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.
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