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.
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