Paris with the Family

Now it was my turn to play host. Alana, my parents and I got to Paris Sunday night. We got our luggage and headed for the RER (suburban train to take you to the city). The RER, which is always an experience (to be elaborated on when I talk about spring break), took a long time because it just kept randomly stopping. Bienvenue à la France!

We didn't get to our hotel until late (The Mariott Rive Gauche) and had dinner at some weird chain restaurant called The Apollo that was open late on a Sunday night. When my Dad stayed at this hotel in February, we made friends with Florence, the friendly concierge. Well of course, she was there again when we arrived so my Dad had to talk with her for a while. She was nice though. After dinner, I ran back to my apartment to get some clothes and toiletries, etc. because I was going to share a room with Alana for the week. It was great to sleep in a hotel bed and have a hotel shower (that should tell you about the conditions of my apartment). We all went to bed.

Monday
I woke up for 10 am class and my family had the morning to sleep in. My mom and I made a schedule for the week on the plane from London to Paris. They were supposed to see Notre Dame and then meet me there. Well, I hadn't accounted for the sudden influx of tourists to the city. I guess April is the start of the long, swarming tourist season. I usually walk by Notre Dame to go to class and I can pop in for ten minutes and then keep going. Now, there is a 2 hour line to get in! So they didn't go inside, that's oK. I met them after class and we went to a restaurant called "Entrecôte". It's a classic - highly recommended if you go to Paris. We sat outside, with gorgeousss weather, and ate our steak-frites with delicious sauce while drinking the house wine. Finally, good food again! The parents loved it, Alana too. We made a quick stop at La Durée afterwards, a famous macaroon shop. These aren't your passover macaroons, mind you. These are gourmet, NOT kosher, delicious macaroon cookies, called macaroons because of the paste in the middle that I guess has something to do with macaroons. We got a bunch of different flavors and figured we'd eat them by the Eiffel Tower. From there, we went to the Champs Elysée, walked down that for about 10 minutes (I find it kind of trashy and way too crowded) and went to the Arc de Triomphe. We bought tickets for the top and climbed the steep stairs to the museum. It's actually a pretty cool musuem about the history of the Arc and other Arcs around the world. It's one of the largest war momuments in France. I heard a story that some drunk soccer fans once desecrated the Arc and were deported from France! Then we went out on the top for an unbelievable view of Paris. We took lots of pictures and found all of the major landmarks. It was really cool up there! We went back down and went to the Trocadero from there. The Trocadero is this square across the river from the Eiffel Tower with the most amazing views of the tower, cool people hanging out, singing and doing roller blade tricks, and a beautiful fountain and pool. We sat on the grass there for a while, in the beautiful 70 degree weather, eating our macaroons and enjoying the view. After relaxing for a while, we bought some tickets for a boat cruise. It didn't leave for another 40 minutes so we walked around the Eiffel Tower some more, going underneath in and taking some pictures (of course). Our boat cruise on the Seine was amazing. There are so many amazing bridges on the river and you will never see the intricacies like you will from a boat. It was really relaxing and I actually learned a lot about Paris. After our boat cruise, and our long day of tourism (my Dad said to me, "who taught you how to travel like this?? It's exhausting" to which I replied, "There's way to much of Paris to see in 4 days!") we went to dinner in Butte aux Cailles. It's an area in the 13th and there's supposed to be a really fun restaurant there that I wanted to take my family to. They didn't accept credit cards though so we found another restaurant that was pretty good. Chez Paul was the name, in the 13th. After dinner, we went back to my apartment so I could show it to my parents. There wasn't much to show, so we went back to the hotel after that and I attempted to do some homework. Then bed.

Tuesday
Me - Class 10 - 12. Family - Musée d'Orsay. I told them not to go on Tuesday (Don't go to the Musée d'Orsay on Tuesday - the Louvre is closed on Tuesday so EVERYONE goes to the d'Orsay instead) but they didn't listen and it was packed! It's ok, I did my homework at CEA while waiting for them. We met in the Marais and went to lunch at Chez Marianne in the Jewish Quarter. It was delicious, plates full of different mediterranean delicacies. We then bought some macaroons from a Jewish Bakery around the corner. They were delicious and the place was packed with people shopping before Passover. We bought some for ourselves and some for our seder the next night. After that, my Dad and I met with the director of CEA to talk about some insurance issues if I wanted to get an internship over the summer in France. It was a great conversation and I think we figured out a game plan to keep me in France for the summer. I'll keep you posted. I went back after that to relax a little bit at the hotel while the family went to the Musée d'Art et Histoire du Judaisme. I had been there a few weeks before so I went back. I think they really liked it but its hard if you aren't very proficient in French. Dinner that night was really fun. We met our family friend Hillary August at a place called Le Louchebem in the 1st. It is an old steak house. My food was great! My mom didn't love her boeuf tartare - it's a huge slab of raw, ground up steak. Service wasn't so good and our meal took forever! But it was fun. The Metro ride home took us through Chatelet, probably the biggest and sleaziest Metro stop in Paris. My family did not like being there. There were sketchy people everywhere and the RER took a while to get there. And it smelled. Chatelet is the worst. We got home late and went to sleep.

Wednesday
Me: Class 10 - 2. Parents: Versailles. After my class, I met my friend Eric Victorson (we call him Vic). Vic was visiting me from New York for his spring break from Law School and we were traveling to Nice for the beginning of my spring break. He met me and the hotel and we went out to lunch at Alouette, this great, classic French restaurant near my apartment. We wandered around for a while and then met my family back at the hotel. We had to get dressed and meet Francois Denavit, our host for the first night of seder, at 6 pm on the Champs Elysée. I had emailed the French American Congregation in Paris a few weeks ago to see if they could set us up with a family for seder. They found us a family in Fourqeaux, a suburb of Paris. It was a Jewish American woman who married a French man. Their kids grew up learning French and English and went to an American school. We took the RER A, which is 300 times nicer than the RER B (presumably because it goes to the ritzier suburbs) and got picked up by Gillian (the American woman) and driven to their charming house in Fourqueax. We had a wonderful seder with them, my Dad leading because Gillian wasn't exactly sure how to lead the seder. The food was great and it was really fun having a seder in France, even if we unwittingly broke it before it even began. Our first cup of wine was champagne, which has yeast in it. Nobody thought about that until our way home! We had a great time though and got home pretty late. Vic stayed at my apartment and I stayed at the hotel with Alana.

Thursday:
Me: Class 10 - 2. Family: Louvre, Jardin de Tuileries. After class, I finally had some ice cream! (I'd been craving it since London and hadn't gotten a chance to eat it). Then I met my parents at the Centre Pompidou (museum of Modern and Contemporary Art) and we saw two great exhibits. The first was on Kandinsky, the Russian artist, and it was unbelievable. It was packed because it had just opened the day before. Next we saw the Alexander Calder exhibit which we loved. There were all there wire portraits of people from the '20s and his famous "Circus" which was a moving, continuous scene of a circus. Calder was really really great. We spent so much time there that we didn't even make it to the permenant exhibit...oh well, they'll have to come back to Paris! We went from there to Rue Moufftard so my parents could do some shopping and see my local market. My roommate Justin met us for a beer and Vic did too. I had to run back to the hotel so I could register for classes for the Fall at Michigan. 45 minutes later, everyone else came to the hotel and we went to a friend of my Dad's, Jack Siler's, house. He lived in a really cool house in the 14th and we had drinks there on his patio. Then we went to a very fun restaurant in the 14th that Jack used to go to when he was younger. I am completely blanking on the name but I had great lamb curry and it was a fun atmosphere. Again, another late dinner, another night right to bed. My parents and sister were leaving the next morning.

Friday:
Morning, family left for the airport/states. I had class 10 - 12. I'm glad I went because we actually did a lot and got a lot of homework! After class, I went back to the hotel and picked up all my stuff to bring back to my aparment. Goodbye comfy bed and nice shower! Vic and I went to lunch at a cafe near my house that was great. I had a delicious omelette...they have great omelettes in France. I got a haircut after that and Vic and I packed for our trip to Nice the next day. We then walked around the Ile de la Cité and the Ile St. Louis (the two islands on the Seine) before going to Vic's friends house for dinner. He was friends with a girl from law school who lives in Paris and she invited us for Shabbat dinner at her house. We took the Metro to the suburbs and then a bus to her house. Her parents didn't speak English so Vic and I spoke French the whole night. It was really fun but tiring. We had great food (kosher for passover) and it was really fun talking with this French family. They asked us to do an American's version of a French accent so I spoke English with a "french" accent and they spoke French with an "American" accent. It was hilarious. I heard some funny but not exactly PC french jokes. We didn't end up getting home until 2 am!

Next post: SPRING BREAK!