Okay, Angelina was a definite and we made it!  Le chocolat Africain was just as I remembered it, the rest wasn’t so good.  David proposed that we split a complete brunch which seemed like an okay idea, but  we got there near closing time and they were running out of stuff so we didn’t have our first pick of pastries and some of the other options.  We definitely ended up trying some things we wouldn’t have otherwise which is always good for the world traveler.  But to be honest, I would have been fine with the chocolate.  David caught sight of something sort of funny:  a waitress picked up the cash payment from a table put it in what seemed to be her personal wallet and threw the receipt away.  That left us with a feeling of intrigue which proved somewhat entertaining.  The best part was when our waitress told us that they were out of fruit salad, she pointed to a bowl of fruit on display and said we could pick whatever we wanted.  Seemed fine to us, for my part I assumed that we’d name our preference and then she’d go back to the kitchen and ask them to chop some of our choice fruits up.  We’d have a customized presentation of fruit in the elaborate Parisian style brought to our table.  Not so much.  A couple minutes later a man who appeared to be the manager came over and told us pretty much the same story.  We said no problem and requested an apple.  He went over to the bowl in our view, plucked out the apple, scoped out a plate from a nearby wait station and brought over the apple sitting in the middle of the plate.  We were amused but not enthusiastic about actually eating the apple, it was a golden delicious and didn’t look too good (and the manager assured us we would be poisoned if we ate the skin).  To be polite, we tried it after carving it up with a butter knife and our suspicions were confirmed.

Off we went to fulfill our other “musts.”  It was about now that the second bike’s 24 hour rental time had expired.  We’d already gotten David a bike earlier but mine had a little more time since we’d gotten them at different times before.   Here’s where our tale of disappointment makes it’s final climb to deliver us to tourist wipeout.  As many times as we tried (every kiosk we passed), we couldn’t cajole those damn automated kiosks into supplying us with another bike.  We were confined to a pretty small area as such.  True, we could have made a trip to la tour eiffel with some ingenuity, but our patience and determination were wearing thin and we just didn’t have it in us.

There was still the matter of scarves, and maybe a dress or two.  What can I say, everywhere we went in Paris there was the possibility that I might find some special little something that keep me from leaving this fashion mecca empty-handed.  In our zigzagging of the streets from previous days, we’d noticed a mall that seemed to offer fashions at bargain prices.  Thank goodness, for my moral at least, I managed to score a few scarves.  That made me feel more Parisian and I was content.  We passed a couple other stores that I wanted to visit and resolved to return.

In retrospect I can fully admit that most of our troubles stemmed from my constant ambiguous quest for some sort of fashion find.  David, generous soul that he is accompanied me patiently as I scoured the stores.  Take, for example, our trip to la louvre.  Alexa had taken a picture of some pretty napkins back in 2005.  I had thought that I might be able to track them down and give them to her as a wedding present.  I was pretty sure she’d seen them at one of the shops outside the entrance to la louvre.  Truthfully, I should know better than to go searching for something that specific in a place so big.  I’ve made that sort of mistake before.  But I plowed ahead with all the naive hope I could muster, until the impossibility of my quest was completely apparent (sorry Alexa, I tried).  Had I not been on some sort of absurd mission to hunt down linen napkins from 4 1/2 years ago, we might had gotten to the ticket kiosk before the cut off time.  Yes indeed, we got to museum, made it through the throngs of people to find that we couldn’t enter.  It was 5:07p and it closed at 5:30p.  No more tickets for entry were available.  Now, that’s not to say that our disappointment was that great, luckily we didn’t REALLY want to go inside.  20 minutes was all we realistically needed.  It was more the mere idea, that once again our plans were foiled.  David had had it.  He was no fan of Paris and he didn’t mind expressing his opinions.

To add insult to injury, I had to visit the loo.  The sign said public toilets.  We followed the sign and found ourselves in a very fancy lobby.  These toilets were certainly not going to be free.  Not that there’s anything wrong with charging for toilet usage, but at least post it on the sign was David’s valid point.  His complaint fell on deaf ears, after he paid my euro admission I was swept away to the cleanest toilets I’d ever visited.  There were all sorts of amenities installed to make this a state of the art toilet facility.  My favorite part was that after somebody vacated the stall, a worker would go in and clean the whole place up so that it was pristine upon entry.  All germs and odors were wiped away.  Lovely.  I walked out feeling completely fine about paying to use the toilet and was even entertaining the idea of purchasing some of the designer toilet paper being displayed for purchase when David gave me a firm “NO” and directed me to the exit.

With our trip to the tower and the famous museum knocked off the list, all that remained was my hapless quest.  Now I was becoming a bit desperate.  There was the whole image of Paris to maintain.  I couldn’t leave without feeling at least one part of the visit had been a success.  By the time we attempted to return to the stores I wanted to visit, they’d closed.  Our options were looking pretty slim, I had exhausted my shopping opportunities.  It was not a complete failure, I did end up with another pair of my favorite Parisian brand of shoes and some very Parisian scarves, but I’d hoped for more.  Ah well, just reason to return another time right?  I think I’ll be going alone though.  A couple good crepes aren’t sufficient to lure David back again.

As seems to be the case with days such as this one, oozing with fatigue and disappointment, we were blessed in the final hour with the company of some friendly strangers and an amusing waiter.  We found a little restaurant that looked tasty and not overpriced.  We were seated right away and put in an order.  I had a really tasty lasagne, David wasn’t so lucky.  It seemed that we’d stumbled upon another bad French chef, can it really be true?!  His meat was carelessly over-cooked.  He suffered through it though.  As we were finishing our meal we struck up a conversation with the people at the neighboring table.  The man right next to David was actually from Dublin, a fun coincidence since we were headed back there in the morning so that we could fly back to San Francisco on Monday.  We had a fun talk with him and his very polite French friends.  It felt like coming home to a comfy little country cottage after tromping through a big abrasive city all day.  Our new friend gave us a very helpful tip about catching our ride back to Dublin.  We were flying out of a distant airport (52.6 miles outside of Paris to be exact) called Beauvais.  David, of course, hadn’t realized this as the airline had deceptively billed the departure city as Paris (sort of like saying the departure city is Oakland, CA and carting people out to some random little military airport in Morgan Hill).  At least we were armed with a plan and for my part I felt fortified by relating to some nice down to earth humans for a least 20 minutes (other than David that is :)).  The anonymity of the big city had left me starved for some sense of normalcy.

Getting our check out of our waiter proved to be quite a challenge.  It’s a story best relayed by David in person, but I’ll put it down here for posterity’s sake.  After we’d been sitting and chatting with our new friends a while David got the waiter’s attention from across the room and put in his first request.  We continued to chat.  About 10 minutes later, David put in a second request, again, from a distance.  We continued to chat.  Another 10 minutes, David was growing mystified and a bit impatient.  He put in a third request.  This time the waiter came by and asked in an amusing tone, “Are you SURE?”  David was indeed sure!  Next came a bill.  It wasn’t our bill.  We had ordered two meals and a glass of wine, this had double the amount of stuff.  David called the waiter over AGAIN, to put in a request for OUR bill.  Then came another bill, still not ours.  But as our new Irish friend helped us to determine:  it was close enough, actually even a couple euro less than ours.  We paid and made for the door on the wake of well wishes from our new friends.

We had a list of musts:

• shoes and a little more shopping for Faye
• poking around jewelry stores for ring ideas
• visiting the tour eiffel and l’arc de triomphe
• making the quick rounds of la louvre
• le chocolat Africain at Angelina

Perhaps having a list of musts is a bad place to start, but there we were.  David was also enamored with the idea that we were in the most romantic city on earth in the days right after we’d become engaged.  What could be more perfect?

Here’s a short list:

• bike kiosks and bikes that worked
• 100,000 fewer tourists clogging the streets and main attractions
• a ban on smoking cigarettes
• streets made of fluffy down pillows to walk around on

I am getting ahead of myself a bit because Friday wasn’t too bad, but to be honest it wasn’t that great either.  The reality was that we didn’t really have an airtight plan for ticking the “musts” off our lists and along the way we had some troubles.

Enough foreshadowing, I’ll start at the beginning of the day on Friday.  I had Pilates at 9a.  David was going to sit across the street at the cafe and have some coffee.  Pilates was great, my teacher was a bit late, so I gave myself a workout.  That was fine since I’d been doing just my bare minimum maintenance work I wasn’t in top form for criticism, I just needed to get myself centered.  And I did.  We had a little tour and polite conversation and we were off to enjoy the magic of Paris.

First things first, I was hungry.  I hadn’t eaten on account of doing Pilates.  David was on some sort of quest for the perfect crepe.  I just wanted food.  But neither of us knew where to get it.  My blood sugar was sinking and my irritability was mounting as we wandered what seemed to be aimlessly searching for food.  Oh and another thing, we were afraid of spending lots of money.  We were still a little burned from our night before and we’d popped into a bakery and been a bit disappointed with our treat, it seems that not all French people are capable of creating sublime pastries, who knew?  We finally found a grocery store, but it was an organic, vegan one and the stuff in there was a little weird.  It took us quite a while of trying to decipher the labels in French to understand that they didn’t have yogurt from cow’s milk.  Sheep or goat’s milk yogurt was a bit further than I wanted to go exploring gastronomically so we walked on.  We ended up with nutella, some pretty stinky cheese that seemed close to brie and yogurt.  Now we needed some bread.  This time we went to the other side of the hotel than we’d ventured until now and lo and behold just a block away was a picture perfect farmers market complete within all sorts of fancy foods.  Talk about bad timing!  Now we had all this yogurt and cheese to eat and we really just wanted to eat at the market.  We got a baguette and looked longingly at the food as we made our way up to our hotel to have our (very late) breakfast.

Next order, get bikes and purchase my shoes.  We managed to get one bike.  That was good for David’s flat feet, but not nearly as much fun.  But we made do since one bike was better than none.  Aside from my new shoes for Alexa’s wedding I had another pair picked out just to elevate my personal style a bit.  Alas they didn’t have my size.  I’d have to look around at other stores….

Every time we passed a bike kiosk we stopped and tried to get another one and finally our efforts paid off, we had 2 bikes!  David was over the moon.  He’d figured out that we could get pretty much everywhere wanted in the amount of time that we could have the bikes without paying any extra charges.

So we had a game plan and were optimistic but we had to get our laundry done.  So that was first priority after getting the shoes.  We managed that fine although nerves were a bit raw on account of all the imperfect execution of our naive plans.  We met an ex-patriot from the bay area and he gave us some tips for inexpensive activities in the city.  By this time our day was winding down and we hadn’t done too much but we headed over to the shopping district to check out jewelry, dresses, scarves, and shoes, all Parisian musts in my book.  Okay, stuff in Paris is expensive, like any big city.  Especially when you visit la place vendome to look at jewelry and when you visit galeries lafayette to look at dresses and scarves.  So we did a lot of walking and looking without any purchasing, which is the sort of thing that neither of us likes as shoppers.  Spirits were low and so was blood sugar again.  We found a little cafe and had a treat which was a bit uplifting.

The stores are over the top with their elaborate decorations and displays.  The fancy candy shops and bakeries are especially mind blowing.  Unfortunately instead of being totally impressed by Parisian style we were more disgusted by it’s opulence, particularly when it came to the food.  The places were so fancy and so formal it seemed hard to believe that they were serving food, surely with all that ambience the food had been transformed into something else.  We’ll never know since we just peered into the windows at the lines of people waiting to select their colorful macaroons and have them specially wrapped up as if they were made of gold.

We were exhausted just by witnessing the elaborate materialism of the shopping district so we took a load off in the tuileries.  We needed to regroup yet again from the overwhelming frenzy that we were finding in our Parisian days.  At this point we’d established that we preferred countryside vacations.  Near where we had collapsed in garden chairs, a Parisian romance seemed to be unraveling.  The man was begging for response while the woman sat despondent, with her head over in her lap.  He walked away and came back, they shared a passionate embrace then she pushed him away again.  He walked a bit and turned around, saying her name as a plea.  He inched away in this manner, every few steps pausing and turning back to look at her as she sat there defeated.  It was the same until he was finally out of my view.  She just sat there looking off into the distance.  Not exactly the romantic picture that David had envisioned.

Having reclaimed our vital forces enough to make way toward dinner we set off in search of what we hoped would be a tasty and reasonably priced meal.  The meal was fine, but not memorable and we headed back to the hotel with quite an agenda for the next day.

Note:  sorry we don’t have more pictures from Paris, the trip sort of went in a different direction….
With a certain amount of resentment at the early travel time, we made it to the airport in time for our flight.  David began practicing a few key phrases in french and I was doing my best to put what words I remembered into intelligible sentences.  We were determined to speak French in spite of ourselves and I’m proud to say that we did fairly well.  Since neither David or I are too concerned about appearing foolish to strangers, we weren’t stymied by pride.  Consequently we had a lot of fun talking with people throughout our stay.

During our flight we made friends with a Parisian named Piérre who would prove to be a good person to know once we were on the ground.  After landing we went through the usual steps of leaving the airport and made our way to the train station.  The station had lots of options for transportation and lots of long lines.  We were pretty confused about which one was right for us but had finally determined our best choice when Piérre approached us with an offer.  In our search for the ideal transport we had gleaned that the next train wouldn’t be coming for a while, but being completely ignorant tourists we had accepted that fact without concern.  Piérre gave us a more thorough explanation:  there had be a significant problem at a station and the delay was at minimum an hour, but likely much longer.  As he had been traveling for work and needed to get into the office he offered us a ride in his cab which we gratefully accepted.  So off we went toward the business center of Paris.  We still needed to catch a train to our side of town, but since we were getting dropped off at la Defense we had a look at the modern response to the Arc de Triomphe.  Unfortunately it was an overcast day, so we could only barely make out the arch at the other end of the Champs Élysées and unfortunately that was the last we saw of the world famous Parisian landmarks.

Another baffling experience in the train station finally found us on the right train to arrive at the stop closest to our hotel (David had figured it all out ahead of time and downloaded a couple Paris map apps on his iphone).  We had to walk a few blocks through the hustle and bustle, but once again David’s excellent navigational skills brought us to our destination.  I was a bit worried that this hotel would be a repeat of the third rate place I’d stayed with Alexa, but I underestimated David’s research skills.  We had a really nice room with a french style window looking out over a pretty park.  I was keen to check out the Pilates studio in town and it turned out to be just one street over from where we were staying, what luck!  David couldn’t wait to have a crepe, so with our two goals, we took to the streets.  We were successful on both fronts, I scheduled a lesson for the following morning and we had a tasty snack at a local cafe.  The people there were quite friendly and tolerated our remedial command of the language.

Next we were off looking for a walking guide of the city.  My Pilates instructor had suggested an area that he thought would have the appropriate shop so we headed that way.  We passed a kiosk that automated bike rentals.  David was elated since he loves to ride bikes and his flat feet aren’t designed for extensive walking.  Once again David’s credit card was rejected by the newfangled European system.  We walked on.  We crossed the island where Notre Dame is located and joined the throngs of tourists making the circuit through the extraordinary cathedral.  I was amazed by the size of it all, David just wanted to get out of the crowd.  He’d seen so many awe inspiring monuments to God in his two tours of the UK that the initial impact of the human congestion overshadowed his impression of the architecture.  Ah well, it was a short walk through.  We were approached by a few different Romanian girls begging for the help of foreign tourists, especially people from the US.  The first one who approached us asking first our citizenship and then for our donation earned a touch of sympathy until we saw the girls gathering together and chatting as if they didn’t have a care in the world.  Not that I blame them for asking, but neither David nor I are keen to hand money over to strangers.  We prefer to donate to organizations.  The vast number of tourists and our inability to blend into the landscape left us feeling a bit alienated from the romantic image of Paris, and perhaps our experience was skewed in the direction of intolerance for our role as tourists from that point on.  For my part, my enthusiasm for finding a book of walking tours was waning, it was all so big and commercialized and our feet could only carry us so far.

On the way to the book store we passed my favorite Parisian shoe store, now this was more like it!  I had a mission to purchase a new pair of shoes for Alexa’s wedding, what luck that David brought me to the city that has my favorite shoes!  The clerk was friendly and helpful.  As he was a lover of languages, especially English, we abandoned French almost immediately especially given the importance of the purchase!  So after lots of trials, I settled on a pair and put them on hold since I had to go fetch my credit card.  We stopped in a couple book stores but didn’t find what we were looking for and pretty much gave up on the idea of walking tours.

Next we headed to the area that I was most familiar with, the first arrondissement, and the restaurant that offered my favorite tiramisu.  The meal was delicious, David was in virgo heaven reveling in the subtleties of texture and flavor.  He wasn’t so happy when the bill came, those Parisians know how to get money out of tourists!  When they ask you if you’d like water they automatically bring you a €10 bottle without telling you.  This is the sort of tidbit I should have remembered from my last visit, as it all played out, I could see that we were heading for a pricey bottle of water but I held my tongue because frankly I sort of like fancy bottled water (yes I’m a sucker).  David asked the waiter and he was kind enough to give us the scoop:  if you prefer the free water out of the tap, you have to request “une carafe d’eau”.  Now we were onto their game and the rest of the time enjoyed free water.

Later we planned to call my credit card company and confirm that I was indeed abroad and could use the card with (guess what?!) one of those special little chips in it.  We have no idea why my student Amex has a chip; but thank heavens it does, because it meant we could get those bikes from the kiosk just around the corner from our hotel.  So into bed we went ready to hit the streets with wheels in the morning.