Tuesday morning, Paris

Coming down the steps of the Daumesnil stop on metro line 6, I see there’s a rush hour crowd at the quay, and when the train pulls in, it’s pretty full already. No hope of me getting on that one, so I let the one crowd elbow its way off the train and through the other crowd waiting to get on without striving either way myself.

An asian woman fighting her way onto the train loses a shoe. She looks behind her, sad, and dejectedly steps off the train. Her place is snapped up before she’s left it.

Once the train leaves, she leans over and sees her shoe, pale pink, fallen between the rail and the wall. It’s about three feet down to go get it. Too far to reach. Have to jump down onto the tracks, which nobody will do. Next train in 3 minutes. She hobbles in a slow circle, not willing to touch her clean stockinged foot to the ground.

And who could blame her ? It’s filthy in here.

She’ll have to put it down eventually. She’s shoeless for the morning, whether she limps home for alternative footwear, or being a visitor like me has to wait for the shops to open to buy shoes.

The next train is here, and we all leave her behind, undecided.

The 6 is one of my favorite metro lines because it travels largely on an elevated railway (Daumesnil notwithstanding). I love being able to look into people’s windows as we go by. We pass the Bercy sports arena. This is a pyramid covered with lawn, with several terraces. The sides are at about 60°, nice and green. That’s apparently actual grass, not astroturf, neatly trimmed.

They must water it with some kind of mist or drip system, because there aren’t even any trenches eroded where water collects at random and runs downhill.

How do they mow it ??

Each section of lawn is 20-30 feet tall, and like I said closer to vertical than level.

Ah, here’s a guy on the middle terrace hanging a modified lawnmower over the side by a long cord. He walks back and forth, letting out a little more slack each time. Must have some arms ! He can’t even properly see what he’s doing, because leaning over far enough he’d fall over the edge. Maybe he has a partner I can’t see, signaling More here to the left! Too low !

I get to the Institut Curie with half an hour to relax over a good coffee (the stuff at the hotel was nasty), and then it’s a full-day meeting, which we don’t even finish before people have to run for their trains. Including me.

EuroCancer

Just some random notes since I've been away for a few days, to Paris for the annual "EuroCancer" meeting. This was my first time at this meeting. My boss was invited to give a talk, and since he was busy that day he turned the invite over to me. Genetic Determinism in Breast Cancer. Oooh, big title! Then I saw I would be speaking not at a breast cancer session, but at a Mediterranean cancer session. Ah, that's something I can really talk about for 20 minutes. A chance to present the comparisons we've done between our central-France population and those in Tunisia, Algeria, & Morocco.

Being a "Euro-" meeting, with other speakers from the UK and the USA, I thought that presenting in English would be fine. It is easier for me, because in spite of a certain fluency after 14 years here, I get nervous and tongue-tied in front of an audience. Then the morning of, I see this is a special session for the inauguration of a Francophone pan-Mediterranean club. Ah, francophony. This definitely means they want it in French, but too bad! Too late. I've done all my practicing in English and changing now could be disastrous.

It went fine, at least for me!

You could tell it was a doctors' meeting by the selection of commercial stands hawking their products. All pharmaceutical companies, all bored out of their skulls because nobody wanted their stuff. All anybody wanted from the stands was munchies - for breakfast there were croissants and fruit, all day long espresso and soft drinks, and at lunch we all made the rounds to see who had the best catering. The sushi got my vote. And what I've never seen at a meeting of scientists - champagne. Yep, every third stand was serving up bubbly for lunch. Since my talk was at 2, I resisted the first day.

This WW2 memorial sculpture is right across from the convention center. From a distance the bushes hide the bottom part, and it looks like a big metal hedgehog or something.

It being the solstice and all, there was plenty of light in the evening to go walking about, taking pictures. I was on the hunt for Monsieur Chat. More about that tomorrow.

The sign on the fence around this long, empty park-ish space says 'no ball playing and no bicycles'. No wonder there's nobody around. Let's enjoy this concrete plain, yeah.

Further down the same parkway there are some bits of adventurous landscaping that just didn't quite make it. This bushy arrangement might be better if it were alive.

The convention center is at the corner of the gigantic Bois du Boulogne park, convenient for a lunchtime stroll. People were out in droves, picnicing and hanging around. The family belonging to this stroller is just around the bush; it's the fearless rabbit that caught my attention, right at the edge of the shadow on the lawn. Here we are zoomed in and cropped. Just hanging around. There was a fat black one too, by the fence to the kids' play area, that hopped under a hedge when I approached, but not in a hurry or anything.

last pictures

Hello all. I'll explain later, but I know a couple of you are waiting to see the remaining vacation pictures. There aren't many without a certain plush toy in them - those will be over at Pink Rabbit Abroad in a day or two. The weather was poor and night falls early this time of year. I do promise to transcribe the rest of my journal entry by the end of the week. Before it gets too old!

Vacation with Darrell, part the last

Brain exercise: all the photographs in the last post will be mentioned. Up to you to match them to this text as you like.

And now... to take up where I left off...

On our walk around Paris Tuesday evening, the Louvre is lit up as usual, but they've added a wheel of filters that turns around, giving the glass and girder structure slowly changing colors. And the giant Ferris Wheel has been set up. This year it is all in white, with fake white trees in front and a shack for toffee peanuts, roast chestnuts, and souvenirs off to the side.

Let's eat French food tonight. Being here in France, after all. We vow to stop for fondue if we see it offered, or tartiflette which our mouths watered over but we didn't get to in Clermont. Those are both regional dishes, though, and we'd rather not wander around in the cold for too long. We're not picky. Parisian French is often edible.

There's a place just a block from the hotel where we can have yet another round of duck, including salad with gizzards. D is a big fan of gizzards done right, and I guess the French do them right. Even I will happily down salade aux gesiers (though if there's salade au saumon fumé on offer, there's no contest). How do they do it? Keep them from getting tough and dry? D thinks they might be steamed.

Tuesday is quiet for dinner out. We have the place to ourselves until after 9, when a party of the owner's friends arrives. The art on the walls is original, and mostly for sale, so when the bored owner sees us looking he comes over and tells us all, all about the artist. It's good food, all the way through the chocolate ganach cake for dessert.

There aren't many people at breakfast, but they all turn and laugh when I set the heavy glass jar of Nutella down with a clack on our table. I didn't mean to set it down quite so hard, really. I wasn't trying to make a statement. Life is better with Nutella. On bread, on croissants, on waffles. The dull breakfast fare comes to life. Accompanied by plenty of coffee.

This morning we have a mission: find and photograph an old Master lock that has been attached to one of the gates at Park Monceau since the early 1980's. Motorcycle thieves did not succeed in stealing the bike, but they did damage the lock beyond all function. - And - it's so tough it's still there.

It's still there because the city of Paris doesn't spend any effort removing old, useless locks from various gates and fences. They litter parks all across the city, in the thousands. The readers of Locksmithing Today just don't know that.

But it's a mission all the same so here we go. While riding the Metro, we decide to start at the first gate we come to, and to continue around clockwise in a scientific and systematic manner until we have found it or gone all the way around. There's the park, with its high, spike-topped fence and its elaborate gates. The very first gate has three locks, two of which are City locks in nightly gate-closing use. The other is some german thing. Staying outside the park we turn right.

More gates, more locks. City is popular, and not just with the city. Bjorn. That german company whose name I forget. Two-thirds are holding something safe - a bicycle, a scooter, a motorcycle; but a full third hold nothing. Some have chains, some chains wrapped in plastic, some just huge hasps. Some new, some old, some ancient and beaten. None are Masters. If we had a digital camera we'd make a catalog. Never fear: they will all still be here next year when I'll have one.

None of the locks have paint on them - apparently the city painters are careful to respect the abandoned locks whenever they come around for the fence.

Around to the fourth and last major gate, and there it is! A long-hasp, combination Master lock, very beaten and worn. Maurice poses with the find. We take its portrait. We take turns touching it. Yep. There it is, as promised.

D is satisfied. He's a big fan of locks and keys, and every time we pass a key store he stops and looks around. Too bad all the really unusual ones are very expensive!

All over town there are posters for a "Courtesans" exposition at some museum, and here it is, right in a little building abutting the park. And what do we have but a group of schoolchildren being shepherded inside. Um, All About Courtesans for second-graders?

We are in France.

It's a museum of Asian art & history, and in front are bronze dog statues that are kind of neat. One has its mouth open, full of teeth, so we go for a Maurice Moment. That gets the interest of the security guard inside, who has by now finished with the herd of children. That would have been fine on its own, but then Darrell notices that the hollow bronze dog has a hatch on the back. And he opens it. Hey, put that back! We're being watched! But no, it's really cool to look inside, and now the guard comes to the door and shakes his finger menacingly, and D doesn't put the lid down, and the guy starts to come out, so D finally gives in and we leave.

Completing our circuit of the park, it's time to figure out what to do with the rest of the day.

Museums? Nah

Art & architecture? Nah

Shopping? Nah

We could go see some other town not too far, like Riems or Rouen, but that turns out to be too expensive just for a day trip to someplace we're not super keen on anyway.

There's the Chantilly castle, but we've done a lot of castles.

So off the Science Park with its Exploratorium it is.

We take the metro out there, and walk around the extensive grounds for a while. The place is huge, though it looks so outsized because there are a meer handful of people putzing around in a space built to amuse thousands. It's probably packed in the summer. In the park there are lots of things to climb on, all chained off now, off limits. The kiosks are all closed, no ambulant pastry sellers or carts of knicknacks. Empty.
We take a likely direction in search of lunch, but find nothing. Back toward the metro station there were a couple of iffy places where we might risk a sandwich - aside from the Science Park this is a fairly depressed and scuzzy part of Paris, full of graffiti and debris. We get lucky and happen across a little bar & resto that's doing a cracking business. Today's specials: spaghetti bolognaise, braised beef with carrots, various combinations of couscous. The steak with blue cheese sause and fried potatos at the next table looks delicious, but I've been having a lot of steak so I go for the spaghetti. Mistake. D has the beef and carrots, which are a hit.

The Exploratorium is huge. Many sections are closed as they turn over the temporary exhibits, but just the part that's open is many times the size of the H Fleet in San Diego. Today's Special Exhibit is "Tout sur le Zizi", which translates to "All about the Penis", targeted to the 9-12 year old crowd. It's a separate ticket, and we pass. The entire afternoon goes by without our being able to mess with all the stuff there is to see and mess with. Optics, space, acoustics, city planning, electricity, engines, we don't even get to the mathematics part, or see the genetics exhibit. There's just too much, and it's time to go to the Imax theater in its mirrored sphere for our movie.

We passed up a film on Monsters of the Deep in favor of Fly Me to the Moon, in 3-D. It's an animated thing about some flies that tag along on the Apollo 11 mission. The 3-D effects are great, but What were they thinking?? This is a science park, and the science in the film gets an F. Flies wearing space helmets not attached to anything. Flies with two arms, two legs. What's more characteristic of a fly than it's compound eyes? Just to cite some more blatant examples. Going to the moon is so interesting and cool in itself it doesn't have to be made dumb to appeal to grade-schoolers. And the story. OMG. They should distribute airsick bags with the show.

The Exploratorium closed while we were in the theater. I'll have to come back some day and see the rest of it.

One last French dinner. Crèpes this time, savory then sweet, and cider. Ohhhhh, that homemade caramel! For late evening entertainment, we take a tour of the Metro. Most of the stations on line 1 are decorated in interesting ways, and line 6 is mostly above ground, allowing us to see what holiday lights are up and to peek into people's apartments as we trundle by, plus where it crosses the river the 6 has a great view of the Eiffel Tower. The 1 and 6 cross twice, at either end of the interesting part of line 1, a very convenient loop. At this time of the evening (it's not "night" in France until either midnight or you've gone to bed) there aren't too many people riding the trains, but not so few you get nervous about the ones there are. It takes about an hour and fifteen plus the round trip on the 12 to get to Montmartre, and then we're done with Paris.

In the morning we say our Happy Thansgivings and our goodbyes at the airport. Darrell gets home without any problems, and that's it for the vacation. See you again in May!

Paris

It's a good train and we are prepared. We have sudoku, pretzels, Italian lemon cookies, knitting, books, conversation. People around us have companions who will not be travelling north, but for the time being they stick around. When the station master makes a preliminary announcement with 5 minutes to go, the husband in the row behind us says his goodbyes, and as I watch him leave the quay, lots of other people seem to be leaving too, almost like a train just pulled up and is letting people off.

Across the aisle are two Turkish girls. The one going to Paris isn't happy with her aisle seat being next to an occupied window seat, so she tried to snag the window seat behind, but then the occupant of that one arrived too. The difficulty of reserved seats. So she and her friend sit in different rows and chat hanging into the aisle. They're so absorbed at trying out various loud and annoying ringtones for their phones that people have to ask twice to get through to their seats farther down.

There's the second announcement, meaning our departure is imminent, but the non-traveller makes no move to wrap it up. I consider saying something, but they've both been rather Don't Bother Us!, and quickly enough the station master blows his all-clear whistle and off we go.

We slide out of the station so smoothly that it takes the Turks a moment to notice, and the look on Girl 2's face is priceless. No translation necessary for her torrent of comments!

(Oh, come now, I wasn't that mean by not saying anything. Our first stop is in Riom, barely 7 minutes away. She'll get back to Clermont without any trouble. If this were a nonstop to Paris, of course I would have said something.)

At two, long past Lunchtime (can you see my life revolves around when I might eat next) and having exhausted our snackage between Nevers and Fontainebleau, we go drop off our stuff at the hotel in Montmartre. No proper lunch: we'll enjoy our tibetan dinner that much more tonight.

First thing: Booktrading.

One of the main attractions of Paris for me is turning over my library. I love books, but I don't need to keep them. It's what's in them that counts, not having the object (unless I haven't read it yet). So I've got 11 or 12 books to get rid of, hoping to change them into a handful of new titles at my favorite used English-language bookstores. Berkeley Books and San Francisco Books are just a block from each other in the Left Bank university area, run by ex-colleagues.

I like Berkeley better, both their stock and the owner. He only wants four of my books today, while I want five of his. Settle for three, and I still have to reach for cash. Down the street I'm pleasantly surprised that the other guy will take all but two of my remaining titles. Deal! I want a couple new ones, and Darrell wants a couple, and even weeding out some I'm digging for change. I'll just ditch the other two in a likely spot for some anglophone to pick them up.

The rest of the afternoon we wander across the Latin Quarter to Notre Dame. They're advertising an organ recital tomorrow evening that sounds like an interesting experience, even for non-organ music, non-religious people like us, but we'll eventually not go. Then through part of the Marais toward the Defender of Time for its 6 pm show. Iris told me some time ago that it had been repaired, but either she was misinformed or it’s broken anew. Awww. Though it does seem to have been polished.
Back in Montmartre it’s not quite seven, the absolute earliest time you can get dinner in Paris. But we’re starving. Must Eat. In front of Gang Seng at 6:58, their staff is rather surprised to have customers on the dot of opening.
It’s a short menu, but even so I haven’t tasted all of it. For starters, I prefer the salad - a sort of cole slaw with carrot shreds and cilantro on top - to the soup. And I’ve only tried two of the main courses (and nibbled bits of others off of friends’ plates), but the coriander lamb is so delicious I can’t bring myself to take a chance on anything else. And the steamed bread is excellent. Darrell and I order the same things, though he goes for rice instead of strange bread. He remembers my recommending injera at that Ethiopian place years ago. And we’ll have a pot of butter tea.
This Tibetan butter tea is a sort of weak tea with a lot of milk, and a fair quantity of butter melted in. It’s salty. Served scalding hot, the up-front saltiness is surprising; the butteryness is unusual. It’s okay. But I’m not a fan of milk tea in the first place. I’m glad to have a small carafe of wine. Darrell quite enjoys the tea as long as it remains very hot. Cooled, we both find it undrinkable.
The coriander lamb is a big hit, and although the chunks of lamb are practically dry on the outside, covered in their paste of spices, they’re wonderfully tender.
I love our hotel room. It has its flaws, and its unfortunate color scheme, and its windows positioned to either side of the very bright on-all-night neon sign outside, but what it mostly has is heat - no cold toes!- and a bathtub. Ah, for a glorious HOT bath at the end of the day.

At breakfast there is unlimited coffee, to the very great pleasure of my companion. Bread and croissants and butter and jam and honey, but alas, no little packets of Nutella. We decide the Nutella situation must be rectified tomorrow.
Our mission today is to travel on the RER system (the suburban trains) to Ecouen and the castle there that houses the National Renaissance Museum. We pack up Maurice and the camera stuff and etc, and take the metro, and the RER, where we sit upstairs for the view of scuzzy near-Paris, and a bus into the leafy commuter towns, and we get out there. It’s a quiet Tuesday in November and, rather as anticipated, there’s nobody much around.
There is a crew working with a dumptruck and a large, interesting vehicle tearing up the road leading to the castle. The interesting machine is like a road harvester, breaking up the top four inches of the dirt road, leaving a smooth surface behind. With a belt it transfers the dirt to the dumptruck strategically placed to catch, like a flow of dark wheat. It fills the truck from back to front, beeping for it to move forward and to stop again, every several seconds.
There’s a front gate, and off to the side a ways a large panel announcing the National Renaissance Museum in several languages, followed by some small print you’d have to go over there to read.
The gates are open so we head in toward the castle. It has a moat, or an ex-moat now a concave lawn. The fourth side of the originally U-shaped building has been rather crudely filled in with a fourth wing to complete the square. This new (19th century) wing, the closest to arriving visitors, is very plain and unimpressive. Not an architectural success. Take it away.
It does have a big wooden door in the middle. A big closed door. Perhaps another 2-5 pm only thing in this off-season. There aren’t any hours posted, no signage at all except for the profusion of keep-off-the-lawn markers.
Try the right door: locked. The left door: locked. But then Darrell hears a voice asking something and the door opens, revealing a small brown frenchwoman. She tells us the Museum is Closed on Tuesdays. Open all the rest of the week, Sundays, holidays, but not Tuesdays.
Hey.
Why didn’t our little what-to-see brochure mention this important detail? Open All Year it says. Except Tuesday.
Alrightthen. We’ll see the grounds.
There is a group visiting the grounds already. It seems to be some kind of youth group, and three of them have split off and are jogging around the formal garden area - now just a lawn with paths to nowhere in it - like this were their phys-ed period.
We stroll down one of the many alleys, hoping to chance across a promised fountain, but the castle park isn’t anything but a November woods crisscrossed with paths more or less covered in leaf litter. It’s damp and dull and we give it up to explore the town instead. At least there we won’t get our feet wet. On the way out we read that fine print: Closed Tuesdays.
The town is quickly done, and soon we have found the bus stop to get back to the RER. How about we stop at St Denis, at the basilica there is where most of the French kings and queens are entombed. It should be quite something, and churches are rarely closed. Plus, it’s on the way back to Paris.

After a sandwich eaten on the train we stop in a St Denis bar for tea, as much to warm up as anything else. It looked like a decent choice from the outside. Darrell, however, gets trapped in the bathroom because the door handle is wonky, then reports that the establishment is still in the 19th century as far as plumbing goes. I’ll wait.
In the main commerce square, just off the main official square with City Hall and the Basilica, we come across a market just packing up. Darn! I love poking around those markets.
Then the Basilica (actually a “cathedral” due to its being the seat of a certain level of cleric, they still call it by the lesser rank of “basilica” because they like to). Yep, very impressive. Not exceptionally large - many cathedrals are more than twice as large. But very ornate. A lot of basilicas and cathedrals have a lot of exterior decoration, but St Denis is exceptionally rich. Famous people and events all over, a storybook in sculpture if you can decipher it, down to the symbolic plants and animals you might think are just there for aesthetic reasons.
Inside, I’d really like to be allowed to walk around the gallery upstairs, where all the kings, and some queens, are lined up in a stained glass parade. Their names are too ornately written for me to read from the floor of the nave, though some may be guessed: Dagobert, Clovis...
Access to the nave is free. Today there are as many people come to pray as to gawk. A quiet day. At the limit of the choir area, though, there is a fence of iron bars. That’s where the necropole is, with the tombs of France’s royalty, some marble, some plaster replicas. To walk among them, touch them if nobody is looking, takes 6.50.
Nah. We can see them fine from here.
There’s a gift shop, as there is in most major cathedrals and religious sites, where you can get St Denis rosaries, books about the church or the life of the saint, St Denis figurines complete with head off, and, the first I’ve seen, St Denis T-shirts. Not even Notre Dame de Paris sells t-shirts.

At a supermarket we equip ourselves with Nutella, and hand cream because the hotel room is extremely dry from the glorious heat running constantly. There are three basic sizes of Nutella. The 200 g jar will get us through breakfast for the rest of the trip, but it’s awfully expensive. 400 g is more reasonably priced, but once you get up in weight (it comes in thick glass jars), why not just go for the more economical 750 g jar? And once you’re leaning toward 750 g (1150 with the jar - we went to the produce department and weighed it), there are not one, but two special-offer jars, with 780 or 825 g of hazelnut & chocolate goodness. They’re all mixed in together, as if a new pallet of 750-s just arrived and they tossed the odd 780s and 825s on the pile. 825 grams it is.
In the evening we stroll around town looking for holiday decorations. The big department stores have their famous animated window displays ready, and it’s the perfect time to browse them: no Christmas crowds out yet. I think they’re cool, often ingenious. Darrell is unimpressed. Aside from the windows, there’s not much decoration up yet. Or, it’s up, we can see the strings of wire, but it’s not lit up. We’re keeping a lookout for Christmas markets, too, hoping to score presents for everyone back home. There’s nothing in several of the usual places, except for the Champs Elysées, and even that is pretty lame.
More later, and the pictures should be ready Tuesday...