Walking, and Paris

[ailbhe]

All over everywhere, people are hauling on leashes, being dragged from wall to puddle to pile of excrement to inexplicably fascinating lamppost... by their toddlers. I watched Rob set off for a brief drag with Linnea today. She had lots of fun. He survived.

We walked a bit in Paris. I called my mother from the Champs Elysees, which was nice. When we arrived, we walked from the Eurostar terminus at Gare du Nord to our hotel near the Gare de l'Est, where we found that the receptionist couldn't "speak" English (apparently) but could use it to direct us accurately to our rooms and explain the breakfast policy. The room was upstairs (in the lift), across a metal grille bridge (over a weird courtyard), and downstairs again. It was tiny - room for one person to walk around a double bed. But it had a shower, and I needed one, so I did that. Then we went downstairs and met <http://www.livejournal.com/users/sierra_le_oli">Kim, who introduced us to the mysteries of the Metro system and brought us somewhere near the Bastille for food.

Excuse me while I descend into drooling incoherence.

Thank you. All I had was the salmon, and they had to do is specially to take all the exciting butter and cream out of the equation, but it was incredible. I have no idea what they did to it but they can do it again any time they like. Twice a day if they like. It was salmon on a bed of green beans. That's it. That's all it was. I was reduced to little groaning noises and repetitions of "This is good, it's good."

My dairy-free dessert was marzipan and jam. No, seriously,m it was. Oh, and pistachios. It was probably the best dessert I've ever eaten. It was so good I fed some of it to Linnea even though it obviously contained sugar and she isn't allowed sugar, normally. It was good.

We also had wine. It's easy to order small quantities of wine, and the wine glasses themselves are smaller than in England, which meant that I enjoyed drinking a lot more. The following evening Rob and I shared 250ml of wine and didn't finish it, which was entirely satisfactory. That's hard to do in the restaurants near us. Some sell that much in a single glass.

And we discovered bread. A baguette in Paris is a totally different experience from one here in the UK. I promise it is. It was, again, so good I had to share some with Linnea. She'd never had white bread before. It was so good it didn't make me sick, which white bread usually does. It was so good I want to learn to make it. I'm hoping Doves Farm organic flour will be good enough. Apparently it's all in the milling, according to a very long thread on alt.fan.pratchett.

We went home eventually and got up for breakfast, and then Linnea and Rob needed to sleep some more, so we all went back to bed and slept until just about noon. We never get to do this normally.

First we had lunch, and the frites looked so good we ordered some after having ordered our main courses, and they were amazing - really amazing, not in the least like chips as I know them, but a genuine pleasure to eat. We saw a lovely slide for Linnea to play on, and a couple of churches, and more sex shops than I knew how to deal with - there was no option of averting the gaze, because wherever I averted it to, there was another sexorama peep show all live all girls all the time, or similar. Most peculiar. Then we went to a chain cafe to get tea and bread and to feed Linnea. We bought extra bread to take home with us because the first loaf we bought accidentally got eaten before we left the shop.

The Sacre Coeur was very high up and the air was much cleaner there; it was lovely, but too sunny, so we descended a bit and Rob bought an icecream. It wasn't spectacular. We passed a vineyard on a hill, which had some pretty pansies but no noticable vines, and carried the buggy up and down several flights of steps on the steeper streets. We're getting good at this.

We made it back to the hotel just in time to find PauAmma at the reception desk - the receptionist couldn't find us in their system anywhere, which could have been complicated. We again headed out to dinner, which was pretty ordinary really, and afterwards walked around looking at Paris. We found the Cathedral of Notre Dame, where there was a service, so we left quickly because I felt rude, and the Pompidou Centre, which I always hear in Zig's accent from Dempsey's Den, many moons ago. Then we walked back to the hotel. It doesn't sound like much, but it was lovely and pleasant and friendly. At some point we had dessert in a little cafe where Linnea met a cute little girl who gave her a cute little kiss, and we forgot to pay and had to run back several yards. Oops.

Sunday was very sunny, and we got up feeling rested enough to head straight out, after packing and checking out. We got the Metro to the Arc de Triomphe and looked at it - it's big and archy - and walked along the Ch. E. looking at the outsides of the shops. It's a nice street but there was an awful lot of cars and none of the shops looked appealing to us, not like the second-hand shop I spotted on Saturday specialising in baby clothes and equipment, either second-hand, hand-made, or designer end-of-line. Cute. Nothing we needed though.

Anyway, we walked down the Ch. E. and through the park to the Louvre, stopping for lunch and letting Linnea walk most of the way through the park. That was when I called my mother. Linnea wasn't allowed on the grass, sadly. Then we got the metro to the Eurostar and came home and gave her a bath. She got a nasty graze on some Parisian gravel, but it's getting much better now.

Comments

[datagoddess.livejournal.com]

Your hotel room sounds like the one Dan and I had in Paris :-)

The walk from the Arc de Triomphe to the Lourve is nice, isn't it? We went in a few of the shops on the Ch. E., but didn't buy anything. There was a lovely little cafe in the park where we stopped for hot chocolate (we were there in late October 2000).

We had more fun in London, though (even though I was sick as a dog).

We need to go back to London sometime. I wasn't that interested in Paris, and we did most of the things there that interested me, but we didn't have nearly enough time in London :)