Paris, Day 18: Palais de Tokyo

In the morning, I blog and Bennett waits for the young people to awaken so that he can take one or more to them down to the Starbucks behind the Centre Pompidou. Three more days (!) and this morning I find the motherlode of cool shit to do in Paris.

We choose Palais de Tokyo, a modern art museum near la Tour Eiffel. The museum is a labyrinth of giant rooms containing huge installations by artists from all over the world - multimedia works that mash together sculpture, paint, audio, video, old yellow Volkswagen vans and more.

One such piece, by the Mexican art collective Biquini Wax EPS, holds a life-sized, plasticene orca with primary-colored, pop culture toys spilling out of its entrails and looping footage from Free Willy next to it. It’s evidently a commentary on Mexican politics, but the connection there is so over my head as to be invisible from way down here.

Another room holds a looping video of an orchestra of Bangladeshi harmonium players playing a single note in unison, and yet another - this one deep in the museum’s bowels - sets you smack in the middle of a Manila street scene where men yell from the darkness and you can climb inside the aforementioned Volkswagen van, don headphones and hear voices speaking or music playing (depending upon whether you’re Bennett or Griffin).

We all enjoyed the museum, and each of us spent significant time exiting through the gift shop (Bennett enjoyed one of the lounge chairs there for a bit).

Nous retournons a l’appartement and had some lunch. It was raining, but still I went out to capture the mosaic tile art of Invader, hundreds of which are scattered throughout the city (there’s an app for that).

I made my way across the Seine and onto the Ile Saint-Louis, from which I took this photo of the other side of Notre Dame before heading to the Left Bank to visit the Grand Mosque.

Pam and I visited mosques in Turkey in the early 1990s; this one was modest, paling in architectural comparison to those minareted wonders. Still, I went inside, as it is open for visitors, where, after walking around, I removed my shoes and entered the prayer room to sit and pray.

Men all around sat, lay down, stood up, picked up holy books from a shelf, prostrated themselves… I think it was 5 pm when the call to prayer began. I left then as men streamed in from the streets. I wanted to stay for that, but it felt imposterish. Back down the streets past the Sorbonne and the Cuvier Fountain - a very cool animal-themed fountain at the Rue de Linne; back to the Seine where I spoke to a young artist on the Left Bank, and back across to meet the others for dinner.

Happy Noodles was closed. Everyone was hungry, and we made do with a Lebanese kabob and crepe joint that was merely passable. It was a beautiful evening, and we walked around the Marais district. Rowan stopped in a dress shop and bought a cool, flowy shirt, and the girls and I all got gelato behind the Pompidou. We were served there by a young Frenchman who spoke English with a British, rather than French, accent, having lived in Britain, and turned us onto a new flavor - violet. Pressed from actual violets in Toulouse, it is colorless and colored naturally with beet pigment. It’s amazing. Bennett got an eclair at a nearby patisserie.

Berit and I watched the pigeon man there as an American tourist had her boyfriend film her walking repeatedly back and forth in front of the pigeons - take one, take two, take three - I think she was trying to capture the moment as the pigeons all lifted into the air with her walking in the foreground, her perfect Instagram moment.

Paris, Day 17: Rick Steves' Paris and Rollerblading!

This morning I was up and out early, headed off to Notre Dame to run through Rick Steves' audio tour of Paris. Yes, I grabbed a McBreakfastSandwich along the way. Cut me some slack; it was just 3€ and came with a cafe au lait.

After a walk along the left bank (orientation:  the Seine runs west to east with the left bank being to the south), by Shakespeare and Company, Saint Severin Cathedral and Saint Michel, I was positioned on the Pont Neuf (Paris' oldest bridge) to walk back across to the Right Bank and down to a very cool wooden pedestrian bridge. It's a wide bridge comprised of skinny wood slat planks and benches running down its center; on one side is the Louvre and on the other is the Institute de France, and it's just cool. From it's midsection, you can look to the east for a view of pointed tip of Ile de Cite on which lies Notre Dame and Saint Chapelle.

So I'm on this bridge, right? And as I'm walking from the Louvre end to the Institute of France end, I take note of a pink-clad Asian woman sitting cross-legged on the planks of the bridge.  She is handing her young son - let's say he's about five years old - her mobile phone so that he can walk a few feet away from her and take this great shot of her sitting there with the Institute de France in the background. So, ok, I silently judge her for that which is wrong because it's not like I haven't gotten my kids to take photos of me in a cool spot. Noted.

But so I'm standing a little ways away when I hear her let out a distressed scream (is there any other kind?) and I look over to see the panicked mom in front of the kid who is sitting on the planks without the aforementioned phone, and the mom has this crazy horrified look on her face and is crying out in a language I don't know as she repeatedly looks into the spaces between the planks where at this point it is clear that the kid has dropped the phone, as though she could draw the lost device from the depths of the Seine with the power of her mind and her wildly panicked eyes.

So let that be a lesson to you, friends. 

It's like 1:30 when I get everyone out of the apartment to see whether we're going to get to rollerblade Paris, today. That's right! Every Friday and Sunday, a Parisian rollerblading club, in concert with the local authorities, coordinates the very temporary, section by section closing of an entire 20 kilometer (in this case) route through the city. It all begins at Nomades, the bike, blade, skate rental shop in the Place de Bastille, where we outfit ourselves with skates and, at 2:30 pm on Sundays, we take to the streets. "Let my people go skating!"

Griffin is a crazy good rollerblader, even in this pack of pros; Rowan is strong and competitive enough to want to be toward the front of the pack; but Berit is just j-chillin, and what we don't realize is that first of all, you've got to keep up a certain pace to stay in the pack. They're only keeping sections of the route open for so long, so it's imperative you don't get behind, or you will be left behind. And secondly, they happen to be running at a particularly fast pace this Sunday. 

We take off from the Place de Bastille, and I notice instantly that people are cruising by me. I wouldn't have been a speedster by any means, but I'm slowing myself way down because Berit is behind me, and I'm not interested in leaving any of my kids behind. It's more important for me to enjoy the thing with the kids than to be at the front of the pack. Recall, we don't realize at this point that it's imperative that we go fast.

Before long, a man skating past me says something to me in French. Je ne comprende pas, I reply. You're the last person, he tells me. And I turn and look back and, sure enough, I see the ambulances that are bringing up the rear of the pack, and I also  see that the rear of the pack is now comprised of just Berit. And me. 

Berit felt bad about the turn of events. There's no doubt she could have kept up had we understood how the game worked, but there was no catching up after that, and so we pressed eject and skated our way back to l'appartement. After getting our other shoes and making our way back to Place de Bastille, we did find have a fun outing of our own - happening on a cool architecture and transportation exhibit at Pavillion de l'Arsenal.

The whole top floor seems to have to do with the Tower of Montparnasse which, it seems, is the only skyscraper in Paris, built (perhaps?) in the early 1970s and (perhaps?) related somehow to the company, CIT. Not sure, but this level was full of architectural/civil engineering proposals designed to improve the situation. Weirdly, Gigi was talking to us about this skyscraper yesterday.

When they got back to the skate shop, Rowan and Griffin regaled us with stories of their two and a half hour skate odyssey du Paris - Griffin's involved being picked up (literally) by another expert skater. On the way home, we stopped in the Republique square where a festival and a Burber/Algerian protest ensued. At least this was what Griffin and I gathered from Idya, the young Algerian man we spoke with after Griffin played a chess game there.

On the way home, we met the girls and Bennett who had stopped at O'Taco which was about as bad as it sounds. 

Paris, Day 16: Biking in Versailles

I'm not going to pretend I wanted to go to Versailles. I'm not particularly into roaming opulent palaces all gaga over the cool, expensive, old shit owned by kings and queens, and I'm not big into gardens, so really, what's there for me in Versailles?

Fortunately, we'd had a hot tip - do the blue bike tour. It's the best way to see Versailles. And that was certainly the case. Though our start was rocky with a tree having fallen on the railroad track our train was meant to travel on, our guide, Guillaume (Gigi), navigated us from the train to a bus that took us into Versailles and from there to the market to acquire our lunch.

Once outfitted with lunch and bikes, Gigi led the fourteen of us (from Toronto, Los Angeles, Seattle, Houston and Boulder) through town and into the gardens. Just 25-years old, Gigi was genuinely nice and funny, and he educated us on French ways and French history, particularly as it concerned Louis XIV, Louis XV (the well-loved), Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, all of whom were key players in the affairs (literally) at Versailles. And when Houston had a flat tire, Gigi expertly changed it.

We biked from fountain to lake and from guest house to Marie Antoinette's hamlet and the Petting Zoo of Versailles where we stopped for four-euro, speedily-squeezed orange juice, my favorite. The whole day was spent outdoors biking, and we were all exhausted when it was done, but we'd had a blast.

My least favorite thing was being crammed into the Palace pressed up against tens of thousands of other tourists shuffling from room to room. The only thing awesome about that place was the seven-euro viewfinder that Berit bought with Versailles photos in it. Oh, and this t-shirt:

Ok, and the hall of mirrors was pretty cool, too - 17 huge windows opposite which were 17 huge mirrors. Louis XIV had sent his man to Italy, where they'd discerned the science for mirror-making, to bring it back and have these mirrors created for the palace which, at the time, was a place through which passed nobels and diplomats from around the world.

Paris, Day 15: Shoah Memorial

We'd decided that today would be our Louvre day. At first, I was pretty lukewarm on the Louvre. I enjoy contemporary art, and I really enjoyed the Pompidou; I love surrealism, and the Dali Museum was a favorite of mine in Paris. And when I was here with Pam nearly 30 years ago, I enjoyed the Musee D'Orsay and the impressionists - Monet, Renoir, Degas and mostly Van Gogh. But the classical art found in the Louvre (and I realize that there is so much art in the Louvre that this is a ridiculous statement) is really just not my jam.

Which is why it's bizarre that last night I decided that what I needed to do was spend eight hours in the Louvre. Actually the original idea was 12 hours. Spend 12 hours in the Louvre making observations of art, people, myself and other various digressions, and write a book called "12 Hours in the Louvre," and sell it as an e-book on Amazon. I pared it down to eight because that seemed more doable. By a third.

I wasn't entirely sold on it when I went to bed, but upon awakening before seven with the ability to make it to the Louvre before it opened at nine, I was down. It was raining outside, and I could easily be three hours into the project by the time the kids even had their coffee. So I was off.

I wasn't going to go for the I.M. Pei pyramids entrance; per Rick Steves' instructions, I would enter via the Carousel du Louvre entrance straight out of the Palais Royale - Musee du Louvre metro stop. The line was long enough there anyway, and when I got in it, I had placed myself in the Catch-22 of being in a line, but needing to go to the front of that line to ensure that the line I was in was the right one. Good thing I spoke to the couple behind me who, fairly convinced the line was for people who had already purchased tickets online, were happy to hold my space while I checked it out. They were correct. In fact, what I found when I walked to the front was a sign stating that the Louvre was sold out for the day.

Louvre would have to be a different day. New plan:  the Shoah Memorial to European Jews who died in the holocaust.  The layout of the museum felt awkward to me, but I did appreciate the signage being in both French and English so that I could follow the story of French Jewish history in Europe through the holocaust.

The exhibit was in the memorial's under ground level, and I was getting near the end when Bennett approached me to say that Griffin, who had not with us, had been texting. Evidently, he'd left l'appartemente without his key and had been texting for the past half hour or so to find where we were as he wandered in the downpour with a dying cellphone. He looked like a drowned rat when he reached us. After wringing out his shirt, he took a key and ran home.

We ate quiche, and Rowan ordered a golden milk at the cafe around the corner. Both were excellent, as was the ambience and the music.

Tourlaville to Paris, Day 14: Etretat

Day 14 wasn't what you'd call a banner day. I don't think anyone would say it was one of their favorite days, with the possible exception of Rowan whose idea it was to drive to Etretat.

We'd been driving at least a couple hours when we hit Caen, home of great big castle and few open patisseries or places to use the toilette. Still, we managed to pull into one with a lovely proprietor who, though she didn't speak English, was all about loading us up with coffee and pastries. Everyone else found a pharmacy to pee at, and I found a castle.

Bennett DJ;d out of Tourlaville at my request. With kids in the back trying to sleep, I thought listening to a podcast was a good move. Bennett put on Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History, a podcast I ended up loving. We listened to a great one in which Gladwell and his assistant take the LSAT as part of a research experiment.

After Caen, it's another 1-2 hours before we reach Etretat. It seems that something's happening there, because as we pull in, everyone is parked on the mountainside approach to the town and walking a footpath the rest of the way. Turns out the chalk cliffs of Etretat, with their delicately sea-carved arches are just that fucking cool and tourists (comme nous) are flocking to the place. Griffin and I drop everyone by the beach and drive back up the hill to find a parking space before we too join the throng.

Our return to Rouen was harried, pedal to the metal. The whole way I was driving like 120 kph. Once in town we spun round and round the roads before Bennett pointed us in the right direction and through the power of group-think we managed to land the car in parking lot P2, level -2, slot number 36. Griffin commented on the lunacy of handing a random, un-uniformed, young man the car keysand taking off without a receipt of any sort, but that's pretty much where we were at that point. We arrived on our train platform five minutes before the train departed.

Tourlaville, Day 13: Baie d'Ecalgrain & Plage de l'Anse Saint Martin

Today, we drive to the absolute northwestern-most tip of Normanday - nay, the northwestern-most tip of France! It's so northwestern that, upon our approach to Baie d'Ecalgrain, we all receive a text from T-Mobile that reads, "Welcome to United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland! Your T-Mobile plan gives you unlimited data..."  I kid you not.

Baie d’Ecalgrain came up in Rowan’s search among the best beach destinations in Normandy; the images made it look like a sunny, sandy paradise. The bay we found was overcast and windswept; what sand there was must have been beneath the water which came right up to a beach laden with fist-sized rocks. Griffin, Bennett and Berit stopped mid-bay, while Rowan continued down the jagged rocks further on, and I followed her. 

We climbed over rock after rock, rising higher above the waves crashing below as we neared the far point of the bay. Once there, we climbed upwards to the point’s peak, took a couple photos before Rowan, who left her backpack behind us, climbed down the way we came, and I climbed up to the easy path above leading to the parking lot.

When we regrouped, it was beyond lunchtime. Everyone wanted to leave, and Griffin was vying for us to go home. I wanted to give the possibility of an epic beach experience one more shot, and we found Plage de l’Anse Saint Martin, a sunny, pebble beach ten minutes away with clear, calm waters.

We were finishing lunch when Rowan walked into the water. Here at the northwestern-most tip of France, the water is really, really cold, but Rowan determinedly stayed in, and soon we followed. Bennett got in quickly, having been knocked down and dragged in by a wave. Griffin ran down from the car and dove in, so I dove in after him. And Berit, once the rest of the family was in, followed.  It was cold, but adhering to Rowan’s “once your skin freezes, it’s not that cold” theory, we stayed in for a bit before climbing out to lie in the sun on the warm pebbles.

In the evening, we go to the beach restaurant near our house where the staff was super friendly, the croque monsieurs were delicious and the grand cafes and ice cream were a perfect end to an amazing day. 

Tourlaville, Day 12: Utah Beach

It’s a rainy Monday morning, and no one is particularly motivated in any direction until Bennett declares that we’re going to Utah Beach; we leave in an hour.

Utah Beach is 45 minutes from us on the Normandy coast. It’s one of the five (I think) landing sites for D-Day, the June 6, 1944 Allied invasion that pierced German control of Europe and effectively won the war.

It’s a small museum but with a good collection of relics from le debarquement. I’ll be honest here and admit that war history doesn’t interest me, and I don’t pay much attention at all to the things that are on display. I enjoyed walking around the outside of the museum - around the American tank and the Higgins boat, the crafts that carried thousands of GIs into shore from the big naval ships; I was also struck by the experience of being on the beach itself. 

Inside the museum, we watched a 20-minute movie about the invasion that I thought was perfect in length, pacing and its ability to convey the scale of the invasion, the sequence and timing of the airborne and amphibious attacks, and the target - in this case, gaining control of the port at Cherbourg, where we’d eaten dinner the previous night. 

It was cool to see the starting points of the forces all along the southern coast of England and recall the plaque we saw in 2013 in our wood in Emsworth, dedicated to the Allied troops who were staged there for D-Day.

After a brief stop in Saint Marie du Mont while Rowan finished her pass through the museum, we headed back to la maison sur la page, where I walked the beach. Bennett made spaghetti and Griffin sliced cucumbers for dinner.

Paris to Tourlaville, Days 10 and 11: Saturday and Sunday

On Saturday, we travel by train from Paris’ Gare Saint Lazare north to Rouen where we rent a car and continue our journey. Our concern about boot size turns out to be unwarranted. I’d rented the “family size” car from Europcar, and they delivered with a Skoda hybrid wagon. Which took me longer - spiraling out of the flat-light-grey spiral parking lot at the train station or exiting Rouen itself? Hard to say.

The road trip wasn’t bad. I think we drove for about an hour before stopping at a supermarche in Ville de Brionne where the friendly, young deli worker added free salami to our package and went out of her way to direct us to a coffee shop in town. Customers waited at her counter while she determinedly sought out pen and paper so that she could write “you will find the coffee at… (name of the place escapes me and I can't find that piece of butcher paper right now) ”

Brionne turns out to be a gorgeous little French ville. It was evidently siesta time when we got there, and most everything was closed. We ate our customary cheese and salami on baguette sandwiches and walked up the hill to find coffee and explore the castle ruins on the hill above. It was a perfect stop for us before continuing on the remainder of the 3+ hour drive to Tourlaville. Rowan slept most of the way, and Berit and Griffin played music and were in remarkable spirits.

Our Bart Simpson AirBnB is very cool - spacious, sparsely furnished and open with a great big patio. Sleeping arrangements aren't bad. Rowan has claimed the outdoor cottage, Berit the bed downstairs and Bennett and I the third floor beds. Griffin has slept once in the bed with Berit and once on the couch.

Sunday was sunny, and we spent the morning hanging out on the pebble beach near our maison. We swam, skipped rocks, read books and generally laid around like you do. Midday naps preceded an evening exploration of Cherbourg, where we ultimately decided that actually speaking to the proprietors in restaurants as we sized them up was better than playing aloof foreigners who approached and receded silently from the establishments.

We ended up at a nice restaurant along the quay (where the ships dock), and culinary experimentation ensued. Results were mixed, but, despite not enjoying everything in my seafood platter (we liked the escargot but found the langoustines useless), I wouldn’t trade the communal experience of trying everything. on it. Berit was totally satisfied with her large, uncut pizza.

Paris, Day Nine: La Tour Eiffel

On our approach to the Eiffel Tower, Rowan warns us again about the scammers - don’t sign any petitions, don’t stop if someone tells you you dropped something, and for god’s sake don’t let anyone tie a string around your wrist. We are in a river of tourists, but there are no scammers. There are plenty of hawkers selling miniature Eiffel Tower replicas, tchotchkes and keyring on blankets all along the way, but there are no scammers.

Not showing the knife to the woman at the first security checkpoint was, in retrospect, an error in judgement on my part. This became clear at the second security checkpoint when the unamused French security guards made me drop the knife through a small round hole in the top of a sealed, transparent, lucite box, artfully creating a display of the knives formerly belonging to idiots who tried to carry them in to the Eiffel Tower. This particular knife however, the one I brought to effect the making of baguette sandwiches, did not formerly belong to me but to our Parisian hosts. So there’s something I’m going to have to make amends for.

The view of Paris from mid-level is spectacular. It seems that every structure in the city is a variation on alabaster, as though the the whole place were crafted out of a paper, except for a single patch of skyscrapers standing out like a mirrored glass sore thumb. Griffin, with his eagle eyes, is pointing out buildings. “See the Louvre over there? And then behind that you can just make out the blue, red and green of the Pompidou Center…”  

Another lift takes us to the top and it’s more of the same, just twice as high and twice as crowded on the smaller deck. Selfies are taken on both levels and, after Rowan, pleading imminent starvation, makes herself a sandwich, the other four of us head down via the stairs from the middle level. More photos ensue at the bottom, and then we too make lunch and eat it in a nearby “keep off the grass” area with other groups of tourists, one of which applauds vigorously when Griffin does a front handspring.

On our exit, Griffin engages one of the petition scammers and we reconnect with Rowan. Family strife divides us en route to the post office, but everyone is down for Starbucks where we regroup before separating again for the trip back to l’appartement, each at our own pace. 

In the evening, Berit and Griffin go to Muji so that he can buy school supplies. He’s been texting his language arts teacher, who is fully supportive of the idea. Bennett and I buy and cook stuffed past shells with olive oil and parmesan. 

Paris, Day Eight: Le Jardin du Luxembourg and Les Catacombs

This morning, Merritt arrived from Munich after a month of traveling around Europe on her own. Berit and Merritt have been friends since first grade, so we were psyched to have her join us. Our to-do list for the day was simple:  get ourselves 20 meters beneath the ground to walk amongst the bones of millions of dead Parisians in the Catacombs.

Two and a half miles translates to 13 stops on the 4 Metro from Arts et Metiers to the Denfert-Rochereau stop, where we ascend to find a ridiculously longue line of touristes at the entrance to the Catacombs where, during the late eighteenth century, Paris authorities under the order of Louis XVI transferred the bones of the dead from Paris' overcrowded cemeteries into a labyrinth of abandoned limestone quarries. In addition to clearing out the cemetaries, which at the time were part of a health problem, the stacking of bones in the abandoned quarries served to help prevent collapse of the ground in those areas.

Anyway, le ligne est longue, and so, guided by Rowan, we head to a Starbucks where large, frothy, caffeinated beverages could be obtained. Those needs met, we next found a grocery to buy meats and cheeses and a boulangerie for something to put them on. In a nearby parc, we gathered chairs together and feasted.

That parc may or may not have been part of le Jardin du Luxembourg, but that magnificent and, quite literally, palatial garden was where we ended up next. Bennett and I headed left to circle the palace while Berit, Merritt, Rowan and Griffin went right, where Griffin practiced his front handspring skills.

Eventually, we found our way back to the Catacombs and the line, and this time we chose to stand in it. Well, mostly Bennett and I did, sending the kids away to chill out in a cafe. After about an hour and a half, they came back to relieve us so that we in turn could enjoy street-side coffees. Another half hour passed, and we found ourselves descending into tunnels beneath the streets of Paris.

Once back in the Marais, we ate outside at a fast-food joint that served crepes, paninis, pizza and smoothies. Bennett had a crepe that included merguez, which the proprietor indicated with a mixture of beef and goat. When trying to convey this to me, he said, "It's beef and... 'baaaaa.'"
"Sheep?" I asked.
"No."
"Goat?"
He points at me smiling. "Oui!"

After Uno, ice cream. And sleep.