Photo by Palden MacGamwell, paldenphoto@cruzio.com
Yesterday was a beautiful day here in Paris and a few hundred people showed up for the "Bridges for Obama, Yes we Span" photo op. Photos from around the world will be shown at the Democratic Convention in August.
More window shopping from the shops around Madeleine. The French love bûche (translates to "log") for Christmas. I admit, I'm not a big fan of them though a few of these just might tempt me. La Maison du Chocolat options looked the best, with one even being filled with chestnut creme filling, along with chocolate.
What is your favorite holiday dessert? More bûche, after the jump.
Truffles! During our window gazing walk, we caught a glimpse of these little beauties. The black truffles were going for €2990 per kilo (roughly $4,300/kilo or $2,100 per pound) and the white truffles a cool €13,990 per kilo or $20,000/kilo, $10,000 per pound. I hear the black truffles cost between €500 - €800 per kilo in the south though somehow, I just don't see them slipping into our budget.
During the holidays, Parisians love to give gifts of chocolates and special candies. Joelle and I did a bit of window shopping last night to see what the big names had on offer this year. The big names on and around Place de la Madeleine were packed with shoppers. The most fashionable names (to foreigners, at least) include Hediard and Fauchon. Superior quality is just around the corner at La Maison du Chocolat where the lines ran outside. La Maison even had a friendly person managing the flow and offering free chocolate! Who says the French aren't friendly?
Thanks to Americablog readers for the the holiday gift! We won't be breaking the bank at any of the posh stores listed here though we are now planning our Christmas Eve dinner, which will be tonight. (I guess that makes it a Christmas Eve, Eve dinner.) We bought our 7 euro ballet tickets last night so we'll be at the Opera Garnier for Christmas Eve. Our special dinner will be fresh fish (to be decided when we see what is available later today), snow peas and our favorite Roederer sparkling wine from California that a friend kindly brought over from California. Since it's a Franco-American product (like the two of us) we love toasting with it on special occasions, including at our wedding here in France a few years ago.
Chris (in Paris), his wife Joelle and I decided to go shopping yesterday at the street market at the Rue Daguerre. It's in the 14th arrondissement, near Metro Denfert-Rochereau. (We walk there from Chris' place via the Cimitiere Montparnasse, a neat above-the-ground cemetery, where Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, among others, are buried). This is a market I used to frequent when I studied in Paris 25 years ago (25 years, ugh) - I lived around the corner. On the map above, I've marked the street market with a nice long yellow tint. The arrow at the end of the market is the bakery that I talk about below (and the cafe I talk about is right next to the bakery).
Here's the meatshop on the Rue Daguerre.
The street market at Rue Daguerre is only open until 1pm, though open most days (maybe closed Mondays). Here's a quick video of the market yesterday.
Chris likes to go to a great, very typical, cafe at the end of Rue Daguerre, at the intersection with avenue du General Leclerc, right on the NW corner. Chris and Joelle ordered "cafe" - i.e., strong black coffee - and I got my usual, a "creme" (a cafe-au-lait, though in Paris they're called cremes). Total for 3 coffees: 5 euros (should be 5 bucks, but with the screwed up exchange rate it's more like 7 now).
Here's a quick video of the cafe, with cameos by Chris and Joelle (Joelle was reading about the Rugby World Cup taking place in Paris at the moment - more on that shortly).
And finally, a woman sitting outside the cafe, as shot from the inside window.
Next we went to an organic bakery right off the Rue Daguerre. It's called, Moisan, and it's at 4, avenue du General Leclerc. They have great bread and pastries. Chris had us buy a "kouign amann" - pronounced "KOON-ya-man." Kind of a sweetened roll, from Brittany. Excellent. Here's a close-up of the kouign amman, with a row of palmiers in the middle.
Here's the bakery window.
And again, a quick video entering the bakery. Check out the bustle.
A closer look at the baked goods available in the bakery. It's funny, you probably can't hear it on the video, but the entire scene was one big "bonjour, bonjour, bonjour" as they served the never-ending swarm of customers.
And finally, rugby. It's the world cup of rugby here this month and the town is insane. The only sport I understand less about than soccer is rugby. Lots of ads all over town, and oh, they're the kind of ads that the French do so well.
It was cloudy and kind of rainy all of August, really. Today, however, was exceptional. Chris (in Paris) and his wife, Joelle, took me to a little chocolate bar/bike rental place in the 19th arrondissement, Velo et Chocolat, that has the best hot chocolate in town. To. Die. For. 3 euros, and you can not finish a large cup. On the way, we stopped and got some melons. Here's Chris.
Feel free to insert your own caption. Across the street was a horsemeat butcher. For real.
We came to this neighborhood to see the canals. Really quite lovely, and a neighborhood of Paris I'd never seen (the light was tremendous).
It's a rather mixed neighborhood - Arab, yuppie, Asian and Orthodox Jewish mixed together. We witnessed an interesting exchange of looks when two Orthodox Jewish guys with their kids walked through a group of Arab guys sitting in the park. Nothing happened, but the looks exchanged were priceless. There were also a group of Asian men playing some game (majong?) with ivory-colored blocks with symbols on them.
As I mentioned, we didn't hit the area until 6pm or so, so the evening sun was just gorgeous.
We held our first AMERICAblog get together in Paris last night, and it went really well. I was kind of afraid nobody would show, but we had about 12 or 13 people, including a few of my friends, show up at Marcus' art studio. It was actually quite fun. An American couple from Boston, who are swapping apartments with a family in France for the month, came with their two adorable kids. A Franco-American couple who are soon moving to Sacramento came by. Also in attendance, a reader from Seattle who is here to study French for a month, and a woman who has been here for several years and is a painter - she showed with another friend. It was a nice, small intimate crowd, and we hung out till around 1030 pm. We definitely have to do more of these (and we still have to do on in DC!)
(Unfortunately, the panoramic shot got a bit screwed up, so you're gonna miss the really cute French guy :-)
More details on Sunday's AMERICAblog get together here.
The Arts et Metiers metro station. You have to click the photo and see the larger version to fully appreciate this station.
I.M. Pei's pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre. Mom hates it. I think it's cool. And below is another shot of the Louvre and pyramid at night (I shot it kind of quickly, so it may not be my best shot, but still you get a great sense of the ambiance at night here). I just realized that I uploaded a huge version of the day pic of the Louvre - click on it, it's pretty cool. Even though you can't see it all in one screen, I think it gives you a sense of being there, what it looks like to be in the courtyard itself, something that normal non-panorama photos don't do. At least that's my feeling.
FYI the day pic and night pic of the Louvre were shot from different ends of the park.
We'll be meeting this coming Sunday, the 19th, at 630pm at the art studio of my friend Marcus, in the 11th (more of Marcus' art here). If no one shows up, it will be me and Marcus having coffee and then wine with his dog Grover. If more people show up, all the better. Here are the details:
152, rue Saint Maur, 75011 Paris code: A4590, premier escalier à gauche, premier étage à droite (entry code is A4590, enter then take the stairs on the left to the first floor, the door is on the right (in France, the FIRST floor is the American SECOND floor, i.e., one flight up from the ground floor)) tél : 01 49 29 08 94.
And now, some more photos.
A number of you had asked for photos of Paris Plage (aka Paris Beach). Every summer the city spreads 2000 tons of sand on a roadway running along the Seine river and turn it into a massive, mile-long beach. It's a brilliant idea. And people use it, a lot. More here.
These are simply a row of trees at the southern end of the Jardin de Luxembourg, a park near our place that was built by Marie de Medici in the early 1600s when she got bored of living in the Louvre. She built a palace and park in this location - now it houses the French Senate. It's a great park, huge, with tons of people just hanging out reading books, sun-bathing, playing tennis, kids everywhere. Just a great place to hang on a nice day.
These are the windows at Sainte Chappelle, Louis IX's private chapel built in 1248. It was only partly sunny the day we went. It really needs to be a fully sunny day to appreciate the windows. When the Republicans talk about "Old Europe," they're talking about people who constructed marvels like this 500 years before we even existed as a nation. Age comes with its own wisdom.
Okay, it's time for any and all of you in the Paris area to join me for a coffee or a drink this Sunday night, say 630pm-ish. Marcus, my American-in-Paris artist friend, and I were talking and we thought we'd do it at his art studio this coming Sunday the 19th. Depending how many of you show interest, we can figure out whether that location works or not. So, who is in the area and thinks they might be able to stop by?
In the meantime, here are a few photos of men playing Petanque, or Boule, or Bocce ball. They play it in the parks everywhere. (As always, click the photos to see larger versions.)
My friend Marcus' art studio (below is a photo of Marcus in the studio). Marcus is an American artist from Arkansas who has been living and working as an artist in Paris for 11 years now. Every Sunday he does an open house and anyone can stop by his studio and talk to him, have a cup of coffee or tea, and check out any and all of his works (and buy some). More on the weekly open house here:
le salon de dimanche (sunday salon) venez prendre le thé à l'atelier (come have a tea at the artist's studio) tous les dimanches de 14h à 18h (every sunday from 2pm to 6pm)
152, rue Saint Maur 75011 Paris code : A4590, 1e escalier à gauche, 1e étage à droite (take the stairs on the left, first floor on the right (in France, the FIRST floor is the American SECOND floor) tél : 01 49 29 08 94.
Si vous souhaitez recevoir des annonces d'expo, envoyez un mail à cet effet à (contact): atelier@marcusmcallister.com
He lives in the 11th, on Rue St. Maur. It's a gentrifying, trendy neighborhood with lots of bars and restaurants, though Marcus' end of the hood is pretty much a working-class Arab and Asian neighborhood, which is kind of fascinating as you'll think you're in a non-French foreign country.
You can see more of Marcus' works here, on his Web site. And, for you New Yorkers, he's going to be participating in a show there from September 6 to 29. I think only a few of his pieces will be in the show, but he'll be there as well, at least the first few days (and I suspect at the opening, which is Sept 6). More on that here:
"En Plein View: French Artists in New York" Exposition collective du 6 au 29 septembre 2007 Vernissage le 6 septembre
Contemporary Art Network 580 8th Avenue, 5th floor New York, NY 10018 USA t: (001)212 354-2999
Mom and I were at the Musee d'Orsay today, a wonderful impressionist museum in a converted old train station along the Seine river in Paris. We were in one of the rooms on the top floor, looking at Monet's "The Turkeys at Montgeron" when all of a sudden a bunch of little French kids came running in and plopped down on the ground in front of us. Their instructor began to explain the painting to the assembled and rather oddly quiescent 5 year olds:
"Note that this painting is a collection of small brush strokes," she told the unusually attentive kindergartners. "The other paintings we've seen today were made up entirely of a series of small dots. As these are strokes and not dots, this is not an example of true impressionism."
One little boy in front then pointed across the room at a still life by God-knows-who and said "look, there's fruit behind that monsieur over there!"
Mom and I went to a Gregorian Chant concert last night at Notre Dame - it's all part of the Assumption of the Virgin celebrations that take place every August 15 in Europe (not such a religious continent, but still, August 15 is big). Was quite nice, though after a while it was all the same thing over and over again - felt vaguely like being at church. Will have some video, with music, edited later today.
Interesting aside: The red light at the top of the cathedral was the sunset shining in through the beautiful rose window at the front of the cathedral. I'd never been inside at sunset, it's rather amazing the light that comes through.
