Paris

Sunday, April 22: Paris, Hotel Taylor.

(Steve) After breakfast, we reluctantly said our goodbyes and began our drive to Paris (5 hours).

The trip was on a relatively lightly traveled motorway, no domestic commercial carriers, and a minimum of Eastern European commercial vehicles.  The weather was not at all pleasant, intermittent heavy showers added to the stress. We had a heart-stopping experience: The GPS went on the blink about a third of the way.  We couldn’t begin to anticipate how we might negotiate our way to the hotel, which is so obscurely located that cabs had trouble finding it on our last visit to Paris!  We attempted every possible maneuver to make it work… unsuccessfully!  However, an hour before we reached Paris, “Suzy Sound Bite” returned, just in the nick of time to get us to the hotel.

Traffic came to a crawl.  It took us several hours to make the last six kilometers.  I shudder what it might have been without “Suzy”.

We did make it to the hotel, and then a new problem arose: parking.  As often is the case in Paris, the hotel has no parking facilities on site.  One is expected to park in public garages, which are sparse.

The clerk gave us a map, which had few street signs, drew a complicated route to the nearest garage and sent us off. We never did find it, became totally disoriented by the myriad one-way streets, and decided to start all over again from the hotel. Next, we discovered a new obstacle: road works closed of many of the turns Suzy (our GPS) called for… one-way streets were reversed.  It took us nearly an hour to find our way to the hotel in order that we might start afresh.  We turned the first corner of our new attempt and Margo noticed an obscure sign, “garage”.  Located in an old, derelict-looking building, the narrow entrance was dark and sloped sharply upwards.  There seemed to be no one around.  I stopped, blocking traffic as all good Parisians do. A shadowy apparition appeared.  In my perfect French, I asked, “garage?”  He beckoned us in, directed us up several steep floors, and there were loads of spaces.  The charge was an arm and a leg, but significantly less than we had been stuck with in the Munich hotel.  We paid, gladly.

We decided to cruise the neighborhood in search of food.  Many places were closed (we assumed because of it being Sunday and Election Day).  Just around the corner from the hotel, we spotted Café Renaissance that, although being unprepossessing, and looking deserted, except for a few drinkers, had a large menu.  We gambled…and won!  The food was delicious.  We correctly guessed the cooking was from the Auvergne region of France – hearty, tasty, but very filling. I chose meat-stuffed cabbage and Margo tried the roast pork. We skipped dessert.We walked back to the hotel, Margo had a hot soak in the tub with a glass of wine, while I worked on the journal.

Monday, April 23: Paris, Hotel Taylor

(Steve) We arose and had a leisurely breakfast. The breakfast buffet is small but offers everything one could want: croissants, small baguettes, cereals, cheeses and cold cuts.

 The sky was clear, but rain predicted. Took a cab to the Pompidou Center where we encountered the first of a series of endless queues (two hours in line). The place is huge and sprawling, and finding elevators and escalators a challenge. One “up” elevator was not operating and a woman standing next to me said, “Welcome to France”! 

Then, after finding our way to the sixth floor, where the special Matisse exhibit was located, we found a still longer line to enter the exhibit itself.  We stood in line nearly an hour, and then viewed two wonderful exhibitions – Matisse: “Pairs and Series” which compared two or more each of his works and explored their relationships.  An excellent audio guide made the show even more clear and interesting.  We spent several hours digesting the show, and then went on to an exhibit of Art Spiegelman’s graphic novels, which included an exhaustive exposition of the development of his powerful “Maus”.  Tired out, we caught a cab back to the hotel.

(Margo) Back at the hotel, exhausted from traipsing around the museum for hours, we rested and then went around the corner from the hotel and had a wonderful Moroccan dinner at Zerda. We began with a cilantro-laden, spicy harissa soup, followed by lamb tagine with prunes, apricots and almonds for Steve, and lamb tagine with apricots, almonds and raisins for me, with a side dish of semolina couscous. It was all delicious but, again, we had no room for dessert!

Tuesday, April 24: Paris, Hotel Taylor

We were late getting downstairs to breakfast, but they took pity on us and served us anyway!         

We spent the day at Musee d’Orsay, and  the queues were worse than the day before at the Pompidou Centre. It took several hours standing in lines that doubled back and forth before we actually entered…tiring and disappointing. We discovered the way to attend these mob scenes is to buy reserved tickets in advance.

While the place has been refurbished since our last visit, it still leaves much to be desired; the audio guides were disorganized and it was difficult to collate the point in the guide and the image being viewed. There is such a huge volume of stuff to be seen that one can only “do” one or two sections, at most, in one visit.

Our feet aching, we caught a cab home. The driver was a kick and spoke fluent English, gained from years in Australia where he had been a chef.  He had returned to Paris when his young wife had a stroke and he then took up cab-driving in order to be flexible in caring for her.

After a short rest, we decided to return to Café Renaissance for dinner. We both ordered the  rabbit-stuffed cabbage.  Unlike our experience there Sunday evening, the place was packed with mostly after-work diners.  We had an incompetent young waiter, which detracted a bit from the meal. On top of that, he “lost” our meal ticket! About an hour later, the maître d’ gave up on that problem, and we retreated back to the hotel.