Lisbon by Plane

We flew to Lisbon.  No Major Strasser tried to stop us, so it was an easy trip on EasyJet.  The baggage rules on EasyJet are quite draconian, but that meant no problem for us since we were only going for a few days to visit Marita Castleman, my father's cousin who will soon celebrate her ninetieth birthday.  Tough baggage rules meant that boarding the Airbus was very smooth.  None of these people trying to pass off steamer trunks as carry-on luggage!

We have been to Lisbon several times before.  Each time we have stayed at the Hotel Travel Park on Avenida Almirante Reis.  This is a nice hotel located very close to Marita's flat.  As we always have, we had a nice visit with Marita and a couple of her friends as well.

Lisbon is a great town.  We didn't go around town taking many photos, and I will add some more from older files when we get to California at the end of the year.  I did get a few and here they are:

Castelo São Jorge dominated old Lisbon from the east.

Praça dos Restauradores

Praça do Comercio was a key trading point in the Portuguese maritime empire.

The cathedral was built on the site of the mosque following the Reconquest of Lisbon in 1147.  The facade is Romanesque, but as is always the case with old European cathedrals, a variety of architectural styles is found throughout the structure.  It was completed in the early 1200s, and has withstood several earthquakes.

Anglophone Musings about Paris

We just saw "Midnight in Paris" again.  This makes the second time that we have seen it since we arrived in Paris six weeks ago.  Classic Woody Allen.  A charming and enjoyable film, and not so deep that it plumbs uncharted depths of philosophical complexity.  I can only take so much "Rashomon" anyway.  But this film did make me think some more about ideas that have been wandering around my head for a while.

The protagonist is a successful screenwriter who makes good money pumping out trash scripts.  He goes to Paris with his shallow fiancee and intended in-laws.  Here, in the City of Light, he connects with his muse, the author within escapes, and his artistic creativity begins to take wing.  At the stroke of each midnight, he is picked up not by a pumpkin coach, but by a gorgeous car from the 1920s.  He is transported to Jazz Age Paris, where he meets Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and all the other artistic, expatriate luminaries in Paris at that time.  He decides to chuck it all and stay in Paris.  In present-day Paris, not the 1920s city to which he traveled through a time warp.  If you haven't yet seen "Midnight in Paris," I haven't really spoiled anything for you.  Even I saw this one coming a mile away, and I am among the more clueless of film watchers.

Here's the thing:  The screenwriter speaks not a word of French.  Not one word.

I wonder what this writer's life would be like here.

I don't speak French either, but I do know a few words.  Most of them somehow relate to ordering things in restaurants.  Vin rouge, mousse au chocolat, pommes frites, croissants.  The true essentials!  And combining an expectation of what things are likely to say with cognates from Spanish and from English, I can decipher a fair number of written things.  I can shop in the Carrefour supermarket.  But beyond that, well, not so much.  It is a bit frustrating, in a way that I never felt during any of our short visits here over the years.

It is hard to engage beyond a certain point.  It is like trying to move a bigger wheel with small gear teeth, where I can't get the mesh that I would like.  Grinding my gears and spinning my wheels.  The tourist world here accommodates the non-French speaker.  In Spain and South America, I don't have this problem.  I get along reasonably well in Portuguese.  I can eavesdrop in Spanish as well as carry on conversations.  I have big Spanish gear teeth!

Many things here therefore remain beyond reach.  Around the corner from us here in Montmartre there is a small stage theater.  It just closed a run of Jean Cocteau's play, La Voix Humaine.  In that play, one person talks on the telephone.  That's the whole thing!  There is no way that we can understand that, so we didn't see it.

Don't get me wrong.  Penny and I are both enjoying our time in Paris.  But I don't think that I would want to live here long term unless I had a job that brought me here, or unless I first acquired some conversational proficiency upon which to build some good gear teeth to mesh with what goes on here.

Rome to Stalingrad

Along Ligne 2 on the Paris Metro, you will find a station named Rome and another one called Stalingrad.  From Rome, Italy, to Volgograd, Russia is a long way.  I think Rome is nice enough, but I haven't been to Stalingrad/Volgograd.  Nor are we likely to go there.  We did Russia once.  One of those places where once is probably enough.  Never say "never" though.

The Paris Metro is the best public transit system that I have ever used.  It goes everywhere.  Like the San Francisco Muni, it lies across the city map like a grid, so you don't have to go into a center and back out on another spoke like in London if you are starting outside the Circle Line.

A single ride ticket is 1E70 if you buy it on a bus, or 1E60 if you buy it in a metro station.  For 12E50, you can buy a "carnet" of ten tickets, so this is a pretty good deal.  Passes are also available, but we thought we would not get enough use out of them to get those.

You need to keep your ticket with you throughout your journey!  They don't collect the tickets when you get off, and there is no machine like in the BART exit.  But if you don't have your ticket with you and you are caught by the fare police, it will cost you big time.  They even have credit card machines to collect your fines on the spot.  So beware!  We see cheaters all the time.  Sometimes they get caught.

This is a great system for getting around.  The subway trains probably work better than a bus for most out-of-towners,  because you don't have to know what your stop looks like.  One of the many things right with Paris is its Metro.

Baseball Withdrawal

One thing that I have sorely missed on this walkabout is baseball.  I mentioned this some months ago, and also that I missed maple syrup.  No baseball in South America, except for scores on the satellite television news.  And no maple syrup, at least that I ever found in a Jumbo, Santa Isabel, or Disco supermarket.  In Ireland there was no baseball either, but the Supervalu supermarket did carry maple syrup.  The Carrefour market a few blocks away here in Paris also does carry maple syrup.  Okay, halfway there!

But what to do about baseball?  I asked Google!  It located The Moose, a Canadian expat sports bar near Metro Odeon.  Their web site lists the sports events that they plan to have on their television screens each day.  Mostly soccer.  But there was a Yankees-Rays game on Saturday at 6 pm.  So the three of us all headed over there.  Women's World Cup soccer attracted most of the attention, but we prevailed upon the bartender to turn on the baseball.  We saw Derek Jeter hit his 3000th hit.  I had predicted a home run and there it was!  Darn it!  I don't like the Yankees at all, but Jeter does deserve credit as one of the all time greatest shortstops ever to play the game.

The Moose had a burger menu, and the ones brought out to some other customers looked quite good.  They also had many different versions of poutine.  Penny had been in Prince Edward's Island and said they claimed to have invented it.  The Moose guy thought it came from Quebec.  It sounded just like Peruvians and Chileans each claiming to have invented pisco sour.  As for poutine, I am putting my two bits on the Saskatchewan claim.

Giverny

Giverny is a small village in Normandy.  Actually it is just across the line between Haute Normandie and Ile de France, but it is very close to Paris.  Giverny was the home of Claude Monet, the impressionist painter.  Unlike poor painters like Van Gogh, Monet seems to have been well-heeled in order to afford such a nice house and garden.

The closest train station is in the nearby town of Vernon, and there is a shuttle bus service from there to Giverny. We found that it was cheaper to rent a car from Gare du Nord for one day than it was to buy three round trip train and shuttle bus tickets.  So we made an advance reservation with Avis/Budget through USAA.  They gave us this C series Mercedes Benz.  It was nice enough, and had about 1,000 miles on it.  (1250 km).  A bit heavy, but it handled nicely.  I wouldn't buy one.  Consumer Reports magazine was sharply critical of these smaller Mercedes cars.

We had a nice drive each way, and so Lori got to see a bit of France, as opposed to just Paris.  I miscommunicated with Penny about the route and so turned onto the inner Peripherique instead of continuing north.  That put her through her navigator paces, but she came through splendidly.

Down the street from Monet's garden is an impressionist museum.  An exhibition of the Sterling and Francine Clark collection had just begun there.  This was a nice day trip.  Photography was strictly prohibited inside both Monet's house and in the Clark exhibition.

Paris in the Summer

Ahhh, Paris!  City of Light!

This city is unique on the planet.  I know that is a trite thing to say, but it is true.  We have been here several times over the years since 1993, and have enjoyed every one of our visits.  So now we are going to try living here for a while.  Living in places where we enjoyed visiting before is one of the main things about our walkabout.  So, here we are!

We arrived at Paris Gare du Nord railway station on the Thalys train from Bruxelles-Midi on time.  The flat that we have rented is only a few short Metro stops away from Gare du Nord.  Rather than carry our bags up and down all the stairs to get to the Metro line at Gare du Nord, we decided to walk to Rue des Abbesses.  The taxi line at the station was huge, and it probably took us less time to walk than it would have to get to the front of the taxi line!

Our flat is in Montmartre, the 18th arrondissement, on Rue des Abbesses, and is on the sixth floor.  Seventh floor by North American counting.  And there is no elevator.  So that is a good thing, because there are pastry shops in the vicinity...French pastry shops.  A built-in stairmaster is a good thing.  The flat is comfortable, although small.  But Paris is a major city, and like New York and Tokyo, real estate is at a premium.  So it is small.  There is only a curtain between the small living room and the bedroom.  Internet and television are included.  We haven't used the television at all. (Unlike in Santiago and in Kinsale.)  There is a Carrefour market one block away, and so we shop for food there.  It is equipped with a washer and a dryer. In other words, everything that we need to live here, is here even if a bit cramped.

We found a restaurant here in Montmartre.  A tourist place.  It was terrible.  The cheese on the onion soup was burned, the meat was bland, and they wouldn't serve water in a pitcher.  In other words, they insisted on selling us bottled water.  We didn't go back.

Our first house guest arrived the day after we did!  We went down to meet Lori at Gare du Nord.  She was coming from London on the Eurostar.  She is staying with us for almost three weeks.  So we started going to see the sights, and so we got the pictures in the previous entry.  We went down to our favorite place on the Left Bank, Le Bistrot 30.  I can't speak for the rest of the places in this area of which the author of the Lonely Planet Paris volume so roundly disapproves, but we have been going to Le Bistrot 30 since 1993.  LP calls the area "Bacteria Alley," but I have to say that I haven't been much impressed with that particular author's commentary.

Midnight in Paris.  That was our first order of business.  We found a theater where it was playing in English with French subtitles, but we did not wait until the midnight showing.  That movie is just brilliant.  I will say no more except that if you have not seen it, then you don't know what you are missing.  I think that Midnight in Paris is the best Woody Allen movie that I have ever seen.

A third cousin of Penny's lives in Paris.  Dominique and Barbara are both shrinks here, and so we have to be careful what we say or they might have us committed.  Seriously, it is always nice to see them again.  We have had dinner twice with them and will see them again when they get back from Greece.


Musee d'Orsay, the Louvre, the Paris Opera, riding the Batobus around the Seine, Notre Dame, and Saint-Chapelle.  Croissants, baguettes, pains au chocolate, boeuf bourguignon, vin rouge, mousse au chocolat...I am learning more and more French every day!

Paris Pictures

We have been in Paris for a couple of weeks now.  There are some things to share with fellow travelers, including the armchair variety.  I will write that in a few days.  In the meantime, here are some photos of Paris scenes.  Some are the standard iconic places that you can see for sale on placemats, wall prints, drinks coasters, etc., but there are some others too.

Perhaps you remember reading Madeline when you were young?  "In an old Paris house that was covered with vines, lived twelve little girls in two straight lines."  These scenes are a bit like that: