In-Seine in Paris

Story and pictures by Leslie Strom

At no time during our stay in Paris did I feel that La Vie En Rose / Edith Piaf / Post WWII / Gene Kelly / Ernest Hemingway air I'd been reading about from home. Modern Paris happily builds itself on top of 1970s Paris on top of 1940s Paris on top of 1640's Paris. The cars are new, little stores sell Palm Pilots and X-Files statuettes, and college students in backpacks run past the 15th century Hotel de Cluny to their 21st century courses.

FRIDAY - Fashion tips from the porn channel

We climb the stairs out of the Maubert Metro station and pop up like gophers at a street market. It is only then that we appreciate our careful research and choice of neighborhood, the 13th century Latin Quarter. We are mere blocks from the River Seine and the original settlements of Paris.

We check into the hotel we'd reserved from 7000 miles away, based on a review in the book Cheap Sleeps in Paris. It is a pleasant place with the thing that matters most in a hotel: good beds. Tall windows open up to the narrow Rue de Sommerard below. After a quick shower and nap, we cruise our Latin Quarter neighborhood for dinner. Algerian wine with a Morocco label, some dry red sausage, oxtail, and buttery couscous may not be French, but it is recommended to us by a French student at the next table who teaches us a few key phrases for things like tap water.

Back at the hotel, we switch on the television and flip through the channels. There's CNN in Spanish ("sey enney enney", a French movie with Gerard Depardieu, pornography, a channel in German, French news, and pornography. The first pornography channel has actual stories, though improbable. Why are you following me with the camera looking up my short skirt as I bend over to choose bakery items? Go away, three person camera crew! Why are you following me into my sleeping boyfriend's bedroom? Begone! Why are you still here as I take off all my clothes and my boyfriend's clothes? At least hide behind the door, would you? The actors are French, the locations Los Angeles, the audience Arab men with credit cards. Arabic instructions and phone numbers scroll across the bottom of the screen. "Call me, habibi... " moans a bleached buxom sexpot in a large-mesh body suit. "That fishnet body suit is actually kind of neat," I say. "Of course, where would a normal person wear it?" "It might look good over a black leotard and tights, for parties," says Marcia. Fashion tips from the porn channel.

SATURDAY - Arago, Giverney, our first Exciting Dinner

Our first mission in Paris is to find the first of the Arago markers along the Paris Meridian. We take the subway to the Paris Observatory, which is gated up and very majestic. I shake the bars and get all dramatic, shouting "NOOOO!" then we take my map with the Paris Meridian drawn on it and head north. I'd seen pictures of the Arago markers... they are bronze and say "Arago" on them, so when Marcia stops at a manhole cover or water meter cover, I try to convince her of her error to no avail. We bring home a good many such pictures which I think you probably don't have to see. Let me describe them. They're round and embedded in concrete. They don't say "Arago" on them.

At the gates of Luxembourg Gardens, embedded in an unobtrusive place in the sidewalk, is our first marker. After we find the second one, it becomes a line-of-sight traverse to the next one. After eight or so markers, they stop when the traverse leads us to the back of the Palais du Luxembourg.

It seems that the particular week in Paris has an Aerial Big Ass Map theme, in which I was born to indulge. While Marcia is hot in pursuit of the next Arago monument, I insist on having her take my picture on a map that rivals Get Lost Magazine's Potomaca creation in splendor (I like to think it's what we could have created with an actual budget) I take off my shoes and join other immersion- cartography buffs on the gigantic map outside the Palais du Luxembourg, and stand on the Azores. All the islands are named, and the major towns as well.

Around the other side of the palace is an exhibition hall with a most exciting photography exhibit. The French photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand has an exhibit of photographs, many of them mounted outdoors to entice the passer-by. The pictures are aerial views from all over the world, the enlargements are six feet wide and stunning. (A postcard image is shown below.) We go in to see the rest of the free exhibit, pleased with our first wonderful discovery borne of Getting Lost.

Our second fortuitous gift comes from arriving late for a bus tour to Giverny. I want to catch a train and rent a bike and pedal Monet's country roads and sniff the flowers in some kind of idyllic trance. Marcia opts for something more efficient and so we reserve a CityTours tour for something close to $60 each. The bus is pulling away, we haven't paid for the trip, and someone from the tour company stops the bus and we get on. We get the trip for free, and catch up on badly-needed sleep on the ride out.

Giverny is beautiful, with Monet's lily ponds and fields of flowers in bloom, and the house that seems to be the inspiration for the country home fad we see in magazines these days. Our tour guide is very knowlegable. The crowds are not beautiful, however. Twin strollers block the paths, gaping tourists stop dead in front of us like they've never seen a flower before. Had I taken the train and rented a bike, I'd have made a fast turnaround and headed out again. I suspect Monet would have, too.

Back from our trip, we decide to see what other dining wonders we could find in the Latin Quarter. I had marked some restaurants on a map, but truly, just rambling around a good area will yield equally good results. It's France. There is no bad food. We take our dinner at a sidewalk cafe where we try wild boar stew (which has a few stray boar bristles in it), a beef burgundy, and Pear Belle Helene. Everything is a gustatory epiphany, especially the Pear Belle Helene: a perfect poached pear, vanilla ice cream, and a chocolate sauce. It sounds simple to make when I describe it like that, but it is a magic pear from trees grown in an ancient grove of long-dead kings and poached in the dew of roses, an ice cream from the snows of Mont Blanc and cows lulled by lutes of virgin shepherdesses, a chocolate sauce made from cocoa beans gathered by silent monks who only make chocolate sauce once a decade. In other words, it can't be reproduced in my apartment kitchen. I savor every bite knowing I'll not be eating like this in Seattle or maybe ever again in my life. Our dinner, by the way, costs about $25 for both of us, including a nice bottle of wine. It's a miracle the French get anything done.

SUNDAY - Notre Dame, lecture and dinner with Ethan and Isabel

I'm going to experience Notre Dame as God (or someone) intended, and actually attend a service. It's Sunday. Never mind that I'm not Catholic. Never mind that it's a Latin service. Never mind that Marcia thinks it's going to be creepy and boring. I am going to mingle with the spirits of the ages, among the French Faithful, and I am dragging Marcia with me. Damned if I am going to suffer alone.

We walk by the tourists and charlatans and thoughtless heathen, take a bulletin (in French) and sit down in chairs pulled out for the mass. The chanting of a castrato voice drifts through the huge cathedral. I look up at the rose windows, which have looked down on congregations for 700 years, and feel suddenly part of gigantic and intimate history. Where in America would you find such a structure, not to mention an actual castrato? Marcia starts to squirm in her spartan wooden chair. A procession of somber men in yellowing wool robes is followed by somber women in black veils. I expect them to be whacking themselves in the foreheads with boards in atonement a la Monte Python. We look for an escape route in the throng of worshippers, but to leave would be noticable and impolite. Suddenly, the enormous pipe organ's dense chords fill the cavernous cathedral in velvety shockwaves from back to front and raise the hairs on the back of my neck. Suddenly, it's not creepy any more.

Outside on the plaza, we find another significant marker, the center of Paris, Ground Franco-Zero. As Marcia stands squarely on it, a French man, pleased we have sought it out, tells us that it means we will return to Paris.

For dinner we meet Get Lost Magazine foreign correspondent Ethan Gilsdorf and his wife Isabel. We do the typical Parisian thing starting with drinks and chat, then move on to a recital at City University, and more chat, then on to a small village-like district of the 13th arrondissment for dinner. Chez Gladines (30 rue de Cinq-Diamants) is smoky and full with diners even late, all there to drench themselves in the cuisine of the Pays Basque. Isabel, who studies African dance, orders the most magnificently fattening thing there, a potato dish baked with Rochefort, swimming in the irresistable oil of this intoxicating cheese. We all help her with it. This dish is the language of contentment, of sheer bliss, of harmony and opulence and we become instantly fluent in it. It goes on my mental list of a simple French dish that I'll never duplicate in my apartment kitchen, the very kitchen with the window overlooking the bike trail and marathon runners slurping Citrus Power Gel from toothpaste tubes. I also note to bring home some Rochefort and at least try.

Page 2 -