The canals of Paris

 

As I continue to prove my thesis that cities without cars, and where the roads are replaced by canals, are all improved, I find I may have wandered beyond my expiration date. While my demonstration yesterday of Venice with roads instead of canals was extremely convincing, I find in looking over my previous cities of Nice, Rome, and Kyoto, my argument is damaged by a few of my penchants.

1. The lack of people make the cities look like the victims of post apocalyptic floods more than the beneficiary of delightful urban renewal.

2. Lack of ground access to buildings makes it look challenging to get around.

3. Heavy focus on already charming alleys, some of which are almost car free anyway, soften my point.

So with all this in mind I am taking my campaign to Paris, France. I may still suffer some of the flaws from the list above, but I am improving.

Is Paris better with canals?

Do I just like canals?

Has my thesis wandered off the map?

These questions and more will surely be answered today and in the weeks to come!

Original Eiffel Tower

Among the many small surprises of Paris was one in which it turned out that I loved the Eiffel Tower. Before the trip I was vaguely aware that, though it never managed to stir anything in me, it was pretty much the most iconic building there is. But with the heightened awareness of having been in it I am finding it's ubiquity to be overwhelming. As a random example I have run an informal study here at my library and found that the Eiffel Tower features on the cover of 35% of all books we have, even, curiously, ones with nothing to do with Paris or France.

My wife and I had a lovely time simply spotting the tower as it ducked in and out of mysterious appearances all over Paris. Later we hung out under it for an hour or so, poking around in its shockingly crappy gift shops and food stands and waiting for our scheduled time to go up into it. We got a little, or a lot, nervous about all those heights. Then up we went in a double decker elevator feeling slightly amazed. "We're in the Eiffel Tower" We said. Though I am drawn to things I can say that I did, I know it's a pretty hollow pursuit. But not with the Eiffel Tower! I am going to see ten million more pictures in my life of The Eiffel Tower, and every time I do a tiny light in me is going to go on, a tiny "We were there."

And so we were. We went to the top and toasted each other with some champagne. We combed over every deck, platform, girder, view, and store. Long since home I now notice how all our giant TV and radio antennae are in the shape of Eiffel Towers. Funny thing is that the Eiffel Tower, built before radio antennae, is the Ur radio antennae. Even the usability of the Eiffel Tower later on as a radio antenna is one of the things that saved it from being taken down. The other, I imagine, is that no one in their right mind would want to undo all those rivets.

On my walk to work today I saw a few Eiffel Towers, that is, I saw radio or TV antennae out on the high ground in the Twin Cities. They really did catch my eye. No doubt there are tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of metal Eiffel Towerish things scattered across America. So it's a little funny that only the original design in Paris is actually at all pretty and magical. Only the Eiffel Tower itself works aesthetically. It's like it used up all the beauty of its own conception on itself.

One more thing about French cheese

My wife and I were recently at our local cheesemonger. We were picking up some cheeses that we had acquired affection for in Paris. I was interested in the Camembert, ubiquitous in the cafes there. Thinking of Camembert just now this phrase popped unbidden into my mind: "The whipped cream of cheeses."

I have no idea why.

I asked the cheesemonger about the Camemberts. These were whole cheeses, not ones for him to cut, so he showed them to us. When asked about two of them he describe one of them as being redolent of Barnyard Fruits.

My wife asked what were the smells of Barnyard Fruits, a question I too was cautiously interested in hearing the answer to.

Without much hesitation or shame the cheesemonger answered "Things like urine soaked hay."

So I bought the cheese.

It was delicious.

My own madeleine

There used to be a different blog post here.




And I used to think what I wrote here was protected, that it might be good or bad, but that it could not do or go wrong. But it went wrong here and all it took was my looking away. All it took was forgetting that all of this, all 1,800 or so blog posts, that you may or may not have read, are real.

I'm just saying these matter. And things that matter, misused, are dangerous.

What used to be here? Something that was supposed to be pretty and grand. It was about food and a lovely night with my wife in Paris, but trying so hard to tell it and be big and important and beautiful, trying so hard to make of it a great towering confection of words, I walked into it like a piece of fiction, like I could do anything with it. So I made lavish noises about Proust, and wine and the streets and smells and the waiter and the chef and food and epiphany and love, and I got all taken with how grand it was.

But I forgot to taste it. I never tasted it.

I can taste it now. It tastes like ashes.

It was never real.

Here is the real story:


Once upon a time I went to Paris with my one true love. And there were pretty paintings and wonderful foods, lovely things to see and interesting things to do.

But I could take or leave everything, everywhere, there and in all the infinities of all the universes,

except for her.     

200 Reviews of Paris: The Louvre

Let's get the star thing right out of the way:


🌟🌟🌟✫✫


Three out of five stars.



Oh yes, I knew that one would rock you back on your heels. A mere three out of five stars from a passionate aesthete for one of the most acclaimed museums in the world.

Impossible! You say.

Well, I'll admit the second removed star is a bit of pique. But the first removed star is wholly deserved.

What a crappy sort of museum. Oh sure, the collection is arguably better than any other museum's on the face of the earth. The pyramid entrance is a stroke of near genius. The history is rich. A dog could run this museum and it would pull down four stars. 

Someone should go out and get a dog.

"Boy, he really hated the Louvre." You must be thinking.

Au contraire mes amis. Oh lord those Rembrandts. The Mona Lisa. The Caravaggio, Death of a Virgin, poorly presented away from its natural home (fuck the 17th Century Carmelites!), but still such a wonder. I had to duck out before we even saw a tenth of what I wanted to see. What miracles!

But alas, poor maps, unexplained sub entrances, broken, inaccurate detours around areas under repair, hideous and questionable security lines, mediocre gift shop, an unpleasant crowd vibe, and, oh boy, this is the painful part, no, I can't say it. It's too horrible. It's beyond human comprehension, fine, I'll say it:

Poor museum cafes!!!!

In Paris! In the Louvre!

I should remove another star.

Ten surprises from my trip to Paris

I am back from Paris. And though I work a little too hard in life to never be surprised it is a futile endeavor. This is especially true in journeys to foreign lands. So Paris repeatedly opened my eyes, and I have brought back ten impressions of Paris that all caught me a bit off guard.



1. Paris is in black and white. Except for the parks.

2. Parisians are nice. This includes waiters.

3. The Mona Lisa is a brilliant and lovely painting.

4. French food is not a cuisine, it's food, really, really, really good food.

5. The French language is fun and easy as long as you don't look at it.

6. There are more bookstores in Paris than, well, anywhere I have ever been in my life.

7. Unfortunately these books all appear to be in French.

8. Paris Disneyland actually is Paris Disneyland as opposed to A Disneyland in Paris.

9. Long security and customs lines are possibly a reasonable response to acts of terrorism and yet by day five I would far rather we died in an act of terrorism than had to stand in another line for an hour.

10. The Mall of America and The Champs-Elysees have a lot in common. A lot. Perhaps regrettably The Mall of America is better.

Careful living

It is no good living life too cautiously. And yet there are times to lay low. One of those times is on the eve of a big journey. Big journeys, to slightly exotic, sort of foreign destinations like, for instance Paris, are enough of tempting fate as it is. There's the flying, the pickpockets, the terrorists, the uneven sidewalks, and, most importantly, the there's things you haven't thought to worry about. Those are the killers. So maybe in the couple of days before departure it pays to appease the gods, keep ones head down, and lay low.

So here at work I have decided to be a model employee. I have decided to tempt no fates. I will simply do my job in the manner of my most isolated and friendless co-workers, head down and with a blunt and tireless vagueness. This is hardest to do during free time, oops, I mean during shelving. No book reading for me! I do not write a blog post up in the stacks. I simply shelve. But, I'll admit, I'm still me, so while I shelved I memorized this blog post, because it's not like I didn't still have blog posts to write. It was a lot of work memorizing this blog post. And even still I mostly got it wrong. For instance I'm pretty sure this post had a super snappy, really good ending. All I remember of it now is "Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah." which is funny, but would be way funnier if remembered the key missing bit.

And that's the moral of today's post. We pay a price for living too cautiously, but sometimes that price is worth it. I will fly off to Paris and I won't be worrying about some petty contretemps I ran into with my manager, or some caustic thing I said about a co-worker who might have overheard it and not understood how affectionately it was meant. I will rest in the aura I have cultivated of harmless, inoffensive perfection.

Oops, well, I better get going. I'm fifteen minutes late to replace the people at the front desk.

Learning French

Bon jour!

Very soon my wife and I are heading off to Paris. I am trying to learn some French. I do not speak French. I speak just one language. I've tried to get really good at it though. Mostly I am, but sometimes I panic and sort of, like, you know...

As for the foreign languages, what like the foreigners speak, I spent five years in Middle and High School learning just enough Spanish so that it can stick a foot in and muck up any attempts to learn any other language for the rest of my life. In five years of classes I learned the same amount of Spanish in school that I now know of French after three hours of listening to a recording in a car.

How much French have I learned? I have graduated from "I will not understand or be able to say anything in Paris" to "I will not understand or be able to say anything in Paris, but it really seems like I should be able to", which I feel is an impressive leap.

Listening to our French for travelers CD I am most surprised by how simple and easy the language appears to be. It's fun to try and speak, like one is making fun of something, but not, which is a very familiar relationship to things for me. It looks like every fourth word or so of French is a great deal like its English counterpart. That's quite a head start and yet strangely useless. "Dinner" in English is like "Dinner" in French, except to say it in French you have to do it while making fun of how French people talk. Just say "Dinner" like you're an exaggerated slightly absurd French person and it comes out just right! "Soup" is like this as well, and a few thousand other words. But then there is an alternate to "Soup" apparently, "Potage", which is familiar from restaurant menus and the eight million food books I have read. And actually there is another quarter of the language right there. All those words I've read, that I've seen in so many contexts, and it's all so familiar!

So I already know half of all French!

Oddly this does nothing for making French intelligible to me. Maybe you have to know 75%? Nevertheless I am thinking it may be enough to be able to make myself understood when I offer simple greetings. At least after a couple of days. I mean, if I don't accidentally say them in Spanish.

Tipping

In preparation for our trip to Paris my wife and I read up on tipping. Luckily this is simple because by law a service charge is already covered, built into the bill in both Paris and all of France. Whew! So it's straightforward, we do not tip at all. Great.

Ha. Not so fast bucko. They always start out telling you how simple it is and then the gobbledygook begins. This is some of what I have learned:


You only have to tip for great service, and there is no great service in Paris, but the waiters are really good at their jobs and work really hard so you should notice just how great their service is. Nevertheless you don't need to feel guilty for not tipping because waiters in Paris are very well compensated, like people here who work in shops or Bakeries. So don't tip anything, nothing at all, just leave the change, or a few euros.

It's okay to tip a little if you want though. For instance, it is customary to round up so that, say, on a bill of 17.80, you leave an extra euro. At a nicer expensive restaurant leave five percent, but if it's really fancy leave ten percent because you're just burning through money anyway at this point, so why not share? Give the waiter your $4,000 watch while you're at it you bloated glutton!

If you're not sure what to tip in a given situation watch what the Parisians do. Look for a table of beret wearing French speakers, and wait patiently for them to finish their three hour meal. Then ask if you can poke around in their little payment dish.


It's all very confusing and strange. But I think I have it all down, and I'm not inclined to complain. In brief: 

Tipping in France is just like it is here in America, but using less money.

200 Reviews of Rome: Beppe E i Suoi Formaggi

Beppe E i Suoi Formaggi



🌟🌟✷✷✷

Two Stars




So, as this review about Rome gets posted on the Internet I am off in Paris. And since that means a year has gone by since my month in Rome, and I am already off on another trip, I thought I should try and make some more headway on my minor epic: The 200 Reviews of Rome, which isn't exactly an epic, I just call it that so everyone on the Internet will be impressed, which I'm pretty sure is working so far. I also thought I'd review some place that would assuage some of my family's pre Paris trip feelings of sadness that we are not returning to Rome. And what better place to review to bolster our spirits than ol' Beppe Suoi Formaggi!

This place is a cheese shop with a cafe restaurant and it is really nice. It's pretty inside and comfortable. The cheeses all look very cozy behind their glass cases. We managed some apparently oddball time to go in the afternoon and were the only customers, but they were still nice to us. It's a pleasant place. When I went to the back to use their bathroom there was someone at a table doing all the restaurant's bills or something. Professional, homey, nicely located, charming, five stars!

Oh, wait, we should have some food before we go handing out stars.

We got ourselves a nice big cheese plate, with a bit of charcuterie on it, some water, and some wine.

What in all of that could possibly bring this pleasant five star eatery plummeting down to a mere two stars? Was the cheese riddled with maggots? The wine soured? Did the meats make us ill for four days?

No. Wow, no, nothing like that. Boy, I feel like I'm being all churlish now what with dropping it down three whole stars. It, uh, it just wasn't very good.

Wasn't very good? Wasn't very good! You dare to come onto the sacred and holy font of all judgement known as the Internet and toss off a mere "Wasn't very good"?

Yeah. I guess. Is that a problem?

Er, no. Go ahead.

Well, so I don't think they quite get cheese there in Rome, I mean, outside of the mozzarellas and maybe ricotta, the fresh cheeses, the cooking cheeses.  I saw the same cheeses on our plate at Beppe that I saw everywhere else in town; a weird greyish blue cheese that always felt like it had been improperly stored, then a bunch of mild sheep cheeses that were hard to tell apart. The charcuterie included a usual salami or two and something so truly horrifying I decided to eat a bite in order to see what it would be like to be the sort of person who does that. It was like pieces of innards and brains in aspic. I had a bite. I didn't like it, but I may have been too subsumed in horror to even taste it.

Anyway, maybe one needs proper cold weather to make proper cheese. Northern Italy maybe? Mountains? Winter?

So, should you go to Beppe E i Suoi Formaggi?

Yeah, sure, it looks great, and the Internet is totally unreliable.

What we have learned

As I prepare to travel to Paris I find myself needing to come up with a dozen or so ahead of time blog posts. After I write them I set them up to dispense one a day while I'm gone. And then the only difference between when I'm home, working and diligently writing posts daily, and this scheme is... well, there isn't any difference. Sometimes my blog just works like that naturally anyway. To you this blog may be the steadiest of metronomes, but to me fecundity comes and goes and I just have to make sure it averages out okay.

But it is a little different when I have to write a dozen, or two dozen, or even three dozen blog posts to prepare for a trip. So in the past I have come up with devices to help me with this. Because none of these have gone well I would like to reminisce about them in the hopes that I can learn something.


1. Ghostwriter!

The only time this blog ever broke from my relentless authorship was in its first summer. I got my friend Grape to write it. He agreed to write three posts for my vacation. I was thinking, when I asked him, he would say "Oh my god, you want me to write? I am profoundly honored! Name any number." And I would have named, oh, fifteen, and then he would have written them and they would have been so good I would be super jealous and it would have eaten away at our friendship. So I guess he knew what he was doing.


2. Befores and afters.

On this trip I was going to a lake house we sometimes go to. I set up a lot of ahead of time questions about the trip for me to answer after. And I made elaborate reading lists and set them up to report back on them. I learned here that the questions I so eagerly have about an upcoming trip are not the ones I want to answer when I come back, and that if I take ten extremely interesting books with me I will discard nine of them out of contempt or boredom after less than two pages and yet will come across seven books randomly on the trip that I will read cover to cover.

3. The fake trip.

Last year we went away for five weeks, and I came up with an elaborate device. I wrote a day to day fictional anticipation of what my wife and I would be doing on that actual day of our trip. Sadly my account was too naturalistic and the whole thing confused many of my readers who thought this was an actual journal of the trip in real time. So when I got back no one wanted to hear about my trip because they had already read about it. When I explained that they had merely read a fictional version of my trip they were surprised, but, alas, they nevertheless felt satisfied with what they'd already read.




And so, what have we learned?


We have learned that I should probably write shorter posts because I still have, like eight to go!

We have also learned that learning is overrated.

My travel list

I am traveling to, or am in, Paris, France. When I go away on a foreign vacation there are usually a few standard preparations I make. Here is the list I use:



1. Talk to everyone constantly, for months and months, about the trip I'm going on so everyone is used to the idea and no one gets too excited. 


2. Learn 75 words of the local language and practice using them on my fellow Americans who will either not understand me or happen to know the language and so answer in a way I am totally unable to understand myself. Oddly enough this is also exactly the same response I get from people in the distant cities I venture to.


3. In the last handful of days before departure, get sick, or have a serious back episode. "Why do you do this?" You ask. 

Because it is on the list. See item number 3.


4. Get very anxious about traveling and occasionally wish we were going to stay at a pretty, nearby lake house instead.


5. In preparation for my absence quickly dash off a dozen blog posts ahead of time. As time runs out resort to short, self-referential lists.

Writing about Paris

While in Paris, in addition to going to Disneyland, we will also be going to The Eiffel Tower. That's the one that leans, right? Or, no, wait, it's the metal one. I've seen The Golden Gate Bridge. I'm expecting it to be a lot like The Golden Gate Bridge. It isn't? Well, I'm always super willing to be surprised.

And that's part of the pleasure I find in going to these gloried cities. It's like I've been there. I'm saturated with stories and pictures and accounts and the language of these places. It's almost like I've been there. But I haven't. And though within five minutes a city like Paris might feel utterly familiar, there's always some detail, some weird and personal detail to find there, one incommunicable to others, that reveals everything.

And then one comes home and tries to explain it to others and... can't.

So soon I will come home from Paris and I will tell you everything. And there will be absolutely nothing to say. And I will tell you anyway.

And that's writing in a nutshell.

Disneyland in Paris

Soon enough my wife and I will be in Paris for a brief week. And nothing I say about that trip quite makes people roll their eyes like when I tell them we'll be dashing off to Disneyland for a day. "But, you discuss Proust. How can you be going to Disney Paris?"

I don't discuss Proust hardly ever! One time I say something about Proust and people think I can't have a cheeseburger or go to Paris Disneyland! So unfair!

I hear Paris Disney is very prettily made because they were afraid the Europeans would be used to such a high standard as to the look of the park that they'd settle for nothing less. It is called the most lovely of Disney parks. But I have also read that people wander around Disneyland Paris smoking and littering all the time, and that Disney doesn't staff the park enough to keep up so it's a bit messy. The bathrooms are all supposed to be an inch deep in water as well. They say lots of bulbs are out in the Small World attraction. I wonder if you can put in a Euro to turn the lights on for a bit, like in the Roman Churches.

Frankly it all sounds interesting. You know, European. Like, here's the prettiest, most charming little street you've ever seen in your life, but these shutters are covered in ugly graffiti no one has managed to clean off in ten years. "You don't like our ugly graffiti covered garage? Ah well, look just a tiny bit left there. Gorgeous, no?"

Yes, it's gorgeous.

It's awful when a bunch of tourists go to these lovely European cities and think it's just an amusement park. These are real places with real people living their real lives!

I will try to keep that in mind when we go to Disneyland Paris.

The travel teaser

I would have thought I'd written more about the trip my wife and I recently took to Rome. We were there for a month, but the project of taking that trip consumed me for a year. And what is there in writing about it so far? A mere 64 blog posts about Rome. The subject could stand a good deal more. I remember... things.

But for all these essays I've written, fake travelogues, and moderately well researched guides, one thing it hasn't much occurred to me to write about is what sucked in Rome. When people asked me, after my return, how was Rome, the simplest, truest answer was to say it was perfect.

Perfect.

And the power of the real world, of language, and of the human heart, is that perfect has room in it for total disasters. Perfect can be full of failures. When I think of this in regard to glorious, wonderful, beautiful, magical, perfect Rome, I think of cheese.

Rome did not understand cheese. I would not have expected that. 


Oh, their fresh cheeses were fine, great even. Buffalo milk mozzarella is half the battle in their remarkable pizza. And some of the wonderful Parmesan was around from up north, but when it came to their eating cheeses they specialized in very bland sheep milk cheeses that all tasted much the same, and some kind of Blue that was more gray than blue and always looked like it had died right there on the plate. Flies liked it.

We tried our share of cheese boards. We tried them in fine restaurants, in a well regarded cheese market cafe called Beppe E i Suoi Formaggi, and at a variety of Prosciutterias. That they did not understand cheese, or apparently think it worthwhile to borrow from the north what was clearly beyond them, was a genuine surprise. And a disappointment.

I appreciate this. I appreciate the ability of darkness to give texture and dimension to perfection. Even in the best of times one needs a little let down now and then to give music and rhythm to the ideal. Perfection cannot be flat. 

Plus there is the next trip to begin planning. Disappointment from the last can provide guidance. If formaggio didn't work, surely there is fromage.