I'm back!

Well, I must apologize for the absence of the past week. There are a few reasons for it:

First, we went to Strasbourg, France for several days and had no internet.

Second, while in Strasbourg, I got sick again.

Third, we were in the midst of yet another trip-related meltdown.

Let me say right off the bat that Strasbourg is beautiful. It is a small-ish, kind of sleepy town with a river running through it. It is a bit like a mini-mini Paris with quite a bit of Tudor thrown in. As you can see from these photos, these buildings would not be remotely out-of-place in Stratford-upon-Avon in England.

The people in Strasbourg are also very nice, and genuinely happy to try out their English on you.

Part of the problem when we were there was that it was in the 90's and very humid, which made walking around town more laborious than it otherwise would have been.

I am not sure if it was the heat combined with not drinking enough water, or if I ate something that, due to heat and dubious French refrigeration, was not in the bacteriological state it should have been, but either way, I got sick.

I woke up Thursday morning with a very upset stomach and it just went downhill from there. Now I don't want to disgust you with too many details, but let me just share that I have not thrown up in 24 years. That's right. I just don't do it. Ever.

The last time I threw up was when I was 14 and I was about to start my first rehearsal for A Midsummer Night's Dream. That weekend, I had babysat for three young children, and during the course of the evening, the kids decided that it would be fun to put one of their wastebaskets on my head. I immediately removed it only to have them inform me that the girl had just the day before been sick in it. I earned my $10 that night, I can tell you.

Anyone who knows me knows that I have a major fear of vomit. It had actually grown into quite a big phobia over the years, to the point that I actually went for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to see if I could get over it.

This was in Charlotte, NC, and the therapist, in addition to doing some odd thing with vibrating orbs in my hands (maybe she confused therapy with massage therapy), told me to rent all the movies I could think of that had scenes with vomit in them and watch those moments over and over until I was no longer upset by them.

This therapy didn't really cure my phobia, to be honest. I am, however, very familiar with The Exorcist now.

Anyway, long story short, after 24 years, I got sick again, and I did actually think as it was happening "You know, this really isn't so terrible, why have I been so frightened of it all these years?"

So maybe there will be a positive long-term outcome of getting sick; maybe I just won't worry about it so much anymore.

In the short-term, however, it triggered a pretty major bout of anxiety, because not only had I gotten sick, but I also had to get on a train for Paris the next day because we were meeting our friends Paul and Christen there.

Suffice it to say, the Paris weekend was not all I'd hoped it would be, as it took me a while to feel better again.

I can pass along information about the terrific hotel we stayed at in Paris, however. It was called the Hotel le Petit Paris, and it is in the 5th Arrondissement around the corner from my favorite Luxembourg Gardens.

The hotel opened in September 2009, so everything is very new and clean. The decoration is pretty great, I don't know exactly what you'd call it, but I would describe it as contemporary, modern but with some old-fashioned touches thrown in.

Not only was it modern, clean, and centrally located, it was also super quiet, and the beds were amazingly comfortable. The bathrooms are pretty cool looking too. All this, and the staff were incredibly nice and helpful, and the rooms are air-conditioned.

I'll include the website in the column to the left so you can check it out.

This post is getting too long, so I will continue in another one.

Paris Wine Toes

This is a photo of the Eiffel Tower from my room last night. Not too shabby. Though I was reading my book today (I am currently reading Spies of Warsaw by, Alan Furst; very good book), and came across the quote "...beautiful places [are] hard on lonely people".

I would hardly call myself a lonely person, and I love doing things on my own, but there is something lonely about seeing these beautiful sights by myself, and not being able to share them with Steve, or a friend, in the moment.

The daytime is easier; I am quite happy wandering around in my own world, reading my book over a meal or an espresso. But when nighttime comes, I feel a bit more uncomfortable. There is something about going out to eat dinner by myself that feels awkward; harder to just read my book in my own world. And I am not adventurous enough to go to a wine bar by myself at night, because (and maybe I flatter myself here) I don't want to get chatted up by random people, especially not in French. Is that lame of me?

I know I should just enjoy it, though, because over the next 4 months Steve and I will, I'm sure, drive each other crazy, and we will wind up begging for a few days to ourselves.

Anyway, I spent the morning at my favorite museum in Paris, the Musee Rodin. It was pouring rain outside when I went, which on the upside was very atmospheric but on the downside, it may have made the museum busier.

And the humidity, my god, the air was so thick I could barely breathe. I don't want to sound like a spoiled American here, but a little air conditioning goes a long way. It doesn't even have to be cold, just get some airflow going. Or just a fan, how about that? Just a fan on rotate so that the air actually moves in the room. Just a suggestion.

After that I went to a conveyor-belt sushi restaurant. Yep, you read me right. Conveyor-belt sushi. I had read about it in my Zagat guide, and the place was absolutely packed. The way it works is this: You sit down at a seat which faces a moving conveyor belt. The chefs prepare various dishes and then place them, covered with clear plastic covers, on this conveyor belt, and you just grab whatever looks good to you. The plates are color-coded, with each color being a different price. When you are ready to leave, the waiters simply add up how many of each color you had and voila, your bill!

Now since it was warm out and since it is, after all, conveyor belt sushi, I didn't actually eat anything raw. I did, however, have a lovely crunchy cabbage salad, a veggie roll, and a cooked salmon and tuna roll. It was just what I was in the mood for, since I just couldn't face another heavy meal.

Today I also went to the Musee du Vin. This was, I have to say, the oddest museum I have ever been to. The audio tour was so strange I wondered if it was a joke. The museum is basically a restaurant with some tunnels leading off to the side. These tunnels contain a lot of wine-making and grape-growing paraphernalia from the 18th and 19th centuries.

The audio tour felt to me as though it had just been recorded that morning by some girl with a microphone in her living room. I could hear her turning pages, taking deep breaths, and at one point sighing, as if she was bored out of her mind.

Every so often, something she said would be punctuated by loud classical music, the same bars each time. The music would suddenly start playing, and then would just as suddenly cut out. At first I thought it signified a transition to the next display of the tour, but that turned out not to be the case, as when the music stopped, she started talking about items displayed in the cases back where I had previously been standing.

And it was just so poorly organized that I had no idea what I was supposed to be looking at when. The tour gave you no real clue. She would say: "Items 2, 12, 85 and 16 were used for decanting in the 18th century", and I would be struggling to locate these items which were, of course, nowhere near each other, and were sometimes in different cases, so I was whipping around trying to locate things, giving myself whiplash.

As soon as I had located at least one of the items she referred to, she had already rattled off 16 other items I should be looking at, and then the music would play.

Then there were wax-people displays set up, one of which showed Napoleon and two other dudes, standing amongst wine barrels. The audio for this was: "Here is Napoleon. He liked wine." And the music played.

I just didn't understand what was happening.

By far the best moment came when I reached the corkscrew display, and the audio mentioned that the cork became the preferred preservation method, replacing hemp, muslin, paper and toe.

I'm sorry, did she say toe? Now I'm sure that word is probably spelled differently and means something else, but it was too late; I was off.

I couldn't stop imagining all of these wine bottles corked with the toes of vintners and their families. How relieved they must have been to see the cork become fashionable. Now the mystery of the toe-less winemakers of the 18th century has been solved.

London for a Day

Yesterday found us back in London for the day and night. We spent the morning at The Cabinet War Rooms Museum. If you are ever in London, it is really worth a visit.

The museum takes you on a guided audio tour through the rooms that Churchill and his various strategists, advisors, cabinet members, secretaries, typists, etc, used as their war command center throughout World War II. The rooms are located deep underground near 10 Downing Street, and are fortified with concrete and steel, to protect those within from bombs.

What I love most about this museum is that on the day the war ended, people who worked in this space literally turned out the lights, locked the door and left. And everything that was down there just stayed as it was.

Some of the rooms were later cleared out before the space became a museum in the 1980's, and so these rooms have been faithfully recreated to match photographs, but one room in particular, The Map Room (my favorite), is exactly as it was the day the war came to an end. Even down to the sugar rations of one officer that were found in a desk drawer.

I just love to think of that when I look at this room, that everything here is just as it was on that historic day. The string on the maps, the push pins, the books and phones, the strategic logbooks, the code scramblers, the desks, chairs, everything, still somehow holding all the fear, the effort, the tension and finally, the elation and relief that this room once contained.

It just really felt like stepping back in time, being in these rooms, imagining all that had gone on in them for so many years, while bombs exploded above them, and the city crumbled while still struggling to stay alive.

Pretty amazing stuff.

After visiting the War Rooms, we did what anyone would do, and we went to a fantastic wine shop. Berry Bros & Rudd. Talk about stepping back in time: this shop has been there for 312 years. In the same space. I have included a link to their website on the left-hand side of this blog in the Sites I Love, Things I Mention section. Take the virtual tour of the shop, because you can see the underground cellars, function rooms and classrooms that you cannot go to when you just pop by the shop.

Today, I am back in Paris, and will be here until Wednesday. Already, it feels like the time on this trip is flying by. I am in a very large business hotel which I booked through Priceline. The room is clean and a bit spartan, almost like a very nice dorm room, but this view from my window....what can I say?

Reflections on Paris

People seem to hate the French, and in particular, Parisians.

The thing I hear most often is how snobby the French are, and since it has been 10 years since I was last there, I had kind of forgotten what it was like in Paris.

I cannot decide if I think snobby is the right word, but I agree there is definitely something grating about the overall demeanor and attitude of a lot of Parisians.

It's not that I felt that the people there weren't nice, it was more that it seemed like so many of them just didn't care about anyone else around them. In many ways, they don't even acknowledge the people around them. It is like each Parisian is his or her own personal island, in which no one else exists but them.

This manifests itself in what comes across as extreme rudeness: people don't move aside for you on the sidewalk, it is up to you to get out of their way; they never say excuse me when trying to get by people in a crowded space, they simply shove you aside.

Conversely, if you are in a crowded space and trying to move through or by people, no amount of "excuse me's" is going to cut it. No one will move until you physically push them aside, and even then, the people you physically push aside still will not pay any attention to you. And why should they? You don't exist, after all!

For me, it was very bizarre to realize that I just had to push people aside, and that people were going to push me as well. I grew up where you just don't do that unless it's an emergency. To me, it's kind of horrific, but nobody there gets upset, it's just kind of how it is.

Even at the pub where we were watching the world cup soccer matches on TV, people would just stand in front of the televisions and chat with their friends. They never once looked around to see if they were in anyone's way.

It's not that there aren't inconsiderate people in the US, because God knows there are! But there is just something different about it in Paris. And believe me, I am not one of those everything-American-is-right-and-everything-foreign-is-wrong kind of people. I'll criticize anyone, just wait and see!

Anyone out there know what I'm talking about as far as Paris goes? What do you think it is?

I will be very interested to see how other places in France will be similar and/or different to Paris.

In Newcastle now, in the very house where Steve grew up.

Paris Dupes

Yesterday wound up being my first real day in Paris since we arrived almost a week ago.

We managed to walk along the Seine and across the bridge to the Tuilleries and The Louvre. Walking across the bridge, I'm sorry to say that we almost fell for one of the most ridiculous cons in the world:

As we were walking over the bridge toward the gardens, a woman in her 50's bent down and picked up a thick gold men's wedding band from the ground and showed it to us, asked us if it was ours. We said no, and she looked at the inside of it and saw the markings which she claimed showed it was real gold. She also said how sad it was that someone had lost it, etc. We of course agreed.

She tried it on her own fingers and it didn't fit. We should take it, she said. She was an evangelist and therefore couldn't wear jewelry. She put it in my hand and walked away, smiling and sweet. Now all this time, all I was thinking how delighted I was to understand everything she was saying to me in French.

As we went on our way she suddenly came up behind us again, smiling and sweet, apologetic, asking if she could have some money. No, we said, and tried to give her the ring back. No, no, she didn't want it, it was for us, but just a little money. Again, so smiley, so sweet.

No, we said again, you can't have any money. Take the ring back and sell it. This went on for another exchange or two, where she would follow us and ask us for money and we would say no and shove the ring back at her. Finally she got the point that we weren't giving her any money and suddenly the nice sweet lady disappeared and was replaced by that crazy neighbor everyone on the block was afraid of growing up.

She stopped following us, but she hurled a few choice words our way, I can tell you.

As for Steve's and my stupidity, I can only say that, as former New Yorkers, we are deeply ashamed. We NEVER would have fallen for that when we were living in the city.

I can only blame it on jet-lag, and the fact that by that point, I had gone almost four days without really eating anything. At least, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

This photo has nothing to do with the story I just told you, but Paris seems to have the most stunning and fragrant flower shops I have ever seen. It seems to be peony and hydrangea season, and those are two of my favorites. Who that dude is, I have no idea.

Paris-Outside!!

Finally! After almost three full days stuck in this room, I was able to venture outside today. I cannot even describe the joy and relief I felt, breathing in fresh air and walking in the Paris streets.

We are still a bit weak, me especially, since I have basically eaten a few bits of cereal and pretzels since all this started on Friday morning. In fact, the last real meal I had was Thursday afternoon.

Anyway, today we went out and walked over to the Luxembourg Gardens, and then sat in some of the chairs they have scattered around, and read our books and just basked in the day.

I wish I had photos for you, but since we were both a little out of it when we left, we forgot the camera. I am especially disappointed to not be able to show you the wonderful sign we saw across from the gardens. It was for a very small museum called "Musee de la Poupee".

Now as far as I can tell, Poupee means puppet or marionette, but I'm sure you can appreciate Steve's and my feeling how very on-the-nose this sign was without any translation, since for us, this apartment we're in has been our own personal Musee de la Poupee.

One note on the language front: my French is pretty good, and I can get us around, ask questions, order, and pretty much understand most of what comes back to me.

As we were getting up from our chairs in the the garden today, a woman approached us to ask if we were leaving. I said we were, and we smiled at each other. Feeling quite proud of myself, I decided to make a friendly remark as we walked away about how good these particular chairs were (they were two of the few chairs in the garden that recline).

I smiled and said: "These are the best chairs". She smiled back, though with a bit of a confused look on her face. As we walked away, I realized that I had in fact said: "These are the best shoes".

Oh well, I blame the dehydration.

When Paris Met Colon

Well, today was the first sunny day we have had since arriving in Paris, and I spent it in bed with what I think is a case of mild food poisoning.

Ironically, I think I may have gotten it from the only healthy thing I ate yesterday! Since Steve and I both had the pot au feu for lunch yesterday and he is fine, I have to assume that I got it from the strawberries I ate last night for dinner, of which Steve had none. I washed each strawberry thoroughly and one-at-a-time, but I guess it doesn't take much to make you sick.

As far as food poisoning goes, it has been super mild, and I am just happy that it didn't happen on a big travel day. I was just able to rest and relax and know that we will be in Paris until Wednesday, so there is still plenty of time.

Ah, the joys of travel. Hopefully this is my sickness for the trip out of the way.

Paris-Day 2

Welcome to Paris!!

Today is our second day here, though really our first full day since we didn't actually get to our apartment until around 7:30pm last night.

Let me tell you, 9 hour jet-lag is a bitch. Last night we went to sleep at midnight, which, for all intents and purposes was 4pm according to our body clocks. I slept until 5am Paris time, which is 9pm San Francisco time. Then we were out and about, eating breakfast and running errands during what was essentially the middle of the night for us. We ate lunch at the equivalent of 5am. After a while my body was just like, "Dude, what the hell, go to bed!!" and when I talked to Steve, I slurred my words, and my eyes went all glazed and wiggly.



Here is a photo, not of Paris, but of the pot au feu we had for lunch at a place near Place de la Madeleine. I include this photo to demonstrate that whomever started the whole European-portion-sizes-are-smaller rumor was a jackass. This was one huge friggin lunch, consisting of beef, leeks, turnip (or maybe it was parsnip; once it's cooked for 14 hours, who can tell the difference?), carrot, potato and cabbage.

Let me tell you, it was delicious, the beef so tender it literally fell apart when your fork touched it, but I only ate about one third of it, the plate was so huge. Steve and I easily could have shared it.

All around us, however, were gorgeous skinny French women, eating their entire bowl of pot au feu followed by a huge hunk of apple tart covered with cream. How do they eat like that and stay so svelte? HOW??? HOW???!!!!!

Oh, the meal also came with marrow bones. I am trying to be adventurous food-wise this trip, and so I thought I might try the marrow on a piece of bread, but once I touched it with my knife and felt that giggly/gelatinous consistency, I just decided it was a bridge too far.

I have vowed to try escargot at some point during our France travels, and I still plan to. Maybe even frog's legs. But that marrow, I just couldn't do it.

The macarons we had later at Laduree, however, those were a cinch to consume!!

One other exciting thing about our lunch today was the recycled wine. The waiter would bring over an opened bottle of house red with your meal, pour you a glass and then leave the bottle at the table. We only had one glass each, so half the bottle was still full when the waiter cleared our places.

He took the half empty bottle of wine, topped it up from a big jug or vat behind the bar, and brought the bottle to another table. We could have done anything to that wine: added a little mustard, some salt and pepper, a little arsenic, and they never would have had any idea. Well, they would have guessed something was up when the folks at the next table fell face-first into their pot au feu....