of a few days “on strike” as well! So we walked around the cathedral instead, then crossed the Petit Pont over to the Left Bank for a trip to Shakespeare and Company, a secondhand English bookstore about which I had read great things. David browsed for a bit, and John and I sat outside, where we watched a small group of people conducting a photo shoot with a model outside the shop (it’s quite the quaint setting, as you can imagine!). The model was sitting on a bench and cycling through the various expressions (Now you’re bored! Now you’re pensive! Give me flustered! Now you’re pouting!) and though it was a very small bench, a Frenchman saw a bit of open space next to her, sat right down and began to read his newspaper. John and I thought this was hilarious, and so John started to take some photos of her as well (and she and her camera crew were too put out by the paper-reading Frenchman to notice!). They always say that the French don’t need much personal space!

We stopped at a crêperie for lunch that had been suggested to us by a friend (thanks Kay!) and got two huge crêpes which we ate outside the bookstore. We bought Emma a kids’ book on Henry VIII (yes, that does exist!) but David couldn’t be persuaded to buy any Foucault, despite my prompting. Instead, we walked across two more bridges that cross the Seine for some ice cream at Berthillon—another must-do on many people’s Paris trip, including ours. We ordered strawberry and mango, and I did a passable job of communicating with the girl in the shop, though I was flustered about the use of the Madame part at the end of our transaction because she was much younger than me, and I didn’t want to insult her with a Mademoiselle, which I have read is a bit dated, especially coming from one woman to another! Or perhaps that’s just what they tell middle-aged women so they aren’t insulted when someone doesn’t Mademoiselle them? We took another Métro trip (this one frightfully crowded, where we were almost trampled by a group of American girls…) towards the 1e arrondissement to see the Musee de l’Orangerie, a museum of Impressionist work where Monet’s water-lily paintings—the Nymphéas—are displayed on curved walls in two separate rooms under direct diffused light, as he originally intended them to be displayed. I thought this would be a great introduction to Impressionism for the kids, and since it was a small museum, they wouldn’t feel overwhelmed. I thought the museum was fabulous—just my kind of thing, and they tolerated it well enough, especially the bottom floor that houses the Paul Guillaume collection of Impressionist paintings, where I gave them my camera and listed items they would need to find in the paintings as a kind of an Impressionist scavenger hunt. After our museum visit, we walked through the nearby Jardin des Tuileries, an elegant Parisian park with dusty wide paths, elegant fountains, and many Pelouse Non Accessible signs on the grass. We took the kids to a small playground to the side of the garden, where they played for a good bit, then to a set of ground-level trampolines, which they loved and which were worth way more than the €2 entrance price.

By around 5pm, we were all starting to get a bit hungry (I wonder how one says “peckish” in French?) so we headed towards the Louvre, where an underground food court with foods from around the world was recommended by one of my many guide books. When we arrived, I was struck once again by how frightfully expensive Paris can be! A meal at a food court was going to run us €15 euros (about $22) each, so I couldn’t imagine how much a meal at a nice bistro would be later in the week. David went off with the kids to procure some pizza with a parlez-vous anglais? approach, and I went a few shops down to try to get some lamb tagine in couscous with stewed lemons for us. The couple in front of me didn’t speak French, and when they tried to pay with their credit card, the woman behind the counter told them her credit card machine must not be working so they would have to pay with cash. They didn’t understand, since she had swiped their card through the machine and gave them a receipt which they couldn’t read, and she obviously didn’t speak English so just kept repeating to them, louder each time, Il ne march pas! Il ne marche pas! and putting her hand on their tray to keep them from walking away with their meal. She finally got her point across somehow and they paid in cash, then left, and because I had heard the whole thing, and understood the whole thing, I felt confident going into my transaction. So, I began with a hefty Bonjour Madame! and launched into our order in French. I faltered a bit when pressed to come up with the word for “chick peas” so I did have to point for that one, but she stuck with me, and then I even asked a question about one of the salads. She made a suggestion to me that I order a certain meal combination to make our order a bit cheaper, and to basically give us a free dessert, and then I asked which dessert she would recommend, and I managed to understand her completely as she pointed to each one and described what was inside. I chose the almond pastry she recommended (qui est tout à fait délicieux) and paid for my meal with another hearty Merci Madame…Bonsoir! then went off in search of the David and the kids to recount my victory, line by line.

After dinner, we were off to the Louvre (it’s open late on Friday nights, so there was no line at all to get in). We bought our tickets (the guy behind the counter complemented John on his French football jersey…) and quickly perused the map for the things we really wanted to see. David wanted to see The Wedding Feast at Cana and a few other paintings that he teaches, and I wanted to see some of the Roman and Egyptian collections. Emma asked to see the Napoleon III apartments and I figured (or more hoped, actually) that John would be impressed with all the French sculptures on the ground floor. The Louvre is immense, obviously, and since it was evening and we were all a bit tired going in, we had to engineer a hit-the-highlights of the highlights trip and do the bare minimum with kids, but it was still a great visit. We saw much of what we wanted to see, and Emma and John politely sat on a bench and mocked us (John played the role of David gesturing at a painting and explaining the triangles of light, while Emma pretended to frantically run around like me, offering to translate all the placards under the paintings…). The apartments and the French sculptures were a hit, and we left on a high note (though as we left, I overheard an American woman say to her young daughter after the girl asked what a certain Egyptian display was: “I don’t know, hon, but isn’t it cool?” and hoped that I had not uttered the same phrase at some point in the visit!)

P.S. I have taken over 350 photos in the last 48 hours, and in order to prevent photo-overload, I'm just providing a link to some of them:

Paris Photos

Nous sommes arrivés!

Nous sommes à Paris! Nous avons arrivés hier après-midi et puis quand je…oh, sorry! I’m getting carried away! Let me back up a bit: when we found out more than two years ago that we would be in Scotland for a semester, my very first thought was that we were definitely going to take the kids to Paris at the end. I have been to Paris only once---when I was 17 years old and in high school, and spent a summer living with a host family and going to le lycée technique in Brittany through a program at Indiana University. The first part of the experience was difficult…living with a French family was not easy, and though my French was greatly improved at the end, it was certainly a challenging experience. At the end of the trip, though, our group of about 20 American high school students was driven to Paris, put up in a hostel, and let loose. As you can imagine, I have wonderful memories of that part of the trip, and ever since then have desperately wanted to come back!

So, twenty years later, here I am! Over the past five months, I have been planning an itinerary for us, and searching for apartments in Paris. I knew from the beginning that we wanted to stay in an apartment in one of the neighborhoods (arrondissements) that would allow us to experience a bit of daily Parisian life and would give the kids a bit of space to spread out in between our visits to the parks and the markets. I eventually chose a one-bedroom flat in the Marais district (the 4e arrondissement) one block away from the Place des Vosges, which is the oldest planned square in Paris. I rented the flat through an American company that rents about 200 different flats all around the city to American tourists, and they sent me the keys to the place a few weeks ago with a map of the area and a note that simply said Merci beaucoup! Easy enough! And once the keys arrived, I was obsessed with fine-tuning our itinerary—staying up late into the night researching and rearranging, adding and nixing, second and third guessing. Was a visit to Napoleon’s tomb worth it? Would the kids be able to take the massiveness of the Louvre, or should we stick to the Musée de l’Orangerie? If we arrived at the Cathédrale Notre Dame right at 10am, would the line to climb the tower already be oppressively long? Could we make it 20 minutes out of our way from the Musée Rodin for a gâteau opéra at Lenôtre? I was checking the tripadvisor sites about taking kids to Paris and reading the David Lebovitz blog daily. In the last week, I have even begun my day with a “walk” through our neighborhood in the Marais through Google Earth! So much fun!

I have also spent the last five months working on my French. It was my minor in college, but I was able to finish all the requirements by the end of my sophomore year (I told you the trip to Brittany helped with my command of the language!), and then I switched to Italian. I haven’t spoken French since (in fact, I was mortified during my senior week in college when I was inducted in the French honor society, and learned during the ceremony that I was expected to say a few words of gratitude…en francais! If memory serves, I believe I stammered out a quick “uh, merci, uh, oui, uh merci beaucoup!”). So, in the last five months, I have been listening to a daily podcast in French on my morning run called Coffee Break French. It’s produced by a Glaswegian guy, and while I have been able to successfully restore much of my ability to speak the language with the program, I now do so with a bit of a Scottish accent, which is a little strange. I have also been working with Emma and John a bit on a few key phrases that they might need to use while in Paris, and coaching them on French etiquette: always say bonjour when walking into a shop, and au revoir when leaving, and use s’il vous plaît and merci (please and thank you) as much as possible; never touch anything in a market unless you are in the process of buying it; don’t walk around with gum in your mouth or your hands in your pocket.

The only downside to all the planning was that I came across a lot of advice about avoiding pickpockets in Paris, and became just a tad bit worried about it. I read about the crowding scam in the Metro where someone watches you put away your money after you buy a ticket, then bumps into you on the train and slyly helps himself to some of it. I read about the string scheme, apparently common in the Montmartre area, where someone quickly ties a piece of string around your wrist then demands money for it, and the ring scheme, used near the Eiffel Tower, where someone gives you a gold ring that they found, claiming you must have lost it, then demands money from you. I got so carried away with worrying about it that I began to chant French phrases in my head at night as I fell asleep: “No, please, that ring is not mine! Go away! Thank you!”

My biggest concern about pickpockets was that, after our arrival, we would need to make the trip from the airport to our apartment, where we would need to take the RER into the city and switch to a Métro line at a very large Métro station with both kids and two suitcases in tow. The RER is notorious for pickpockets, especially when it comes to tourists fresh out of the airport laden with suitcases, laptop bags, purses and kids (i.e. us!). I also know from experience that the Métro is not easy to navigate with large suitcases, and though I don’t know from experience, I am guessing that it might be tricky with kids too. So, to avoid the risk and to alleviate my worry about the RER (much more the latter than the former…and I’m sure David would not use the word “worry” there, but would go with something like “torment” or “anguish”) I arranged for a private transfer service to take us to the apartment right from the airport. I felt a little silly, and a little extravagant, making such a decision (though I might add that in the end, it was actually only a wee bit more expensive than tickets for four people on a return-trip shared van shuttle), but I must say that it certainly paid off when we emerged at baggage claim at Charles de Gaulle airport to find a very polite, English-speaking Ghanaian waiting for us with our name on a big white sign! (I only know he was from Ghana because I saw the screensaver on his iPhone which said “I HEART GHANA!” so am assuming…) He drove us right to our flat, which took about 40 minutes in a bit of traffic (John promptly fell asleep, of course, the instant the van started to move…) and dropped us off at our front door. Again, easy enough! We arrived at our flat without incident…no stolen laptop or passports, and now I feel like I can much more easily tackle the Métro in the days to come without being a pickpocket target.

So, we made our way up the four flights of stairs to our flat and went in. It was actually larger than I had thought from the pictures on the website (and from my general idea that any flat in Paris would be tout petit), but just as cute: huge windows overlooking the Place du marché Sainte Catherine, a bright kitchen that looks over a courtyard overflowing with red geranium-filled window boxes, a bedroom wall made of exposed wooden beams and thick red drapes, and a big bottle of wine on a tiny table waiting for us. We unpacked quickly, and headed out for some dinner. In my constant quest for the perfect itinerary, I read about a falafel place called L’As du Fallafel on the Rue de Rosiers just a few blocks away from us that was a must-see, so we ventured in that direction and found it with no problem. I was able to piece together enough French to order our meal (the result of the podcast is actually that I can understand quite a bit of French, but can’t speak it back nearly as well…), though we are somehow so easily identifiable as English speaking that it wasn’t necessary. Our meals of schwarma, falafel and humus were delicious, and not too frightfully expensive. We treated the kids to their first taste of Orangina (still one of my best memories of France…twenty years later and after “globalization” has brought Orangina to every Wegman’s store in New York State…), and I was treated to my first taste of sitting amongst the French. After twenty years, it’s refreshing to see that not much about the French has changed—it’s still apparently not acceptable to sit with your hands in your lap, but perfectly OK to have a go at the contents of the inside of your nose in public.

After dinner, we walked a bit, and stopped at a small grocery store for some breakfast supplies. My French came in handy again as we read the labels (though I inadvertently bought lactose-free milk which the kids won’t touch…) and as we paid for our purchases. We did a fair amount of window shopping on the way home too, as most of the stores were closed. The phrase “window-shopping” in French, by the way, is faire du lèche-vitrine which translates into “window-licking” and gives a nice visual…After a stroll, we went back to the apartment, where the kids watched the Hunchback of Notre Dame and I put some last-last-last minute touches on our itinerary for tomorrow!