My last post was a week ago, and during that time nothing much really happened.
Well… except for this.
Oh yeah and this too.
This spectacular display, among others, was seen during our decorations tour by car, which was simultaneous mixture of awe-inspiring holiday spirit and life threatening traffic. But to tell you about the whole weekend, I suppose that I should start at the very beginning (a very good place to start).
We left early on Saturday morning (at 7:30) for the three hour driving to Paris. My host family, like many people here, doesn’t visit Paris often as it’s far enough that you can’t just visit for the day. So it was an exciting visit for them as well as me, to show me the city at Christmas time. We got into the city at about 10:30 and spent the morning on a whirlwind tour of all the sites by car. The traffic of Paris has all the aggressive pedestrians of New York and all the congestion of LA- with tiny cobblestone streets and scooters.
Paris really is a beautiful city. The two cities I have spent the most time in are San Francisco and New York, so my expectation of a big city is above all a place of sometimes hectic energy and eccentricity. It is not to say that Paris lacks in energy of eccentricity, but it maintains certain stateliness at the same time which was totally new to me.
We spent the morning on the Champs Elysées, admiring the high prices and general ‘classe’ of the area. One interesting thing was the Abercrombie store on the Champs Elysées. In France, Abercrombie is an extremely expensive and classy brand. (So is GAP. It makes me feel so high class to realize that the clothes I wore all my childhood are considered almost designer here.) The Abercrombie store Paris has one key attraction: the real-live male models who are key to this brand’s marketing tactic, and are willing to take pictures with the adoring girls who wait in line to get into the store. Thankfully I was saved from spending my time in Paris waiting to set eyes on said models by the length of the line, with a wait-time of over an hour and a half (there were two models we saw by the gate. I am sorry to announce that they really are that good looking in real life, plus way taller than you would expect). Here is the line, longer, by the way, than the wait to see the Mona Lisa:
Dropped out things off at a charming and small hotel, and bought sandwiches for lunch before going shopping. I was pleased to do the classic Parisian activity of shopping and succeeded in finding two new pairs of pants. After our shopping trip along some of the main streets of Paris we left for dinner at a tiny Italian restaurant before the play we had tickets to.
It was ‘théâtre du boulevard’, a small modern comedy production in a charming, tiny theater. There were four actors who carried the show and they were absolutely hilarious. The premise was a woman, just engaged, who invites her three ex – ‘great loves’ to dinner, and their colliding personalities results in hilarity. Here's the inside of the theater:
After the show ended it was late but we took the opportunity to drive through the streets of Paris and see the Christmas lights. In this instance pictures speak louder than words, but before I post them I would like to list the other aspect of driving through Paris which I have already alluded to. During the weekend we almost crashing into : 1 bicyclist, 2 cars, 1 moto, and several pedestrians. But considering we survived the traffic I think we can deem the weekend a success.
We even took a spin by the Moulin Rouge before going back to the hotel and falling straight asleep. That morning we had a lovely breakfast of croissants and chocolate croissants before leaving for a walk around the Latin Quarter. The walk was self-guided but we followed directions from a tour my host mom had found online. It started at a place which you might recognize. It was in a Disney movie, I think…
I was magnificent to see Notre Dame in person. If I had been impressed by the Cathedral in Bourges, it was nothing compared to this cathedral of such incredible awe. On the same walk we passed by the Panthéon, the Sorbonne, and got a feeling of what the student’s quarter is like. It was more quirky and interesting than the other sections of Paris I had seen so far and may have been my favorite part of the tour. (Note: wereing a beret is not stereotypically French in France. Berets are warm and France is cold.)
We had lunch a Corsican restaurant in the Latin Quarter, which was very good and warmed us up enough before going to the Marché de Noël which is an open air market, the largest in France along another section of the Champs Elysées. It was charming and seasonal, the air was bitingly cold and as we passed by the stands we caught smells of Christmas trees, hot onion soup, pastries, and roasted chestnuts. The artisan crafts were from around the world and there was even a big screen of Santa, live from the North Pole, where children at the market with their parents could speak into a microphone and talk with him. I bought something for my host family, and my first roasted chestnuts. They were delicious, but more than that they held the heat, so that the very act of unshelling them warmed up my fingers.
We left not too long after to get back home before it was too late. It was really an excellent, excellent weekend.
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