Paris France Guide: Paris Hotels, Food, Wine and Discounts

Half a dozen errands to do and lunch with friends, then stock up the pantry: a day on foot.  Not enough distance to bother taking the Métro and anyhow the weather is good and I’m a walker.  Coming up from underground and holding the chin up, since it’s no longer cold or rainy, Paris begins to look like Paris again.  I’d almost forgotten one of the city’s most striking characteristics.  There’s advertising everywhere.

There’s something absurd in Paris and it doesn’t quite fit.  Parisians are not absurd, not by nature and not, I’ve always thought, by artful choice.  The theatre of the absurd flourished here and might even claim Paris as its capital. But not so with the new absurdistes I’ve been seeing this spring in Paris.  They are riding scooters.  Not motor scooters, but the Razor, an American child’s toy that also caught on with some adults in the States, but mostly they were high school and college students.  There, the Razor is passé.  It seems to have caught on in Paris this year, and those who scoot are mostly young children.  But there have been too many adult men (I haven’t seen a single woman scooting), and they bother me. 

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We like to say that some things are unimaginable, incomprehensible to the human mind, even unspeakable.  But then we manage to conjure up—and not only in our minds—avocado ice-cream, a book written without using the letter e, or genocide.  Ecclesiastes was surely right: there is nothing, no matter how absurd, vile, or unnecessary, that has not been or, given human imagination, will not be some day.

A long walk today, from the apartment near the Luxembourg Garden to the Jardin des Plantes to look at the animals.  The zoo is not one of Paris’s triumphs, but it was the first day in a week that it wasn’t cold, windy, and rainy, so the zoo seemed as good an excuse as any to take a walk through several quartiers of the city I don’t often see, the streets of  l’Abbé d l’epée, St. Jacques, Clovis, Cuvier, Monge.  If I learned nothing about the animal kingdom, the day and the walk taught me something about time.

As we drove our red Smart Car off the dealer's lot in Lindon, Utah last week the sales person shouted to us, "Be prepared for conversation!" The fact that so far there was only one other Smart Car in SLC, a yellow one, portended that we would undoubtedly receive a lot of attention. In the parking lot at the hospital people noticed (it was hard not to) and when they found me said it was "cute."

Where are all the Americans who create gridlock inside the Louvre?  Where are the busloads of tourists saying, "If this is Tuesday, it must be Belgium." Where are the early birds trying to order dinner at 6:00?  They're staying home, exploring the US, or traveling to other countries where they can get a bigger bang for their buck. Who can blame people when the dollar is going down the tubes and the Federal Reserve has lowered and might cut interest rates yet again?

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Heading to the café with Kitty in a bag.  Kitty is borrowed.  She likes me, perhaps too much: her owner has threatened to sue me for alienation of affections because Kitty perches on me whenever I visit and, I am told, sits by the door and cries when I leave.  I don’t know if this is true, but it is flattering since I grew up with cats who were all indifferent to me in that aggressive way that only cats can be indifferent.

The French are not American.  They do eat at McDonalds, wear blue jeans, play basketball better and better, and to the despair of Parisian café intellectuals watch American movies and television.  French businessmen have realized that English is the language of global trade (and that global trade exists), the nation has given up the sovereign franc for the international euro (which looks suspiciously like the American dollar in its continental use and currency, but is actually worth something these days), Parisians have decided—long after New Yorkers and Angelenos—that smoking in restaurants is naughty, and most of the population has discovered that the personal computer is definitely more useful than la plume de ma tante.