| I am beginning to catalog the little
things that make Paris distinctive for me. Like all the cats I’ve seen carried in
cages. The little dogs that join their owners (always women) in restaurants. The little
piles of dog merde on the sidewalk. The noisy green and white machines that scour the
alleys in the morning. The plaintive two note call of the emergency vehicles that, in
doppler, shifts downward to an even more mournful bleating. The mobile phones sound odd,
there’s a chip we don’t have with a different set of music for the rings. And
mobiles are ubiquitous. On a bus today, I counted 3 simultaneous conversations, and much
ringing. We were on the bus because the trains are on
strike. Paris has 300 strikes a year, I’ve found out. "So what’s the
purpose of the strikes?" I asked Pierre, our dinner companion last night. "There
is no reason. They happen, and sometimes discussion begins after, but usually not."
Pierre we have seen twice now, and in whose company, (first in his home, and then at a
café his daughter recommended) we’ve had the best meals in Paris this trip.
It’s been surprisingly hard to get passable food here, but then we’re staying in
the tourist ghetto on the Left Bank. But during the good ones, I have been in bliss. The
cheeses! My word, I had no idea such sensations were possible. A bleu cheese last night, I
will remember until my dying day. A quiche today at lunch has obliterated ever attaching
the name quiche to any such concoction I might have ever tasted in the past. They no
longer exist for me.
|
Did you know the Eiffel Tower is brown?
I didn’t. Too many black and white photos we’ve been exposed to. It’s also
much larger than it seems from the photographs. A first trip to Paris has to include the
Eiffel Tower, and only once in one’s life can that discovery of its true color
happen. I’ve been very conscious of these first-time-in-Paris moments, and enjoying
the ephemeral sensations that arise. I’m not discovering anything that hasn’t
been described a thousand times before by others, but that is the unique gift of this
city. However much it may change, and however much old Paris hands decry the passing of
the time when Paris was still Paris, that momentary feeling of just having discovered
something, whether wonderful or exasperating, that could exist nowhere else in the world
except in Paris, will always be here. |
