Les Ponts de Paris !

Le Pont Mirabeau

Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine
Et nos amours
Faut-il qu'il m'en souvienne
La joie venait toujours après la peine.

Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
Les jours s'en vont je demeure

Les mains dans les mains restons face à face
Tandis que sous
Le pont de nos bras passe
Des éternels regards l'onde si lasse

Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
Les jours s'en vont je demeure

L'amour s'en va comme cette eau courante
L'amour s'en va
Comme la vie est lente
Et comme l'Espérance est violente

Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
Les jours s'en vont je demeure

Passent les jours et passent les semaines
Ni temps passé
Ni les amours reviennent
Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine

Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
Les jours s'en vont je demeure

Guillaume Apollinaire

Sarko wins

Well, tonight Sarkozy decisively beat Segolene Royal in France's second round of the presidential elections. Even though I am not surprised, I still thought for a moment, right before the results were announced, that perhaps Sego would pull through. Alas.

A crowd tried to protest the impending doom at Bastille...Go here to find my favorite new Sarko slogan.

I watched the results by walking up and down Rue St. Jacques, first stopping at the overflowing, but hushed small satellite bureau of the PS where plates of pasta salad sat untouched, down past the cafe au coin where I watched Sego cheerfully address her crowd (she almost seemed somewhat relieved) and then I spent the last hour, waiting for Sarkozy to finish his triumphal car ride and address the public, in the little marche next door, where the nice vender bagged up my Perrier and cheese, and ticked his tongue in disappointment telling me that France was now going to have a president who was 'a mere thumb, a small, not nice man.'

La Normandie !

Normandie was simply more beautiful than I could describe so I will simply post some photos from my voyages to Honfleur et Etretat, a sun-doused weekend de Pâques.

Time to catch up

Well, over the past month or so, I have welcomed many lovely visitors to my little garret, introduced them to France's best radio station -- Nostalgie -- (I managed to find a Parisian equivalent to WJIB in Boston, a feat heretofore thought of as impossible), went to Versailles *TWICE* (where Annie communed with her inner Marie Antoinette and Caro contemplated possible condo decor) and ate tons of fromage and fatty ham. Then I did a bit of visiting myself to see Stephanie and Toffi in Berlin, then Dana graduated (she's got her masters!) and I hung out with the Glynn/Carney contingent in London. So now I am many posts behind and have tons of pictures to upload, so you'll just have to be patient!


Working in backwards chronological order, I wanted to post these pictures from my lil birthday fête at work. It was so lovely:

Valérie went out and selected a beautiful array of French Japanese pastries from the shop Sadaharu Aoki, they bought a bottle of champagne and some lovely little name candles. Then they sang happy birthday and we all tasted the deliciously magical pastries, like the green tea matcha élair (the one sporting the candles), the sesame sea weed chocolate bar, the raspberry pistachio green tea confection, the red bean tart covered in green tea dust (it's the green Etowah mound looking pastry), and tarte citron, also with some sort of bean paste. Amazing !

In these photos you can also see my awful haircut in its first stages (which would be before the mullet is really starting to set in, as it is presently). Not so amazing.

Saturday is market day !

One of the most excellent things about my teeny little garret is that it happens to be on a street which has a super market every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Going to the marché on a Saturday morning is one of the great quotidian pleasures of the week (and the prices are better than in the local Franprix !). Every one is intent on examining the arrays of colorful vegetables and fruits, the venders are eager to help you, ringing out, “Et avec ceci, madame…?” each time you ask for something. There are fishmongers, cutting open the coquilles St. Jacques right there behind their stand, splaying the turbot and saumon, deboning the caubillaud or morue for a customer. There is the extremely hospitable traiteur libanais – clearly one of my favorite stands – who hands out sample upon sample of his delicious kibbé, tabouleh, labneh or hummus to the passersby. There are ample, overflowing flower stands, with rainbowed bouquets or elegant arrangements. The cheese masters are slightly more reserved, their counters an exercise in the various shades of white, cream, beige and yellow, with the occasional blue-veined tint of a Roquefort or the ashy crust of a chèvre providing the bottom of the minimal color spectrum. They don’t call out to customers, but simply wait for you to examine and decide what kind of fromage you desire. Today, the woman in front of me at the cheese marchand carefully selected five or six different kinds of cheese and it was a marvel to watch the monsieur carefully cut each cheese, each cheese with its own proper cutting tool, and its own specific cut – whether a long, rectangular slice for the comté or cantal, or a round little pyramid of chèvre, or a wedge of brie or camembert.

Since I love lists, I thought I'd share what I brought home today :

Endive

Roquette = arugula

Courgettes = zucchini

Avocats = avocados

Pommes = apples

Tomates cérises = cherry tomatos

Kibbé

Tabouleh

Saucission sec = dried sausage

Fromage St. Nectaire = cheese

Cantal = more cheese

Jambon de pays = fatty delicious ham !

All of my reveries about vegetables reminded me of this line that I saw on an interesting piece of art at the ultra contemporary museum, Musee MACVAL. In this work, the artist interviewed a series of immigrants in Norway, who had come there from different places around the world, and asked them about their newfound life in the bottom rung of the Artic circles...This quote jumped out at me:
= No, I haven't lost anything that important -- just my last name and fresh vegetables.

O the places we'd seen !

I feel unbelievably lucky that Tadhg could come for 10 splendid, soleil-drenched days in the capitale. It was remarkably bright and warm during his stay and we made the most of it, splaying ourselves on the grass devant le Pont Alexandre, spending a whole afternoon sitting in the ancient arènes de Lutèce, watching a group of young boys, très doué, play soccer, while on the other side of the venerable stadium a group of old men milled and squatted in the shadows, a game of pétanque making their deliberations seem all the more quaint.

We strolled arm in arm through the plein air Jardin de sculpture, we went through the Jardin des plantes and marveled at the dragon made of recyclable things, his curlicued breath, upon examination, turns out to be the filigreed six pack plastic rings from soda cans.

We went to the marché on Port Royal and the beautiful heads of lettuce seemed more beautiful than the tufted heads of children.

We ate saucisson and comté as snacks. We strolled through Père Lachaise, hurriedly looking for Oscar Wilde’s tomb before the security guards sussed us out. We were chased from the Parc de Belleville right before sunset and we didn’t even mind, having laughed together at the three small children who ran like martians, silently and delicately, each carrying a pastel balloon from McDonald’s like a glowing orb, around the parc, pointing at but never touching the flowers which were pushing up in this early burst of spring. The drama of the small boy responding to the garde’s warning that the park was closing, his face a small battle between petrification, tears and insolence – mustering up “On ne touche pas” and then repeating his claim, once more, this time more quietly, to the girl among them “On ne touche pas” – I shall never forget his face, nor the lovely classic way he pronounced the 'e' on the end of ‘touche’, just as if his small stand against the ravages of time were a half-alexandrin, dropping off into the wind. This boy and his memory makes a bookend with the Van Dyck painting I saw at the Jacquemart-André the day Tadhg left, Le Temps coupe les ailes de l’amour where old Time, having laid down his scythe, holds the boy against squirming as he cuts off his delicate wings with rough shears.

Sacre Coeur a mon coeur

I love this church: it is impossibly beautiful, peaking out from the ends of les grands boulevards here in Paris from atop its perch on Montmartre; it appears white, made of clouds from far away but as you approach you see its traces of grimes and layers of dirt, its onion domes remind me of my absolute favorite church, la Basilica San Marco in Venice.