A Month of Fun Days

I have not yet gone for a ride on the Roue de Paris, the 200-ft high Ferris wheel on the Place de la Concorde, but I have taken its picture.  Not to be confused with the Grande Roue, which was erected in Paris for the 1900 Exposition Universelle and stood for 20 years, the Roue de Paris went up for the millennium celebration in 2000 and seems to be here to stay.  I had a look at it this morning, running down the Champs-Elysées on the homeward leg of a seven-mile run on my 31st day in Paris.  

 On Sundays the road along the Seine is closed to cars, and I started down it, heading west toward the Eiffel Tower, then across the Pont d’Iena, planning to sneak up on the Arc de Triomphe by one of the 12 streets that converge on it.  It was my first crossing of the bridge between the Eiffel Tower and the Palais de Chaillot, and it was free of the thronging tourists who would soon arrive.  

Reaching the top of the steps near the Trocadéro Métro station, I passed between the eight golden statues that stand facing each other, four on each side, officially welcoming me to the 16th arrondissement.  After a few zigs and zags I ended up on Rue de la Pompe, running past a pub called Honest Lawyer.  Rue de la Pompe dead-ends at Avenue Foch, the wide and well-heeled street that runs between the Bois de Boulogne and the Arc de Triomphe.  I hung a right and came up the hill, happy not to have missed my planned inspection of the famous Arc, commissioned by Napoleon in 1806 as a slap on his own back for the great job he was doing watering the fields of Europe with the blood of soldiers both French and foreign.  

After taking the Place Charles de Gaulle side of the circle around the Arc, I turned down the Avenue des Champs-Elysées, passing an arcade called Publicis Drugstore, which houses several businesses, none of which is a pharmacy.  

Ordering a sandwich, something I do as least once a day, can be a great opportunity to learn a few new words of French.  Walking back from a meeting around lunchtime last Friday I ducked into a tiny sandwich shop on a side street between Quai Voltaire and Blvd St-Germain.  I bent down to inspect the various sandwiches piled in the glass case and then met the penetrating gaze and raised eyebrows of the Sandwich Man.  Loudly confident and hungry, I placed my order. 

“Un club thon!” I said, forgetting that thon means tuna.  

“Chaud?” The Sandwich Man asked convincingly.  

“Pourquoi pas.” I fired back, sounding even hungrier than before.  

So I ended up with a hot tuna sandwich, which was quite good, but not exactly what I had in mind.  

Three days after arriving in Paris I left, taking the Eurostar to London to spend Christmas with friends.  I was sitting in the waiting area at the Gare du Nord when an announcement came over the public address system.  First in French and then in English, a female voice belabored a forlorn and captive audience: 

“This is a security announcement.  A pink bag of chocolates and candies has been left unaccompanied at the UK Customs desk.  If is it not claimed immediately by its owner it will be destroyed by security personnel.”  

I was deflated by this news, gathering that Paris suffers from the same over-securitization that has a hold on the United States like Br’er Rabbit grappling with the Tar Baby.  I pictured a couple of under-appreciated gendarmes waiting an obligatory five minutes, then tearing into a kilo of fancy Parisian chocolates and stuffing peppermint sticks into their pockets for later.  I was jerked from my malaise by the blur of an octogenarian Asian woman sprinting toward the Customs desk to rescue her stocking stuffers from the cops.

Paris does Christmas well.  Strings of white lights are everywhere, Christmas trees stand in front of public buildings, and fake snow is spray-painted on the windows of shops and cafés across the city, yet somehow Paris does not succumb to the kitsch of other cities decorated for the holidays.  In spite of all the window dressing, the city isn’t trying to look good, she just does.  Like a woman I saw yesterday in the Rue Mouffetard.  She was walking toward me in the middle of the street, slamming her stiletto-heeled boots into the ground with each step, her hair bouncing, her head and shoulders motionless, a thousand-yard stare glazing her dark brown eyes.  She was wearing little black shorts over black tights and a black leather jacket made top-heavy by a huge fur collar that I hoped was real.  This Parisian goddess, announcing herself like a Clydesdale on a cobbled street, was probably just running out from her job at the bank to grab un club thon.  This is the beauty of Paris, or one of them, anyway.

Métro Music

It is no surprise that the music of Parisian buskers is first rate. Since 1997 over 4,000 musicians have auditioned to play on the platforms and in the corridors of Métro stations around Paris. Each year, roughly 350 new artists are accredited, making them sanctioned RATP performers. This is rather tenuous job security, as the only thing these artists are rewarded is the opportunity to practice their art, with a hat, or a jar, or guitar case on the ground to collect a few coins. Many of them aren’t even interested in money, seeking, rather, an audience, and an acoustic chamber as vibrant as any studio in which to play. After several recent encounters with Métro musicians, I find myself drawn more and more frequently into the subway, in the hope of witnessing another virtuoso performance.

My friend Elizabeth lives in the 9th, and I take Line 12 toward Porte de la Chapelle to get to her house. The closest that Line 12 comes to my apartment is Sèvres Babylone, and that’s where I listen to the pan flutist, sometimes missing my train to hear a little bit more. He’s always in the same spot, in front of a billboard for a Belgian restaurant chain, standing with his feet together in a way that reminds me of Charlie Chaplin. Most every instrument I’ve heard in the subway sounds great, but the pan flute seems particularly suited to the ceramic tiles that bounce it’s high-pitched notes around like so many golf balls dropped into a racquetball court.

A few days ago I heard two pan flutes on the same day, one on my way to Elizabeth’s for dinner, and the other that morning at Châtelet, where I changed from Line 8 to Line 12 toward Mairie d’Issy on my way home from looking at an apartment in the 3rd. This first pan flute was half of a duo of Peruvian woodwinds, the other instrument a large recorder. I put some coins in their jar, and shot 30 seconds of video before a middle-aged man in spectacles and a fedora stopped to inform me that filming in the subway is illegal. My ignorance had been bliss, and now I feel self-conscious when I illicitly document music in the Métro.

Even the accredited performers break the rules from time to time. They are not supposed to play music on the trains, but they often do, and no one seems to mind. I, for one, couldn’t be happier, as was the case on Tuesday morning, when I joined Line 10 at Saint-Germain des Prés on my way to the US Embassy. In the middle of the car lengthwise, blocking one of the doors, was a man playing a guitar, which is a gross understatement. He had a German look about him, all blond hair and set jaw in a zip-up black turtleneck. His instrument was a caramel-colored electric, I couldn’t tell the brand, and it was beautiful. He wasn’t so much grinding his axe as making music, with the pleasing contradiction of effortlessness and concentration. He played sweet rock riffs that were somehow loud enough to hear from the far end of the car without being obnoxious, whatever your musical taste. Before he got off the train at Concorde several passengers dropped coins into the little change purse he carried around, a rare compliment from the fickle French commuters. The place where he had been standing was quickly filled by a dozen new passengers, who did as the French do, standing silently and looking anywhere but at each other.      

Paris 4-Miler

The Church of Saint Germain des Prés is the first thing I see on my morning jog.  I could hit it with a baseball from my apartment, though there aren’t any baseballs in France.  Construction of the church’s bell tower began in 990, making it the oldest one in Paris, other parts of the church being refitted into the 19th century.  As I walked by on Sunday morning (having postponed my jog until the afternoon), a six-man jazz band was playing in front of the church, just across from the café Les Deux Magots.  I stopped and listened, eventually emptying my pocket into their tip jar and buying a CD.  These guys were good.  After touring the inside of the magnificent church, I took an outdoor table at the café, ordered a coffee, and opened my book, a cheery clarinet solo reaching me from across the street.  I later visited the band’s website, learning that La Planche A Dixie was formed in 1995 by the washboard player, Christian Giovanardi, and they’ll happily play your wedding if the price is right.

After an hour of reading and listening to jazz, I reluctantly left the café and walked to the Louvre to see about getting a season pass.  As I feared, Sunday was not the day to do this, the courtyard and lobby of the museum were mobbed.  I decided to skip it, instead walking toward home across the Pont des Arts, one of Paris’ thirty-seven bridges over the Seine.  Near the middle of the bridge, two high school-aged guys stopped me and asked if I spoke French.  I said yes, adding that I was no expert.  They said they were doing a school project on the significance of the bridge and asked if I would answer a few questions.  “Sure”, I said,  as one of them manned a video camera, and the other began questioning me on the history of the Pont des Arts.  I gave the only answers I could, which were simple ones, explaining that I thought it was nice bridge, situated as it is between the Louvre and the Institut de France, which houses, among other things, the Académie Fançaise.  They asked me about the locks, and I said I thought they were nice, too.  The Pont des Arts is one of a couple of bridges in Paris to which happy lovers afix padlocks as symbols of their love, afterwards throwing the keys into the river.  Periodically, the police cut off the locks, though apparently they leave the older ones.  Everyone, it seems, has a sense of history around here.   Before parting, the guys took my photo, asking me to hold up a picture frame around my face.  I hope I am spared the worst of their classmates’ ridicule, thought it seems unlikely.

Jogging in Paris is unlike jogging in other cities.  The buildings, parks, and monuments seem built to a larger scale and to a higher quality than in other places, and the one at the end of the next block, whatever it might be, is the carrot that keeps you going, just a little bit farther.  Not to mention the café signs and the awnings of brasseries, dwarfed in size by the impressive buildings, but no less enjoyable to see.  

Heading out for a morning jog at 9:30am, I ran into the little old lady who lives in the apartment above me.  She was coming up the stairs, laden with parcels and bundled up against the winter cold.  “Ah, bonjour!” she said, looking me and down, clearly disapproving of my cold weather running gear.  “I did the same thing this morning,” she added in French, “but at 7am!”  “Ca c’est bien fait.” I offered, stepping aside as she tromped past me up the stairs.  Normally, I run a bit earlier than 9:30, but Paris is a late starting town, and I’m trying to fit in.  Hitting the streets at 8:00am on a weekday the city is eerily deserted, as if an evacuation has been ordered and I’m the last to know.

Rounding a corner by the Luxembourg Garden one morning, I passed a kettle of chestnuts roasting on an open fire, an old woman stirring them with a metal spoon, les marrons rattling around with a pleasing clatter.  Later on the same run I saw three guys swimming in the Seine.  I was crossing the Pont Louis Phillippe, from the right bank to the left via the Ile Saint-Louis, feeling full of myself for being out so early in the cold morning air.  As I glanced to my right, I caught sight of three black shapes as they emerged from under the bridge, moving swiftly in the frigid brown water.  I stopped in my tracks and watched three guys in wetsuits and flippers swimming with the river’s strong current, attended at a safe distance by a small motorboat.  I imagined the boat was stocked with blankets and hot wine, the least these guys deserved for their morning’s exercise.  The motorboat had the markings of the Paris police, and I confirmed its identity the next day.  Walking in the garden at the back side of Notre-Dame Cathedral I stopped to chat with three French soldiers dressed in fatigues and carrying machine guns.  I described the swimmers I had seen the previous morning and asked if they were indeed police, or if perhaps they were French military.  The soldiers confirmed that the guys were with the police department, explaining that salvage and rescue divers conduct training year round, regardless of the conditions.  The four of us agreed that this was a little nuts, and then I asked if I could take their picture.  Their apparent leader answered: “Non.  C’est interdit.”  The second of the three, and only woman, added: “Peut-être le 14 juillet.”  Switching to English, I wrapped things up, “Roger that,” I said. “See you then!”

Réveillon de la Saint-Sylvestre

A friend from home put me in touch with her aunt and uncle in Paris, Kate & Pierre-Yves, and I did not hesitate when they invited me to join them for dinner on December 31st.  “Just a small dinner,” Kate said.  “Nothing much, but you’re more than welcome to join us, and you shouldn’t be alone on New Year’s Eve.”  There were six of us, including Florence & Nicolas, who live in the apartment downstairs, and Jean-Pierre, an old friend.  Florence and Nicolas are both enthusiastic chefs, as is Kate. Pierre-Yves explained it thus: “Ils cuisinent.  Je mange et je bois.”  “Me, too.” I said.  

The evening unfolded like a play written by Julia Child.  Everything we ate was made from scratch by the three chefs, except for the ‘#3 special’ oysters on the half-shell, which came from the ocean, and were shucked by someone else.  We started in the living room, sitting by the fire, drinking whiskey and champagne, and snacking on three appetizers: toothpicks of roasted prunes and bacon, small triangles of pastry stuffed with black sausage and apple, and a tray of shot glasses containing puréed fennel and a  slice of Manchego.  

Next came the oysters, brought in from the terrace on a bed of ice and seaweed.  As he opened a bottle of white wine, Pierre-Yves recounted demonstrating his devotion to Kate by defiling an oyster with cocktail sauce to meet the expectations of her Texan father.  He also explained the different types of oysters, saying that the ones we were eating were the highest grade of the best type.  Indeed, it was hard to imagine any oysters tasting better.

Before decamping to the dining room there was a pause, Nicolas and Florence disappearing downstairs to their apartment to ready the first course.  The rest of us chatted in the living room before Kate ushered us to the table, and then the soup arrived.  Nicolas came through the front door with a tray holding six steaming bowls, and they were passed around.  According to Florence the soup had only two ingredients: topinambour and seared foie gras, though Nicolas cracked under questioning and confessed to adding a little olive oil.  It was my first encounter with the Jerusalem artichoke, and I think we’ll be seeing each other again.

For the main course there was roasted beef tenderloin, potatoes, yams, snow peas, bread, and red wines from from Spain, Argentina, and France.  I tried out an electronic pepper grinder made by Peugeot that shines a light on your food as it grinds the pepper, an effect I found creepy.  Next came a green salad and assortment of cheeses, followed by a chocolate cake made by Kate, served with fresh raspberries and cream.  Someone handed me a digital camera showing pictures of the same group eating dinner at a restaurant in the south of France just a few days before.  I felt like I was being recruited into some kind of gastronomic cult.  What they didn’t know is that I would have gone quietly.  Primed by the champagne, whiskey, and wine, I was ready for the Kool-Aid.

After dinner we moved back to the living room, Pierre-Yves pouring glasses of cognac and Nicolas opening more champagne.  Thirty minutes before midnight everyone started sending text messages to check on their kids, and phone calls  came in from siblings overseas.  The carpet was rolled away and Pierre-Yves and Florence danced, encouraging the rest of us to join in.  The whole scene was presided over by Judy & Mabel, Kate & Pierre-Yves’ two miniature Dachshund puppies, who stayed up past their bedtime to ring in the new year.

Napoli e Pompei

Owing the euros in my wallet to the U.S. Navy, I mean no disrespect when I say that military administration is nothing if not inefficient.  As proof, consider the three days I recently spent in Naples, Italy - was ordered to spend in Naples, Italy - to accomplish one hour of administrative check-in for my current assignment in...wait for it...France.  The back story in a nutshell: In 1966, Charles de Gaulle, long unhappy with the perceived special relationship between the United States and Britain and other alleged inequities within NATO, expelled American forces from France.  100,000 U.S. personnel, and all their stuff, got the boot.  Fast forward 45 years, and you see the bureaucrat’s dilemma: Who fills out the paperwork for the handful of U.S. military folks working in France if there’s no base there, no There there?  Time to find another There, and the There they found is EURCENT, in Naples.  This doesn’t explain why I was afforded three days to accomplish an hour’s work, but the inefficient don’t appreciate second guessing.  Rather, There I went, and did the paper work, and 2.8 days remained until my flight to Paris.  Plenty of time to do a bit of sightseeing. 

I saw the city once before, during a port call in 2004, when I bobbed across the choppy waters of the Bay of Naples from the USS Enterprise to the fleet landing pier, for a few days of strolling about and eating pizza.  On the advice of an old friend, I rode the funicular up to the top of Vomero Hill, then walked to the fortress of Sant’Elmo, a majestic complex dating from the 13th century, with sweeping views of the bay, port, and city below, and Mount Vesuvius beyond.  The aircraft carrier, funicular, and visit to the fortress are several years ago now, and on my return to Naples what I'm most impressed by are the trash and traffic.  The place is a godawful mess.  Which is not to say that Naples is without it’s fine points, but the madness of the traffic and ubiquity of the refuse are easier to find.  I found both in spades on my way to Pompeii.

On Tuesday morning I got up early and made the three-minute walk to the top of the Navy base’s five-story parking garage to snap a few pics of the sun rising over Mount Vesuvius.  That done, I walked the half mile to the bus stop outside the airport to catch a ride downtown.  Driving in Naples seemed like a bad idea, not that I had the option, and the bus ride was pleasant.  My destination was the Piazza Garibaldi, which I remembered from my previous visit as the bustling, vibrant center of downtown Naples.

Either times had changed, or my memory had been generous.  On debarking the bus, I looked down to find the tops of my Skechers barely visible through loosely packed garbage.  Shuffling forward and turning 180 degrees in the trash, I saw that the entire Piazza - perhaps the size of 6 city blocks - was a construction site.  Plywood fences, enormous cranes, and stockpiles of building materials were everywhere. I was underwhelmed by the power of urban renewal at work and wondered if the construction workers, trash haulers, or both, might be on strike.  At various intervals it looked as if the construction crews had taken delivery of loads of household garbage and were waiting for word from the foreman as to what should be done with it.  

Having gotten off the bus at the opposite end of the piazza from the train station, I hoofed it around the perimeter, taking in the sights and smells.  It was a welcome relief when the odor of cooking oil from the McDonald’s next to the station overpowered the stench of hot trash, an incongruous stench considering the wintry morning's chill.  Upon entering the station, I stood in a couple of wrong lines before finding the place to buy a ticket to Pompeii.  Ten minutes later I was rolling south, listening to a busker's accordion, Piazza Garibaldi happily forgotten. 

Without fail, there are five things you see out the window of the train between Naples and Pompeii: orange trees, prickly pear cacti, graffiti, laundry drying on the line, and Mount Vesuvius.  The infamous volcano dominates the skyline in these parts, situated as it is only slightly closer to Pompeii than to modern day Naples.  Graffiti is everywhere along the tracks, one recurring design bringing to mind Cool Disco Dan, the District of Columbia’s legendary tag artist.  

Exploring the ruins of Pompeii is worth every penny of the 11€ ticket price.  At over 150 acres the town is huge, and there is a lot to see.  I snagged a free tourist guide from the the kiosk by the front gate and set off to get lost in the cobbled Roman streets.   As the guidebook explains, most of the original art and statuary has been moved to the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, a diminishment for which I was grateful, given how much there was to see. A recurring architectural feature I found especially pleasing were the large, raised stones in the middle of the streets.  Back in the day, the streets were flooded each morning for cleaning, and the precisely-spaced stepping stones allowed morning commuters to cross without getting their sandals wet.  The spacing coincided exactly with the length of chariot axles, so that they too could pass.  I wondered if the concept of street cleaning in Italy had been lost forever when Vesuvius blew its stack in 79AD.

I am not yet a world traveler with friends dotting the earth like push pins on a wall map, but I do have a friend in Naples, and what a friend he is.  Domenic, a Navy doctor, is Italian, and his insider tour of Naples was educational.  On my last night in town he picked me up for dinner at the Navy base near the airport in Capodichino.  As the crow flies, the distance from Capodichino to the Trattoria da Cicciotto in Mareghiaro is just shy of eight miles.  In Dom’s BMW, during rush hour on the night of a local soccer match, this drive took years off my life, threatening on multiple occasions to take the whole thing, all in 30 minutes.  As Dom explained to me, there are too many cars in Naples, causing people to drive like maniacs.  Dom being local, I was reticent to question his logic, though I silently held the opinion that the problem wasn’t too many cars, but too many drivers, a frightening number of whom slalom through traffic on scooters like a swarm of hungover Alberto Tombas careening down the slopes of Lillehammer.   Lane markings on the roads mean nothing, and traffic signs might as well be in a foreign language, which for me they were, because absolutely no one pays the least attention to them.  Most of the time, everyone except the kamikaze scooter drivers is in gridlock, with adjacent cars no more than six inches from one another on all sides.  It seems an impossibly tight mass of cars for the scooters to negotiate, but somehow they do, often at high speed.  The drive to dinner was tense, but we made it to the restaurant, with Dom pointing out sights along the way, and without being implicated in a vehicular homicide.  

We sat down for dinner at 8:30pm, obscenely early by Italian standards, our waiter clipping on his bow tie as he showed us to a table in the winterized outdoor seating area.  For forty minutes we were the only people in the restaurant, and we had the undivided attention of the cheerful, chatty staff.  The village of Mareghiaro is situated to the southwest of Naples proper, smack on the Mediterranean coast, at the bottom of a maze of small and tangled streets.  It is locally known as the place where the 18th century poet Salvatore Di Giacomo penned a famous Neapolitan love song, staring out a particular window at the sea.  The historical record does not identify Di Giacomo’s muse, but she may well have been a poached octopus.  Dom ordered our dinner in Italian, without consulting either me or a menu, and it was delicious: lightly fried julienned vegetables, poached octopus salad, lobster, mussels, heaps of pasta, bread, and a pitcher of fresh white wine pulled from a tap.  Our main courses were served on rectangular plates the size of tea trays.  After dinner we walked down a flight of steps for the obligatory look at Di Giacomo’s window, and then drove to a downtown cafe through eerily deserted streets.  Dom explained that all Neapolitans watch the local soccer matches, emptying the streets to observe the ritual.