Paris, Deuxième Visite

On our second visit to Paris, we took the Metro to Ile de Cite, where Notre Dame is located. Notre Dame is not the oldest or largest cathedral in France, but thanks to Victor Hugo it is certainly the most famous. There’s a massive restoration project underway, and the front façade of the cathedral has been returned to its original grandeur.



The square outside is bustling with tourists, students and artists. By now, my daughter had adopted a very French style, purchasing a beret and a foulard. She told me that she had been watching French women very closely to see exactly how they knotted their scarves so that she could do it just right.

Inside the cathedral, I tried to explain to my daughter how these buildings were constructed entirely of stone, how the stained glass windows are structural units, how the flying buttresses keep the walls from falling outward, but I think it went over her head. In one of the side chapels, there is a nice model of the cathedral, showing the buttresses. I took my daughter outside and showed her the real thing.



The stained glass is quite impressive, especially in terms of scale. Some of the rose windows are so huge that I am unable to imagine how they were created.



We went outside to a little park behind the cathedral and ate some lunch. My daughter had way too much fun feeding the sparrows, which annoyed my wife and I because we have sparrows in the United States. The street that runs alongside the cathedral is full of souvenir shops, and we noticed that the shop nearest the entrance to Notre Dame has the highest prices. The prices are lower at the one next door, and so on. The one furthest from the entrance is the cheapest. It’s fascinating that you only had to walk a block to save as much as 50% on this stuff.



Later, we took a walk across the Seine and headed over to the Louvre. I had forgotten how massive the Louvre is. It’s an enormous building, and we walked forever along its outer walls looking for the entrance. It’s so big, the cops wear roller blades.



Eventually, we found the entrance. We had purchased tickets online before we left, so getting in was a breeze. We quickly visited the major attractions: Winged Victory, the Venus de Milo and the Mona Lisa, which is displayed behind a sheet of glass that could stop a bazooka shell. I was able to walk completely around the Venus de Milo, and discovered something I never knew about this famous statue: You can see her butt crack.



Once we left the Louvre, we wandered around in Paris for awhile, admiring the architecture.



We wound up in the Les Halles district, and decided to have a nice meal. Unfortunately, there are lots of tourist restaurants in Les Halles, and it’s hard to distinguish between a good restaurant and a bad one.

We picked one at random and were seated immediately. We noticed that the restaurant was only about 1/4 full, even though it was 6:00 pm. We didn’t know if this meant that the restaurant sucked, or if Parisians eat late.

Years ago, my daughter had tried escargot and claimed to like it. So she ordered it again as an appetizer and took a bite. As it turned out, her tastes had changed, so I wound up eating the other 5 and a half snails.



My wife had a delicious tureen of French Onion soup, served with a spoon the size of a shovel. When our main course arrived, we were all in fine spirits, laughing and kidding around. My wife had ordered a steak of some kind. It was tough and gristly, and she was horribly disappointed. The mood at our table turned sour and I was amazed at how fragile good times can be. It put a damper on our evening, so instead of hanging around to see Paris at night, we headed home in rush hour traffic.

So my advice is, if you’re ever in Paris, stick with the soup.

Giverny

One morning we got up early and drove down the secondary road that runs along the Seine through a series of small towns down to Giverny, where the great Impressionist painter Claude Monet lived. One of the towns we passed through was Les Andelys, which has a large castle up on the hill overlooking the town.





The French use the word “chateau” for “castle,” but they also use it to mean “large house” or “small house.” So it’s all contextual, and makes no sense. We couldn’t visit the castle, because they all closed at the end of September – one of the problems of traveling during shoulder season.

We passed homes that were half-timber construction (typical of the region), and some that had thatched roofs. It was like being transported back in time.



Eventually we reached the town of Giverny, where the home and gardens of Claude Monet have been lovingly preserved. You must pay a small admission fee to enter the gardens, and it’s a little more if you want to see the house as well. The gardens are magnificent, even in October. I can’t name all the flowers that are planted there, but they are growing 8 feet tall in some places, in profuse, voluptuous splashes of color.



There’s an underground passageway that takes you beneath the busy road that runs past the town and brings you up at the lily pond where Monet painted his famous series. It’s a beautiful spot, and my daughter was quite captivated seeing the lily pond and the paintings that were completed there.




Monet was an avid collector of Japanese prints, which cover the walls of his house. At one point, he had a small footbridge built over one end of the lily pond, in the arched Japanese style, which is known as the Pont Japonais. This bridge became the subject of a series of famous paintings. I found it amusingly ironic that on that day, the Pont Japonais was groaning beneath the weight of a dozen or so Japanese tourists, frantically snapping pictures.

Monet’s house is surprisingly modest, although that may have been the way things were back around the turn of the 20th century. Besides the dozens of Japanese prints from his collection, there were lots of copies of his paintings done by students. This is to give you a feel for the way the house must have looked when he lived there, but the copies sucked, so it didn't really work. It’s filled with period furniture that matches the furniture from the original house. My daughter was amused by the lumpy featherbeds.

The French have learned much from Americans, so the entire area that Monet used as a studio has been turned into a gift shop, selling postcards, shopping bags, refrigerator magnets, books, and even Impressionism-by-numbers art kits.

When we left the house, we visited a museum nearby called the American Art Museum, where there was a terrific exhibit of Winslow Homer paintings. After the museum, we took a short walk through the lovely little town of Giverny to the church where Monet is buried, along with many members of his family. By this time, My daughter had reached art and history overload, and wanted nothing more than to sit down and read a book.

Notres Chambres

We had traded out our time-share condominium in Daytona Beach for one in the town of Connelles, France that was named "Manoir de Deux Amants" (The House of Two Lovers). This agricultural community is located on the banks of the Seine about an hour and 15 minutes northwest of Paris, in the Normandy region. Normandy is known for soft cheeses and seafood, as well as apples, which are typically processed into three liquid forms: Cider (a sparkling alcoholic beverage similar to champagne), Pommeau (a more alcoholic beverage typically consumed as an aperitif prior to a meal), and Calvados (a 40% alcohol drink that is served as a "digestif" after a meal, or poured over sherbet between courses). The French love alcohol.



Once we had negotiated the nightmarish roadway tangle of Louviers, we found the road to Connelles, which was closed off for construction, leaving us clueless and stranded. Fortunately, two gentlemen strolled by and pointed to a tiny, one-lane road that looked more like a driveway, urging us to take it. We found ourselves winding through medieval-looking clusters of homes that are built right up against the curbs.

Cars raced towards us through these narrow streets at frightening speeds, forcing us right to the edge of the pavement as they shot by, our side view mirrors missing by a fraction of an inch.

My wife served as the navigator, reading the directions to me from the resort printout. As we crept through the town of Connelles, we came to a sign for a restaurant. She read the directions that said, "… the Manoir des Deux Amants is located 300 m. past the Moulin de Connelles restaurant…" Dutifully, she reported to me, "We're almost there. The hotel is only 300 milligrams past this restaurant." I laughed so hard, I almost slammed into the curb.

Finally, we arrived and checked in. The building is a renovated older structure, right on the Seine (actually it's on a small ox-bow channel about 200 feet (that's 80 milligrams) from the main channel of the Seine). There was a little footbridge that crossed the channel to a small park that bordered on the Seine. We had two bedrooms, one bath, a small kitchen (including a dishwasher and a washer/dryer combo), a small living space with a dining table and a balcony overlooking the water.

The staff was courteous and helpful, especially a girl named Gipsy (the resident shopping expert), and a man named Jean-Christophe.

Whenever I would ask Jean-Christophe for a weather forecast, he would step outside, sniff the air, and tell me, "Cloudy, weez some sun. Maybe rain in zee afternoon." He never used the computer, and he was always right.

We were only given one key to our rooms, and if you were inside, you had to lock the door with the key. This meant that if there was a fire, you would have to find the key to let yourself out.





Just 300 milligrams from our hotel was the Moulin de Connelles restaurant, which is in a beautiful converted mill building that straddles the channel. Many old mill buildings in the Seine river valley have been converted in this manner. We couldn't afford to eat there.

The Normandy region is easily accessible by car ferry from various ports in England, so there are lots of British tourists. Our resort was packed with them. It was weird to see so many cars with right-hand drive on the roads and in parking lots.
There was no grocery store of any kind in Connelles, so we had to drive to a town called Val de Reuil. This is easy to pronounce if you say the word "Roy" while gagging on an oyster.

The "Atac Supermarche" in Val de Reuil was a typical supermarket, except for some peculiar differences from American supermarkets.

For example, they charge you a one-Euro ransom for shopping carts. The shopping carts are locked together in a daisy-chain arrangement. To take a cart, you have to insert a one-Euro coin (worth about a buck and a quarter) in the canister on the cart, and the chain from the next cart releases your cart. When you finish with the cart, you plug the chain back in, and the coin pops out. So they don't have to send employees out to the lot to gather up the carts.

There was a Halal section for Islamic shoppers (they have a large Islamic population in France). The cheese section was the size of an aircraft carrier. The wine section was huge, and you could buy a bottle of delicious French wine for a dollar. The most expensive bottle we saw was about 7 dollars. Strangely, crackers and salad dressings were nearly absent. And in France, you must bring your own shopping bags- they don't provide them.

When we came to the massive cheese section, we agreed that we would each pick one cheese to take home that day. My daughter informed us that she didn't want anything "runny" or "with mold in it." She looked around for a minute and came up with a wedge of Mimolette. FLASHBACK: About 20 years ago, my sister went to France for a semester abroad program. I picked her up at the airport on her return, and she had a ball of cheese the size of her head that she claimed was the most delicious cheese she had ever tasted. It was Mimolette. So out of the 200 or so varieties of cheese available in France, both my sister and my daughter picked the same one. In fact, she refused to eat any other kind of cheese for the duration of the trip, especially the gooey, moldy the Roquefort I purchased.