Tour de Paris

My legs are pretty numb and useless right now. The top half of me, though, is very excited to have a new used-bicycle! (Skip to the picture on the bottom if you are as excited to see it as I am…)

Since the weather has turned so sweet and warm, I have been stricken with bike fever, and really coveting all the cyclists swarming the city. The fever turned into sickness when I found out that used bikes are even more expensive than new ones. Vintage is hot. Thanks to Craig’s List Paris I found some guys who sell some cheap bikes out of some garage. A shady garage in the bottom level of a nondescript parking lot. I wondered if I would make it out of there with my life, let alone a bicycle. But the salesman was very straight, extracted 3 from his stash that were in my price range. The choice was made by fate: I live near the neighborhood of Alesia and I chose the “Alizée” model. (Fate, and that choices #2 and #3 had either weak breaks or a missing tire.)

Riding back to lab after the transaction rather than walking was most satisfying. Today after lab, I brought Alizée home. This entailed going from the very north to the very south of Paris, in a Tour de Paris that even Lance Armstrong should not snub. (Travel time=2 hr:15 min:59 sec. In the same amount of time, Lance could probably be in Belgium.) The trip was every bit as exciting as I thought biking here would be. It was like working out a geographical jigsaw puzzle, riding by and recognizing different spots and piecing them together. From a pedestrian’s perspective, I doubt I looked so exciting. French “femmes au vélo” always look impossibly chic. I am just hoping to get away without needing a helmut and kneepads!


The picture does Alizée a bit more justice than she deserves. She is actually not shiny, but pretty dirty and rusty. Aaah!, but I still think she’s the prettiest in the pile outside my building.

Get out the Dance!

Here is a happening that does not make it in the weekly “Pariscope” entertainment listing but should: Le Bringuebal! A monthly balls-out dance party. This month’s took place in an outer arrondissement near Belleville (as in the setting for the Triplets of Belleville).

I went on Saturday with some girls from lab. I do not know if this is a popular Parisian activity (as I said, it is not in Pariscope), and I do not think it is a typical “boite de nuit” (night club) ambiance. But I do know that it is an activity made for me!

Not many people there were NOT moving to the Bringuebal beat. And wildly! I think the French let out all their inhibitions on the dance floor. Different groups took turns on stage, with no coherent musical theme other than danceable. Big band swing-style, Ska-ish, even a little bit Oompa band.

The very loose theme of the party was the next day’s presidential elections. (They take place on Sunday. Bizarre, non?) A few dancers turned out in mock conservative garb, but looked to me just like the hipster sort crawling Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Some musicians were waving bunches of leeks on stage, in either a related theme (as a rally for the Green Party?) or not.

The finale of the night was a Conga line led by a guy holding a sign reading something like “Attention! La Gauche s’avance” (Watch out, the left is moving ahead).

In the next day’s presidential elections “first tour,” the Socialist candidate Segolene Royal did make it through. Voters were not too tired from Saturday night’s activities or too anxious to flee Paris for the weekend to come out in high numbers. As I am told. Me, I wallowed a bit on Sunday in the feeling of not having a voting voice, surrounded by fellow mute non-citizens at La Cité. I am not decided if I would have put my ballot towards Sego or the Centralist Bayrou. Sure Sego is strong, not to mention a fashion plate in her knee-high boots and accessories. But Bayrou is a candidate who might have stood a chance at defeating the Bush wanna-be Sarkozy. The second and final tour is in two weeks. Yet, it seems like most people, in my lab at least, have conceded to the fact that the fate has been sealed. Even before the one and only presidential debate. The majority of French are delusional and already in line behind Nicolas Sarkozy.

February Follies...with Julie

February was visiting month with Julie, Matt and Marcy coming over back-to-back weekends. I have finally surfaced to talk about it. Here you can even take a “virtual tour” with Julie or Marcy and me. (Julie is a friend who, way back, used to work in the same lab as me at Columbia. Marcy is a friend who was in the same class as me at Columbia.) Matt has set a schedule, of which I approve, of a visit every 1 1/2-2 months. So his Paris photo album has many pages left to fill. Some of which I will post on later blogs.

Julie taught me a new French expression when she was here: “leche vitrine.” Window shopping or, literally, window lick. And that is just what we passed our time doing. The first day she was here, we used as our base a street that I like to call the foie gras district because it is lined with boutiques selling and serving this delicacy. It is at the geographical and emotional heart of Paris. Of the shops that we discovered that day, the highlight was Dehillerin. (Julie did great pre-visit research!) This is the oldest cooking store in Paris, according their site, established in 1820. This remarkable establishment sells every type of appliance or ware for every item deemed fit for culinary consumption. Julie found her coveted lions-head detailed porcelain bowls. And walked in the footsteps of the Celebrity Chef Barefoot Contessa, as shown below.



Me, I took a load off in a pot big enough to cook a small child.



Of course, obligatory trips to the Eiffel Tower and Sacre Coeur (through a taxi window) were made in between shopping expeditions.




We launched expedition numbero deux from the Golden Arches (of Café McD) in front of some other famous arch (look in the background).


Julie and I happened upon LaDuree, supposedly the first tea salon in Paris. It was there that I discovered God. In the form of a Macaron. Anyone who has eaten a macaroon at Passover knows that, while good, it is not exactly divine. But this is not exactly a Passover macaroon. Rather the best cookie in the world. A crunchy sugar shell encapsidates a chewy cookie with a cream or jelly (depending on the flavor) core. This picture captures Julie at the perfect instant: before the first bite of the best of the macaron flavors, pistachio. I am a little embarrassed to admit that, since our LaDuree discovery, I have been back about every week.



After the feast for the palate, we had a feast for the eyes at Le Louvre and his gardens. Julie, inspired by the Louvre Pyramids, gave me the Cliffnotes version of The Davinci Code. (Thank you for saving me from the time of reading the book!)






For our Last Supper, we went to a restaurant behind the Louvre. Probably a mistake in such a touristy area. Definitely the worst, and only bad, meal I have been served in Paris. Julie’s French onion soup came in the form of a clump of powder at the bottom of a bowl of broth. With the support of Julie and a couple righteous Parisian girls at the table next to us, I complained to the waiter. (I am becoming less timid and more vocally disgruntled the longer I am here!) The waiter was less than accommodating. He finally took the bowl away and came back, approximately five minutes later, with the exact same soup. When we still weren’t having it, he directed me to the owner. The owner pointed out for me that, as I am American, I do not understand food or restaurants, and I will eat what I am served. I was proud of myself for telling him, “I am sorry, I thought the French had pride in their cuisine!” He gave me such an icy cold stare I was afraid he would serve me a head-butt Zidane-style. He didn’t. But he taught me an important lesson: Unlike in the USA, the customer is NOT always right. The Parisians at the next table confirmed this general truth. I suppose, though, that with boutiques like Dehillerin and LaDuree, the customer can tolerate being wrong once in a while!

...and with Marcy

Oh! the places we went on Marcy’s whirlwind tour of Paris. Paris is the prettiest city I have ever seen, and so an easy tour to give. But besides that, Paris was Marcy’s first stop in the developed world after her experience working and living in Cameroon, Africa. So she was especially easy---she just wanted to eat DAIRY! (At one point, I think we stocked my mini-fridge with more varieties of yogurts and puddings than the Monoprix mega grocery store.)

We bopped about almost* without stop.
*Almost except for 3-4 hour long dinners

Marcy’s friend Syd came down from London for the weekend to bop with us. Syd is such a globe trotter that, between his stories and Marcy’s from Africa, I felt like I traveled the world in that weekend!



Who can take so much travel without a little vertigo? I don’t know if it was the elevator trip that we took to the top of the Eiffel Tower or the actual being at the top of the Eiffel Tower that was so disorienting. You can see from this series of pictures that none of us could tell which end was up!







(Marcy is a good photographer, non?)



Despite Syd’s vow that every time you go to the top of the Eiffel Tower, you will witness a marriage proposal, we unfortunately did not see Tom Cruise or anyone else get engaged. But we still saw plenty of Paris and the ‘burbs. At such a height, we caught a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty (the spec just behind the 3rd bridge up from the bottom of this picture) even with New York City exactly 5,849 km away.





(Incidentally, these are two of the cities where Marcy has hung her hat in the last year….We are missing San Diego!)

Standing on the top level put the “wind” in “whirlwind” tour of Paris. I think the gusts up there were rattling my brain, and that is why I look so deliriously happy to be at the exact spot where France hoisted its flag for the first time after Nazi occupation. (Merci beaucoup USA!)



I eventually had to return to earth and to lab. But Miss Marcy and Syd continued the tour. To Montmartre, one of the highest (natural) points in Paris. Marcy tracked down the Moulin Rouge, a symbol of Montmartre's pre-WWII artist’s haven. Finding the famous cancan theatre was very special for that dance fanatic! (I think after posing for this picture, Marcy started to recruit dancers for FRANZA!)



The trip ended on another high: We saw, from one of the very top rows of (one of) the Paris Opera house, LE Paris Opera Ballet’s production of Don Quixote. Check THAT off my To Do In This Lifetime list. The Paris Opera Ballet puts on a fraction of the ballets in a season as the New York City Ballet or ABT. But when it does, it pulls out all the stops. Don Q is a show-stopper all around! Marcy and I were especially impressed by the elaborate set!




Maybe it was the thrill of being at the ballet. Or all the travel. Or too much dairy. I like to blame it on Marcy for being a vehicle of some mysterious African-borne stomach bug. Because I started to feel sick up in our top row. And, what do you know was waiting in my mailbox when we got home from the ballet? MA CARTE VITALE! Finally. The magic green health card that is my pass to hypochondria-land (aka, France). With it, I can see any doctor I want and pay even less than the pittance somebody not in the Social Security system would pay. I considered seeing a “medecin” for motion sickness!

Barcelona or BUST!

Ironically one of my first blogs from Paris will be all about BARCELONA. (For an alternative definition of irony, and hopefully one better than “1,000 spoons when all you need is a knife” (c. Alanis Morissette) see Installment 1D of this blog.)

I couldn’t get down to Barcelona soon enough, early in February as it turned out, to see my dear friends Dorca and Dan and to see this thing that I vaguely remember from my childhood in Florida called the “sun.” Since I arrived here, these friends have been my same-time-zone Skype buddies. They, like me, defected for a European postdoc and lifestyle after grad school. But unlike me, they actually knew the language of their host country. That, and the fact that they settled in Catalun-town a couple years ago made them ideal tour guides. Even though the Spanish sun turned out to be more stingy than I would have liked the weekend I visited, I always felt like I was basking in its warmth with the lovely D&D around!

Whoever came up with the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” may well have had Barcelona on the brain. So I will let pictures do most of the talking, with some supplementary narrative.

This corner of a gate in the picture (top left below), while lovely, seems like nothing after you look at the rest of the gate or the buildings in other pictures. But it was the very first shot I took of Barcelonian architecture so you could say I was easy! What steals the show, and probably what puts this formerly residential gate on the map of Gaudi’s work, is the frightful metal dragon rearing its head. Wow! Talk about a punishment for breaking curfew and trying to sneak through the front door late. In the bottom picture, I am rescuing from the dragon’s jaws my sheep-wolf, a stuffed animal who I kidnapped indefinitely from my cousins to be my travel companion. (He will appear in more pictures.)










After dragon-wrestling, Dorca showed me around the old city center. But what I found more picture-worthy was the self-serve tapas spot where we dined. You take as many little plates, each garnished with a toothpick, as you want, then pay based on your number of toothpicks. I guess it’s honesty policy than no toothpicks are “dropped.” The tapas were the “nouveau” flavor, meaning, I guess, that they contained ingredients OTHER than just ham and olives. Dan and their friend are color-coordinated because, as I was informed, Barcelonian men like to match when they go out.





I was very drawn to the “sea-side” of Barcelona, old but not as old as the city center. (Perhaps I am butchering my history and geography lessons from D&D….) So, be prepared for a lot of pictures in this series. First off, the maritime museum (top left below). I was kind of awestruck to learn that one of Columbus’s ship was built in it (like the birthplace of the birthplace of America, sort of). In all my shock, I was not prepared to go INSIDE. Maybe next time. So, you pick up your ship and head out to port (next picture to the right). Depending on which direction you take, you set your course for the Americas (right) or Africa (left). Leave it to the Barcelonians to plunk a Miro sculpture down in the middle of all these old buildings, as you see on the bottom of this cluster.













Espresso break #4 of the day. (I think their cafés are better than in Paris!!)




The tour continues in the more modern district up from the sea, a district jam-packed with Gaudi’s and other Modernista (is that the right word?) architecture. And my awe continues….If you look-squint to see the building in the top few pictures, you can see most peculiar awnings and roof. Word is that it tells a story of a dragon (again with the dragon!) by Gaudi. The next building on the right looked so much like a wedding cake it made me want a bite. Next stop (next picture down on the left): La Pedrera. Or "The Rock," I think. Yet another Gaudi creation. For some reason, I am posing how I think Salvador Dali, another Barcelona son, would---MADman is my motivation here. What’s mad, besides just this building itself, is that if you have a few thousand Euros a month to spare on rent, you can live here. We took a tour of one of the noninhabited apartments. Sweet, but so circular and curvy that I felt like I was in the Gravitron ride that I used to ride at State Fairs before I got too old and wussy. On the rooftop, you can see more unique window awnings and----I don’t know, giant chess pieces, as they are called? And, off in the distance looms Sagrada Familia for tomorrow….




















Out on the town that night, Dan and Dorca posed in front of one of their favorite apt building (they are SO many jems, you can really be picky!) where they may one day buy an apt and their newfound favorite furniture store (where they will go to interior decorate), and Dorca and I pose (Dan’s cinematography adds to the bizarre effect).







And finally…Sagarda Familia. It took the last decades of Gaudi’s life to start to build. But if you compare what has been done (spectacular) to what is planned, based on extrapolation from Gaudi’s vision (super super super spectacular), I doubt that he could have finished even if his life hadn’t been taken in the tram accident (see Installment 1D). As the cranes indicate, construction continues. And a crane in the neck would be required, I think, to see the top of the highest steeple, once it’s finished. The differences between the old and new sections, the old and new styles (angels vs. more of those creepy chesspiece figures) are striking. Sheepwolf particularly liked how many flora and fauna Gaudi included in his baaaah-reliefs! It seems like maybe, just maybe, Spaniards, or at least Catalunians, are more religiously devout than Parisians.














This trip ends on a sweet note. The crowns on Dorca’s and Dan’s coat rack are the only remaining evidence of our Fete de Roi cake. The big “Feast of Kings” holiday is celebrated early Jan-Feb in both Spain and France. Each country has its signature cake. For comparison’s sake, I brought a flaky Parisian version to compare to the flufflier Southern counterpart. Dan got the piece with the toy. As long as doesn’t have dental damage from biting into the small ceramic figurine, he should have one year of good luck! Go Dan!



And I brought from Spain one of their own signature sweets: chocolate-covered pork rinds! All around, Mui exitante!