altariel | Paris

So we did have a really lovely long weekend in Paris, although it's important to realize that our take on holidaying is all about eating as much good food as possible and then working off the calories by sitting down and watching people hurry past on their way to do improving things. It's worked well in the past, so we saw no particular need to alter our practice this time.

We went to see Suzanne Vega at Cambridge Corn Exchange the evening before setting off (Thursday): it was an incredibly hot evening. The support act (can't remember her name, it sounded like but obviously wasn't 'Nooka') was a Tori Amos-style pianist/guitarist who I would have thought was fabulous when I was sixteen (that isn't meant in a bitchy way, I'm just grumpier now). Suzanne herself was marvellously grumpy (in the right kind of way), particularly about a review in The Guardian which had said one of her new songs was about gardening. It wasn't about gardening exactly (it was about a plant that was growing happily now, as a metaphor for where she is since her divorce), but there was enough detail to suggest intimate knowledge of gardening. It was just herself and a bass player; not sure if this entirely suited all her songs; 'Blood Makes Noise' lost a lot of the texture. But the more guitar-based ones worked really well, particularly 'In Liverpool' and 'Gypsy'; it's astonishing to think she was only 18 when she wrote that one (the lyrics are quite naive, but that's a lot of the charm). Definite highlight for me was 'Small Blue Thing', which sounded great, just her and the guitar. SV's daughter Ruby (aged 10 or 11) came on and played the finger cymbals on 'Solitaire', which was brilliant, not just because it's a great song, but because several of SV's songs are about her, and it was just really nice to see her. The audience seemed to be made up of women who had dragged their partners along (into which category we fell) and men there by themselves.

Unfortunately we had to sneak off at 10pm to get the train down to London, and missed the last couple of songs. We stayed the night (well, just under five hours) at a hotel just off Trafalgar Square and checked out hideously early to the usual cry of, "Whose idea was this exactly?" Decided to walk over to Waterloo; this is when we discovered my special power, which is the ability always to find Charing Cross Station. Unfortunately, Waterloo appears to be outside of my expertise... Some aimless wandering around the South Bank followed until we found the secret way... Got to Gare du Nord incredibly early on Friday morning, even adding on the hour. Hotel check-in turned out to be 3pm (we were at the Hotel Ambassador on Boulevard Hausmann), so we dumped the bags and went in search of caffeine and protein, and then stationed ourselves in the Tuileries (Paris's own version of Central Park, as you may recall) for some dedicated people-watching. In fact, the highlight was a scary gull of fear that was terrorizing fishies and small children alike; I'm not very tall and it had me running scared. We were both really flaked out by the end of the day; I dimly but happily remember some good Lebanese food.

On Saturday, we made an effort and went to the Louvre; I'd never been there before: on my first trip to Paris it was being built or rebuilt (that's more likely, isn't it); second time round we got grumpy at the ticket prices, but this time I had an urge to commune with my sacred feminine, and in we went. I enjoyed the building itself a lot more than the contents, to be honest, although I did find an El Greco (Christ on the Cross Adored by Donors) and there was some excellent anthropology to be done around the Mona Lisa. Not just the expected crowd lining up to take photos of the backs of other people's heads in front of a blurry picture, but people who were lining up their cameras and taking a series of shots and then leaving without ever looking directly at the picture at all... Ah, the modern world, how strange are your ways. I think I may have had a grump about globalization at some point. More people-watching later in the Tuileries including an amazing piece of yer actual modern world in action as we watched some bloke turn up and feed the birds for fifteen minutes. I know it doesn't sound exciting; trust me, it was fascinating to watch... We finished the day with a slap-up dinner at the hotel's extremely good restaurant (mmm... scampi ravioli... mmm... caramelized figs with grapefruit ice-cream) where we were hugely if unintentionally entertained by the couple at the next table (she had ordered his food and he was looking my way periodically with sheer nekkid fig-envy). Between that and the presse I'd had earlier, the word of the day was definitely 'pamplemousse'.

My notes for the next couple of days are a bit scratchy... Sunday was blisteringly hot and so of course this was the day when we did a huge amount of wandering around Saint-Germain des Prés and Ile Saint-Louis. Obviously, given the heat, this was interspersed with the usual cries of "Whose idea was this exactly?" (Particularly when there was a bit of a cock-up on the navigation front, and we found ourselves right by the hotel we'd stayed in last time we'd been in Paris.) Exhausting day, but very lovely. On Monday we made an abortive attempt to visit the Musee d'Orsay which is, so it turns out, closed on Mondays; that was OK since after Sunday's marathon we felt perfectly justified in camping out in the Tuileries, watch people go by and make up life-stories for them - happily did this several hours. In the evening we discovered the delights of the TV drama 'Dolmen', which seemed to about weird shit happening around some standing stones; at least I think that's what it was about, since my French is limited pretty much to 'pamplemousse' and so we just made up some stories to go with the pictures, which was quite entertaining in and of itself. I may try it with TV I can actually follow. On our last day (Tuesday) we were leaving late evening, but had to check out mid-morning, so we decided to take one of those hop-on, hop-off tour buses which meant I got to go very slowly once around Paris (it took just over two hours) and then shout, "Again! Again!" I really enjoyed this as it took us a bit further than the usual haunts; plus, entertaining commentary on dodgy headphones, and a fifteen minute stop to watch some scaffolding being put up. I've wanted to do one of these bus tours for ages; I think I'll do one here now.

I've put some of the pictures Mr A. took from the bus up here. Please be particularly impressed with the one of the Eiffel Tower, which was taken from the top of the tour bus, with the camera held up and pointed back over the shoulder.

So, that was Paris.