Paris: Day Three (part II)

Arriving back at our Metro station two or three blocks from our new hotel in the Latin Quarter at four o’clock in the afternoon, we were hot, tired, sweaty, hungry, hot, and tired. And hungry. Fortunately, there were a good half-dozen open-air bistros to choose from for a late afternoon lunch.

We selected the St. Andres Café on the Rue Danton, one leg of that triangle of dining hot spots I mentioned yesterday. Rue Danton was much smaller, narrower, and quieter than the busy thoroughfare Boulevard Saint Michel, the other leg. The appeal of the St. Andres Café at this point in time to hot, tired, sweaty, hungry travelers was that it was somewhat empty, or between eating shifts as I began to think of Parisians. The dude running the café reminded me of a middle-aged Mad Max, albeit scrawnier and French. But he was friendly enough, and said we could sit wherever we liked.

Right on the Rue Danton, it turned out. A table for two, raised about a foot off the street, in the shade, where we could watch pedestrians of all stripes walk up and down. There was an automated bike rental station, too, whose operation I gradually discerned over the ninety minutes as I watched perhaps a dozen people borrow and return bicycles, paying with debit card thingies.

I had a mozzarella-and-tomato sandwich (a “Croque Italien”) with a Heineken while the wife had a salad and a glass of wine. The sandwich was fantastically fatty – literally what I needed after my pilgrimage to the Sacre Coeur. It was cooked open, which means I had to eat it with a knife and fork. We had a very relaxing, very recharging time at this café, and talked about many, many things: France, our families, the aspirations of our young cousins, the hopes, dreams, and desires we had for our two little girls. It was a tres enjoyable time.

We leisurely made our way back to the Hotel du Lys two blocks away. The room was uncomfortably hot. There was no air conditioning nor was their any air circulation, even with both windows completely open. My wife crashed on the bed and was out in five minutes. I stripped down to my undies, Homer Simpson-like, and read some of Hunchback and some of Devotion to the Sacred Heart at a chair at a shelf-like-desk at the window. The chair at the shelf-like-desk at the window was just as uncomfortable as the room. But I read for a good hour or so, maybe a little more, before I woke my wife. It was getting on six-thirty, and we needed to shower, get dressed, and make some dinner plans.

Our feet had finally rebelled – at least mine had. My only demand, other than we stay within our budget, was that the restaurant needed to be within walking distance. In this case, a few blocks. We didn’t want to do the Perfect Storm of outdoor bistros just outside our hotel door. So the wife did a quick scan of her Paris Guidebooks as well as a print-out of recommendations her French colleagues had sent her. We picked a well-known and respected place, and got ourselves cleaned up.

By seven-thirty we hit the gloriously cool evening streets. Our destination was a relatively famous eatery called the Balzar Brasserie about six or seven blocks away. We negotiated the burgeoning nightlife in the Triangle, passed the bookstores and the fountains, made a right onto Saint Michel and walked four blocks down to the Rue Ecole. Saint Michel is a busy commercial street, kinda like Fifth Avenue in New York if you stuck it down into Greenwich Village.

The Balzar Brasserie is a bustling indoor café which seated about a hundred – and every seat looked filled. Uh oh. This was the first time I thought we might be turned away from a Parisian restaurant because we lacked reservations. But when my wife gets a mission in her mind, she succeeds. After speaking with the maitre ’d (in what language I couldn’t hear), we were seated all the way to the right rear, three or four tables from the kitchen, sandwiched between other eaters at each of my elbows.

To get through this ordeal, I needed some back-up. I ordered a 50 cl glass of Kronenbourg. I don’t know exactly the English equivalent in size, but the volume was about that of a Foster’s oil can. I was halfway through it when our dinner came, and in a much better state of mind. Being smart, I ordered exactly what my wife ordered (actually, she did a pre-emptive strike and ordered for me in French). We both had mouth-watering, delicious scallops in some sort of risotto sauce. A great meal, one of the best in France, if I had to say so.

However, the entertainment was even better. Next to us, to my left, sat two older gentlemen in their fifties. Now, it was a little bit warm in the Brasserie, but the man diagonally across from me was soaked in sweat. Literally dripped from his hair onto his shirt. He had rosacea or some otherwise reddishness along his upper cheeks. During our hour-long dinner we found ourselves listening to their conversation, and from that we extrapolated their personalities and probable careers, and amused ourselves comparing notes on the walk home.

For instance, sweaty rosacea man was an American. Most of their conversation is in English, but he is trying to learn French. According to my wife his vocabulary is superb but his pronunciation is awful. His companion is a suave older Frenchman, who in the beginning seemed to benignly tolerate the American, but as dinner progressed, seemed genuinely friendly with the man. Their talk turned to philosophy and my ears perked up; the American mentioned Camus and my hopes deflated a bit. “I’m trying to learn French by reading Camus,” he said. “If there’s a word or phrase I don’t understand, I put it into my translator and the right word comes out, only it’s just a little off.” He actually plucks a white-covered copy of a Camus paperback (it wasn’t The Stranger or The Plague, thank God), thumbs through it, and places it on the table.

Who are these dining men?

We decided that rosacea guy is a genius. A Steve Wozniak-type genius; he works in computers. His company has sent him over to France on a year-long contract to overhaul their operating systems or their server technology or whatever. He has no family, he’s not socially adept, he’s a nerdy outsider brilliant shy competent expert in his field. The company he’s contracted to, a French company, has either hired his companion or his companion is the computer guy in the French company who has to work with this American. Now, the French guy is out of his league compared to what our Woz can do, but our Woz needs the French guy to navigate his new life. Ergo, their regular after-evening get-togethers in the bistros of Paris.

Fun, isn’t it?

By the time dinner was over, around 10 p.m., it was finally getting dark. In fact, by the time we paid the bill and got back on the Boulevard Saint Michel, it was dark. But Saint Michel is a vibrant street, and store fronts and apartments and cars and streetlights all kept our path home well-lit and well-populated. No possibility of a trashcanman mugging here. So we meandered northward at a slow pace, enjoying the atmosphere and each other’s company.

There was sidewalk book fair under a canopy a block or so into our journey. Books were kept in boxes, spines up. A sign marked SCIENCE FICTION caught my attention, and I thumbed through the box. Now, all these books were in French, but if I could get a copy of Bradbury or Clark or Heinlein or whomever in French, I’d buy it in a heartbeat. (Side note: the next day I would find a French copy of David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, but I could not justify buying it, though it is definitely on my list of books to re-read.) However, SCIENCE FICTION must not mean the same thing in Paris as it does, say, in New Jersey. There were no science fiction, but there were books on science and books of fiction in that box.

Suddenly – Crash! Gasps and shrieks. I turned around, spotted my wife (okay), and then my gaze went to the street ten feet away. It seems a bicyclist moving very fast in the dark had slammed into a pedestrian making his way into the street. Though we were not at any intersection, there were white “pedestrian crossings” at the spot. The bicyclist was helping the dazed man up, apologizing profusely and asking if the man was okay. The small crowd that gathered quickly dispersed as the pedestrian shook it off and assured every one he was okay. We, too, resumed our walk back to the hotel.

Before we knew it it was eleven o’clock as we climbed the endless floors of the spiral staircase to our room. The room was still hot, though not as bad as it was in the late afternoon. We took showers, and they were wonderful, luxuriating showers, even if the shower tiles were cracked and peeling and a little bit moldy. Rejuvenated, we dressed in comfortably but light sleep clothes because we knew it’d be warm. We laid in bed and called the girls back home, knowing it would be just before suppertime for them. Little One had field day at her school, and did well, though she insisted she “broke a muscle.”

Considering our change of venues, our trip up to the Basilique du Sacre Coeur, our two different dining experiences, as well as the fact today was the hottest, most humid day of the trip so far, we were plain exhausted. I thought leaving both windows wide open to the Parisian night would be an acceptable idea, and we both wished the room had at least a ceiling fan. Lights went out around 11:30, and we were asleep in minutes.

Only to be awoken by midnight. The walls were paper-thin, the ceilings and floor not much thicker. The square “courtyard” our two windows faced only served to add reverb and volume to any conversation had in any room. All through the night, every ten or twenty or thirty minutes, some drunken French couple (or tourist couple, I’ll concede) would noisily return, making sleep for us impossible. Some guy below us took an opportunity to make extended noise like the unwrapping of birthday presents. A woman slid hangers across a metal pole for five minutes. The couple above us seemed to drop everything possible on the floor, furniture included. Showers ran, toilets flushed, all making running water noises up and down the pipes just outside our windows.

Finally, after an hour or two (I lost count), I gave up. I grabbed a pillow and went into the bathroom with my books. I lay on the hard, cold, tile floor and tried to read. Couldn’t, so I broke out a pad and pen and tried to brainstorm ideas for various projects I’m working on. Had better luck. But just so exhausted, and so craving sleep. Finally, around three in the morning, I crept back in bed, next to the wife who was also tossing and turning, and it was like someone just flicked the switch on my back to OFF and I knew nothing more of those way-early morning hours.