Bastilling

I will be honest, I have been a bad traveller the last two days, having spent a lot of it holed up in my apartment.  My excuses for this are threefold: (1) It rained for roughly six hours this morning, mostly very hard, making any outdoor activity impossible and any activity involving a significant walk far less desirable.  (2) Today is Bastille Day.  This means most things are closed or opened late (even relative to usual), although there is very little predictability here (and some of the closures may have been due to rain... this is the kind of place where restaurants close when it rains).  For example, most museums are closed, although the Louvre is open (with lines of tour buses waiting to get into the parking lot and empty their hordes of underexercised Americans, you can imagine how excited I am about gong myself right now).  I noticed that the nicer the restaurant, the more likely it was to be open - so, coffee shops where one (although perhaps not me) could sit with a coffee and sneer at passers-by are closed, while stylish, fancy restaurants where patrons are expected to consume a full meal are open.  Also, nearly all Parisians are off work today and many were off yesterday, which means more people vying to attend the fewer available diversions.  And, my final excuse: (3) Being a tourist is extremely tiring.

However, that is okay.  I needed a good rest to energize myself, because in the next couple weeks I am going to be day-tripping like mad.  Plus there are many other Parisian museums to see, and I have somehow neglected to eat any Parisian chocolate and have done a grossly insufficient amount of Parisian shopping.  So I will be quite busy starting tomorrow.  For now I will record what I have done in the last two days.

One of the things I did was get coffee for my apartment, finally.  I was on my way back from my post-rain walk to check the status of Paris (answer: mobbed with tourists emerging from their hotel rooms for the first time all day, and still drizzling) and noticed, to my pleased surprise, that the grocery store was open.  There was much coffee, but I could find no good way to distinguish the instant from the non-instant (in the states, I do not buy instant coffee, obviously, and I'm not one hundred percent sure what it looks like).  Finally I found some Nescafe single-serving envelopes which had instructions about stirring the powder into water.  So, I brought it home to try it.  Instant coffee... how easy!  Had I been missing out on some amazing new revelation all this time?

No.  It was gross.  Weak and bitter.  It did not even smell like coffee, but like instant coffee, which it turns out is a totally different smell.  I added some of the dreaded demi-ecreme (half-skimmed, i.e. 2%) milk and that improved it substantially; the noxiousness of the two substances seemed to cancel out.  But it is still not proper coffee, and I think I would need to use two envelopes (and therefore twice as much demi-ecreme) in order to create any kind of reasonable facsimile.

A slightly more exciting cultural-contact event was meeting two French women.  I was sitting on one of the benches on Pont Neuf (a bridge), writing.  They were sharing a bottle of red wine that they were storing with an equal-sized bottle of water in a gift bag.  One seemed very stereotypically Parisian (she wore off-white pant and an off-white floaty top that looked quite good on her, and had the almost-no-makeup-or-hair-fussing look (perhaps achieved by quiet a lot of makeup and fussing for all I know) that is favored here) while the other did  not (she wore clothes unsuited to her, that made her seem both gangly and chubby even though I think she was neither and her stringy, too-long hair looked bad even by American standards); it turned out that while they are both Paris natives, the non-Parisian-seeming one had lived several other places, apparently diluting her Frenchness.  As I was scribbling in my obligatory-for-this-type-of-trip moleskin, the one in white asked me, in French, whether I was writing about them.  While I was trying to work out what this question was and how to reply (both linguistically and given that I was, in fact, commenting on them) her friend said, in English, "You don't speak French, do you?".  A pleasant conversation than ensued.  They were very excited when they learned I was from New York; the girl in white, whose English was not all that great, kept saying "Sex and the City!  Sex and the City!" (clearly she had not see my shoes, which would send Carrie Bradshaw into paroxysms just to look at).  We discussed non-touristy things to do in the city (Musee d'Orsay, according to them, which is one of the most tourist-saturated sites I've been to) and why you can't get coffee before 9 a.m. (it would be "abusive to the workers" if there were more jobs available, apparently).  The girl in white got hit on by a man who asked her whether she spoke Arabic (not anymore) and asked the other girl to take a picture of them together; they seemed to consider this an entirely normal and inoffensive event.  They also, in the course of the twenty minutes I talked to them, isolated an attractive male specimen, got his phone number, and called him to get him to round up his friends to take them out... so apparently that's how things are done in Paris.  Interesting.

I saw an airshow.  I was on the fence about the parade (military parade + mobs of French people + me with poor French = ?) and the rain made my decision for me; I would have watched it on TV but my TV appears not to work.  But then, around 11 a.m., during a brief pause in the Day of Downpour, a tricolor of cloud appeared in front of my window, jetted by six planes!  I watched for about twenty minutes as groups of planes flew across Paris from West to East, joined by several others on my street leaning out of their window, most in their pajamas and/or eating bowls of cereal.  (not early risers here)

Last night, for pre-Bastille Day, apparently the thing to do is party in the streets - this appears to be far more popular in Paris than in New York, perhaps even rivaling bars, probably because most of the bars seem to be also restaurants.  Partying in general seems to be more continuous here... in New York, it seems like most of the late-evening options are either very tame (go to a movie, sit in a coffee shop) or very party-y (go to a bar or club).  Here, perhaps because it is common to not start dinner until 9:30 or 10 and to linger for hours, and yet bars close between 12 and 2, there is much more of a continuum; there are more different things to do and, I think, less craziness.  I like it better.

Anyway, what I did was met up with my British friend and a German friend of hers, and we sat by the Seine on the Ile de la City and had wine and cheese and crisps (potato chips appear to be unchanged by crossing the Atlantic) and chatted and had cheese puffs thrown at us by idiot drunken boys (also unchanged by crossing the Atlantic).  I feel like this would have been much harder to do in New York.

I have also seen two small museums: the Carnavalet museum of the history of Paris, which was quite unusual: not a lot of commentary, and nothing whatsoever in English, just paintings and all sorts of artefacts - medallions, furniture, street signs - jumbled together.  Also the Crypte de Parvis, the archelogical dig revealing the well-preserved Roman city under Ile de la Cite.

Finally, I am going to have to learn to cook, because I bought some serious Parisian groceries.  In addition to massive amounts of cheese, these include (1) eggs (which I know how to deal with), (2) new potatoes (really not sure about these, but they are just potatoes, right?  I'm thinking I can cut them in pieces and plunk them in a frying pan with some Parisian butter), and (3) haricots vert, stringy green beans.  I got the ready-to-use kind without end bits, but I'm not sure they can be eaten raw... maybe the fry-with-butter trick will work on them too?  I was sort of seduced into these purchases by how good the produce looked in the Palais de Fruit, although as I quickly discovered by trying an apple, looks can be deceptive. Still, there's not much that can be wrong with a potato, right?