Weekend in Paris (a.k.a. "A Menu")
Lamprey Queen and Stroopwafel Fiend were kind enough to invite me to Paris for one of their last weekends there. I hadn't been in ages and it was good to be back, even if it was in the middle of a strike.
SF was late from a meeting on Friday evening, so I was forced to eat a crêpe with home-made compote de pommes to fill the time and me. Later on, we went to the rue Mouffetard for dinner. The Mouffetarte was closed, so we picked another place to have quiche: one of those tiny eateries where it feels like you're having dinner in someone's living room. The chocolate and banana pie was deadly and I was glad to have it inside me when I went outside. It was bloody freezing, a few degrees colder than London, which doesn't seem fair. The streets were strangely quiet for a Friday night, the strike kept a lot of people away.
On Saturday morning, the three of us went to the local market. The cheese lady gave me a freebie just because I was with her regular customers which was very nice. We also got Portuguese pastries, which I will not attempt to spell, and some Lebanese goodies for brunch.
Outside in real daylight, I could clearly see the change in the number of bikes on the road. A public bike rental scheme, Vélib, was introduced this year and is doing well although there are some mutterings about the maintenance of the silver-gray monsters. New bike paths have been put in place too, some more well-planned than others.
Unfortunately, Paris's next big change hasn't happened yet: the smoking ban on 1 Jan. I had a cold, so when we wanted to go to a café my lungs had to be sent in first to scout the place out. The strike actually worked in my favour here because some places were completely empty and thus free of smoke.
We went to one of my favourite bookshops, Gibert Joseph, in the afternoon, where I bought the last two books in a Pierre Bordage trilogy. They were second-hand so I could've bought another Bordage with the money I'd "saved", but sanity reasserted itself and I escaped.
After dinner at a Thai restaurant where the staff did their bemused best for a vegetarian, we repaired to a shisha café for cinnamon tea, and got involved in a random conversation with some high schoolers wanting to try out their English. A friend of LQ's met us there and it turned out he was doing the Paris-London move soon too. I then had the immense satisfaction of losing the Clark & Rose moving company some business.
On Sunday, we met German people for falafels in Le Marais, the Jewish and gay area, and then had a nice wander through the narrow and busy streets. SF had the good idea of taking us to a restaurant serving cuisine from the south-west for dinner. Conclusion: the south-west likes salt. I also had frog's legs for the first time because LQ let me taste hers. Tender white meat, tastes like the sauce it's in -- sums up a lot of French cooking really.
My train left on Monday evening but I got there hours early because of my worries about the métro, which gave me the opportunity to walk around the Gare du Nord area where I don't usually go. North of the station is a somewhat different area to where I'd spent most of my weekend, poorer and livelier.
Apologies for there only being half a dozen photos of Paris this time. Keeping in mind that "but I lived there" doesn't fly as an excuse, I did try to take more, but if I had, they probably would've been of plates of food, which isn't really interesting. :-)
SF was late from a meeting on Friday evening, so I was forced to eat a crêpe with home-made compote de pommes to fill the time and me. Later on, we went to the rue Mouffetard for dinner. The Mouffetarte was closed, so we picked another place to have quiche: one of those tiny eateries where it feels like you're having dinner in someone's living room. The chocolate and banana pie was deadly and I was glad to have it inside me when I went outside. It was bloody freezing, a few degrees colder than London, which doesn't seem fair. The streets were strangely quiet for a Friday night, the strike kept a lot of people away.
On Saturday morning, the three of us went to the local market. The cheese lady gave me a freebie just because I was with her regular customers which was very nice. We also got Portuguese pastries, which I will not attempt to spell, and some Lebanese goodies for brunch.
Outside in real daylight, I could clearly see the change in the number of bikes on the road. A public bike rental scheme, Vélib, was introduced this year and is doing well although there are some mutterings about the maintenance of the silver-gray monsters. New bike paths have been put in place too, some more well-planned than others.
Unfortunately, Paris's next big change hasn't happened yet: the smoking ban on 1 Jan. I had a cold, so when we wanted to go to a café my lungs had to be sent in first to scout the place out. The strike actually worked in my favour here because some places were completely empty and thus free of smoke.
We went to one of my favourite bookshops, Gibert Joseph, in the afternoon, where I bought the last two books in a Pierre Bordage trilogy. They were second-hand so I could've bought another Bordage with the money I'd "saved", but sanity reasserted itself and I escaped.
After dinner at a Thai restaurant where the staff did their bemused best for a vegetarian, we repaired to a shisha café for cinnamon tea, and got involved in a random conversation with some high schoolers wanting to try out their English. A friend of LQ's met us there and it turned out he was doing the Paris-London move soon too. I then had the immense satisfaction of losing the Clark & Rose moving company some business.
On Sunday, we met German people for falafels in Le Marais, the Jewish and gay area, and then had a nice wander through the narrow and busy streets. SF had the good idea of taking us to a restaurant serving cuisine from the south-west for dinner. Conclusion: the south-west likes salt. I also had frog's legs for the first time because LQ let me taste hers. Tender white meat, tastes like the sauce it's in -- sums up a lot of French cooking really.
My train left on Monday evening but I got there hours early because of my worries about the métro, which gave me the opportunity to walk around the Gare du Nord area where I don't usually go. North of the station is a somewhat different area to where I'd spent most of my weekend, poorer and livelier.
Apologies for there only being half a dozen photos of Paris this time. Keeping in mind that "but I lived there" doesn't fly as an excuse, I did try to take more, but if I had, they probably would've been of plates of food, which isn't really interesting. :-)