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.
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