Topic: TN: The cheese that keeps on giving (Paris, pt. 1, long, img)
Author: Thor Iverson (Boston, MA)
Date: 20031212020305

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There goes the sun

She considers my lorry to be bloody attractive

"It's a fine day, with a few scattered clouds," mumbles our British Airways pilot, as we descend towards Heathrow. Why do BA pilots always mumble? And why do they lie through their teeth?

The latter question, it's true, only arises when we're on the ground in London. Thick, dark clouds pour a deluge of rain into widening puddles, around which sodden airport workers pick their way despite their waterproof boots. Just another lovely morning here in Sun City. "It's a fine day, with a few scattered clouds." Uh-huh.

The joy of theatre

As usual, our flight from Boston arrives before anything, including a desperately-needed coffee vendor, is open. We make our way through the airport's endlessly twisty hallways to our departure gate, just in time for a nearby restaurant in the throes of pre-breakfast setup to barrage us with irritatingly awful "country" music at a deafening volume. Theresa attempts to sleep on a row of uncomfortable chairs, largely without success, while I stare longingly at duty-free vodka (hey, you pass time in a closed-up Heathrow) through locked mesh gates. And anyway…Kenny Chesney at 6 a.m.? In London? Isn't there something profoundly wrong with this scenario?

The ride over is as pleasant as usual (BA remains my favorite trans-Atlantic airline), though the food and wine in steerage has declined a bit. Usually, there are un-offered choices amongst the forest of tiny bottles on the flight attendants' carts. This time, there's just one red and one white, a Fetzer chardonnay. I choose the Dourthe 2001 Bordeaux "Numero 1" (Bordeaux) to go with my overly-salted beef stew. This has become some sort of standard beverage on the last few BA flights, and it must be for purely economic reasons. Weedy and insipid, this has gotten dramatically worse, and it was never all that good to begin with.

Pancakes in Paris

Rain causes delays, as it always does, and thus we're in Paris a little later than intended. One bus to the Gare de Lyon and one taxi later, we're at our hotel, near-comatose with jet lag (commonplace for Theresa, but a rarity for me). We blame the sleep-inducing effects of the hot London sunshine.

You get what you Pei for

The Hôtel St-Christophe is a classic Parisian hotel, with charming little rooms full of antique furniture and windows that open onto unendingly noisy streets. We lock up as best we can, and take a short nap; I resist the impulse as strongly as possible, preferring to fight my way through the lethargy, but eventually sleep comes.

A few short hours later, we're wandering the streets of the 5th, up and down the semi-bustling serpentine squiggle of the rue Mouffetard, in search of lunch. Everything's closed, of course, because it's May 1st…a holiday, though how the French can possibly keep them all straight, I have no idea. One wonders where all the pedestrians are going, because today there's neither shopping nor commerce to be had on the otherwise fully-commercial street. Perhaps they just enjoy the walk. In any case, nothing except a sidewalk crêpe stand is open, and we devour a few of their mediocre offerings before searching for the nearest Métro station.

Above ground at the Palais Royale, all is relatively calm, though the gift shop is open at the nearby Comédie Française. Theresa browses Molière-themed bric-a-brac while I watch energetic young French skateboarders leap from an improvised ramp onto the historic stonework below. Unlike some of their Stateside counterparts, they're polite enough to wait for pedestrians to pass before going airborne. It's an interesting cultural discontinuity.

Horizontal sheets of rain arrive (fresh from London), and we duck into the covered walkways behind the Palais Royale to escape it. Here, there are more skateboarders perched and twirling on the variable-height barber poles that pass for public art in the enclosed courtyard, and their clattering nearly drowns out the soprano quavering of a distant opera singer. Soprano, yes…but not female, as we discover when we arrive. It's a guy, with quite the audience. Perhaps the castrata tradition isn't dead after all.

Darkness falls on the City of Light

Aussies in absentia

We're to meet Graeme and Judith Gee at Willi's Wine Bar, just a few short blocks away. What we don't realize until our arrival is that Willi's, like pretty much everything else in Paris, is…you guessed it…closed for the holiday. According to a hastily-scribbled sign on the door, nearby Macéo will be opening at 7 p.m.; we've reservations an hour later, but perhaps there's just enough time for a quick drink before dinner. However, there's no sign of our Australian counterparts. We wait ten minutes, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five…and just past the half-hour mark, we shrug and admit defeat, heading eastward (thus, apparently, missing the map-misled Gees by a scant few minutes). The streets are quiet. Only on a holiday could Paris be this calm.

The rain has stopped, giving way to blue sky and bright early-evening sun, and we walk towards the river. The Louvre at sunset is a marvelous thing, with low-angled light glinting off the fountains surrounding the Pyramide and brightening up the freshly-cleaned exterior of the museum. As we stroll down the Seine, a brisk Atlantic wind brings a new umbrella of rain-drenched clouds to the Paris sky, and we duck inside a quai-side café right on the Place du Châtelet just as the deluge begins, manning a corner table with a view of the Ile de la Cité. The coffee is mediocre – not unexpected for the location – but the ambience makes up for it, and we wait out the brief storm before returning to the streets, turning northward towards dinner.

Auvergne and out

Thankfully, a few restaurants are open despite the holiday, and Ambassade d'Auvergne is one of them. Quaint and cluttered, with a homey feeling to both the interior and the food, this is a remnant of countrified retro-classic French comfort food in a city swept up by the excitement of the reconceived and modernized bistro. My grandmother, were she a grandmère rather than Norwegian-American, might have made the warming and welcoming cabbage and Roquefort soup, and the Scandinavian in her would have loved a sticky, cheesy, sausage-spiked aligot. This is not light cuisine, but it's heavy in the most fulfilling (and filling) way; peasant food done with just enough, but not too much, refinement. From an extremely regionally-authentic, and thus completely unfamiliar, wine list (on which I've done some advance research) I select a bottle of Les Vignerons des Gorges du Tarn "Seigneurs de Peyreviel" 2000 Côtes-de-Millau (Aveyron), an intriguing blend of gamay, syrah, cabernet sauvignon, duras and fer servadou. Bright, acidic raspberries with gritty and rustic earthtones dominate the nose and palate of this fresh, drinkable wine with – like the food – just a touch of complexity. It's marvelous and palate-refreshing, a classic example of the sort of simple yet delicious country wine I crave on such voyages.

Impressed duck

Before dinner, a house apéritif of chestnut liqueur (from the Distillerie de la Salers) and white wine satisfies, and so I'm moved to sample a digestif from the same house at the end of the meal. The Salers Vieille Prune is a good but incomplete eau de vie, showing strong aromas of caramelized raisin but little else through a hot, thin palate.

It's a beautifully brisk but calm night, and we take our time strolling back across the Ile de la Cité to our hotel. There is nothing in the world quite like Paris at night, and on the quiet banks of the Seine – the golden towers of Notre-Dame gleaming off the calm water – it finally hits us: we're back. Places can become almost too familiar, after enough visits, and yet there's an emotion to travel that simply can't be replicated at home. Paris delivers that emotion better than almost any other city. We've missed it, though we've only been gone a short while; in a way, we'll always miss it, because Paris – the feeling more than the place – is something that, once experienced, always begs to be recaptured. The feeling I once called "recaptured memory" is actually the moment where memory becomes reality; the moment when Paris – the place and the feeling – brings you back to a place you've never quite left.

Sleep, when it comes, is welcome, but the excitement of the days ahead never really goes away. And, I note on several occasions during this fitful first night in Paris, neither does a belly full of melted cheese.

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