France, French customs, Paris, Sightseeing

Slow Walking on Rue du Louvre

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Now if you happen to walk down Rue du Louvre, with your back to the Seine, you should stay on the left side until you come to the remains of a stone wall that is actually part of the fortress built by Philippe Auguste at the end of the 12th century to protect Paris while he was off at the Crusades. It was later to become the Louvre.

Cross over to the other side and you’ll come to a large round building. Few people realise that it’s open to the public and that you can just wander in. It used to be the Bourse du Commerce which, despite its name, isn’t the stockmarket which is about ten minutes away, but the commodities market. It was originally built by Louis-Philippe in 1763 to store and sell wheat. Its location was chosen due to the proximity of the Seine and it was financed by constructing rental buildings around it.

Today it’s the Chamber of Commerce and Industry. It’s built on a circular plan, 122 metres in circumference. There were two concentric galleries above 25 covered arcades. The galleries housed the police, the weights and measures office and the statistics bureau. Enormous wheat lofts on the first floor were accessed via two beautiful spiral staircases, one of which had a double revolution so that the administrative staff and merchants didn’t have to rub shoulders with the porters! The courtyard was orginally open but later covered with a wooden dome to protect the wheat.

After a second fire in 1854, the building was closed for 30 years before being renovated and converted into a commodities market in 1885. Wheat, rye, oats, flour, oil, sugar, spirits, rubber, cocoa, coffee, potatoes, and rape were sold by auction until 1998 when it was disbanded due to computerisation of the futures market. If you stand right in the middle and speak, your voice will be amplified.  The inside is decorated with murals depicting the four cardinal points. You’re not supposed to take photos, I discovered after I got to the third cardinal point, so you’ll just have to go and see for yourself !

Just next to the Bourse du Commerce, you’ll see a tall column which has an interesting history. It’s the last vestige of a private hôtel built by Catherine de Médicis in 1572. The queen had the 31-metre high tower built for her astrologist, Cosimo Ruggieri. They often used to go up to the top of the tower together, where he whispered, not sweet nothings, but magic spells.

The top part of the column used to be glassed in but all that’s left today is a metal frame. After Ruggieri died in 1615, it fell into disuse and the building was demolished in 1748 to pay the debts of the last owner, Amédée de Savoie. Only the tower was saved and bought by the City of Paris in 1750. A fountain was added, which has now run dry, and a sundial. Legend has it that on stormy nights, a long black silhouette appears in the iron cage every time there’s a flash of lightening! I’ll let you go and check that out as well too.

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Italy, Travel photos

Sunday’s Travel Photos – Tivoli Gardens, Italy

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The Villa d’Este, more often call the Tivoli Gardens, is an easy visit from Rome. It’s no surprise that it’s on the UNESCO world heritage list. It has the most impressive number of fountains, nymphs and grottoes you could possibly imagine. It really is sheer magic. I nearly didn’t put the last photo in, because I think it’s actually rather grotesque, but it’s so well known that I thought I couldn’t leave it out!

Accommodation, France, Italy

My Croatian Itinerary – Part 1: Paris to Milan

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Apéritif to accompany the travel diary

Now that we’ve given up spontaneous travelling and plan our itinerary practically down to the last detail, we spend a lot of time pouring over guide books. Or rather, Relationnel does, because I do the bookings (much more productive in English because you have a greater choice) and then once the holiday has begun, I do the talking because Relationnel’s capacity in this respect is somewhat limited. He keeps reading the guide books. And we both write up our (French) travel diary over our daily apéritif, one of the best moments of the day!

Our travel diary

Once I had convinced him into going to Croatia and Slovenia, we bought an enormous map of Europe to determine how to get there and back by car. There was no really obvious route, so in the end, we decided to go across Italy and take the ferry at Ancona on the Adriatic Coast across to Split in Croatia then come back overland via Germany. The next step was to see how we would divide up our 28 days. We have discovered that, on the whole, it’s very tiring to change places too often so we usually alternate 2 and 3-day stays. We also try to keep the journey time to a maximum of 3 hours after a 2-night stay and 5 hours after a 3-night stay. Relationnel does most of the driving.

Lake Annecy

The most important booking was the ferry, because that would determine everything else. Another thing we like to do is to start the trip with 3 days somewhere in France where we can wind down and get plenty of rest and exercise before moving onto the more serious stuff. Annecy looked like a good choice, after an overnight stay in Dijon to see family. The photos of the lake in our cycling book looked very enticing. As we’d never been to Milan, we decided that would be our second stop for 2 nights before going to Ancona.

View from the window of our room

So I found a B&B about a half an hour from Annecy at a short distance from Thones. It was a cosy little wooden chalet, the owners were very friendly and helpful, we had a little kitchen to cook meals in if we wanted to and a small dining room to eat them in. There was free WIFI and the breakfast was excellent. The B&B is up on top of a hill with some lovely forest walks and views. Unfortunately, despite the fact it was mid-July the weather was cold and rainy and we were somewhat restricted in our cycling excursions as a result. But I can definitely recommend both the area and the accommodation. We had visited Annecy before, but we enjoyed going back again.

Umbrellas in Annecy

We then took the Mont Blanc tunnel to Italy. A word of warning – make sure you get there early – not like us – or you’ll find yourself in a long queue, particularly in the summer. It took us an hour of stopping and starting before we were finally able to take the extravagantly expensive 11.6 km long tunnel (38 euros one way, 49 return). It was 10°C when we left Thones and 31°C when we came out the other side of the tunnel. A rude shock!

Castello de la Sarre

We looked for somewhere to picnic. I personally think the food on the Italian motorways is awful. They have a funny system for buying things as well. First, you have to line up at a cash desk to pay for what you want to eat and drink, then you take your tickets over to the bar and line up again. You obviously have to know exactly what you want (and know how to say it, which is worse) or someone else will push in front of you. That’s why I had cleverly packed a picnic. They also have toilets with an automatic chain which I haven’t quite mastered yet. The cappuccino‘s good!

View from Castello de la Sarre

Just as we came out of Aosta, which we’ve visited several times in the past and is definitely worth a detour, I saw a beautiful castle high up on the hill on the left and decided we’d have lunch there. We followed the signs to Castello de la Sarre and parked at the bottom. We staggered out in the heat, planting our hats firmly on our heads and walked up the path, oohing and aahing at the view on the way up. We found a lovely shady spot at one end with the most spectacular panorama in front of us. We practically had the place to ourselves.

We left reluctantly, but Milan and further adventures were awaiting us!

Patricia et Rémi, Chalet Les Lupins, La Clossette Glapigny, F – 74230 THONES
Tel:    +33 (0) 450 63 19 96, email: chaletleslupins@orange.fr, http://www.francealpes.com 
(65 curos / night for 2)

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Food, France, Loire Valley, Paris, Restaurants, Wine

La Saint-Valentin

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As my 9-year-old nephew in Sydney pointed out to me yesterday when I mentioned Saint Valentine’s Day to him, the “Saint” has disappeared from Valentine’s Day in English. Francophiles may wonder why it’s “la” Saint-Valentin and not “le”. Well, like all feast days, it’s short for “la fête du Saint-Valentin”.  Hence the feminine for what looks like a masculine.

Back to the day itself. Relationnel, who is a real romantic, arrived with a bunch of roses at lunchtime. He had taken the afternoon off so we decided to go to a couple of depôt-vente and find some things to furnish and decorate Closerie Falaiseau, our new house in Blois. The temperatures have risen since our previous excursion last Saturday so my hands and feet weren’t completely frozen this time. There is a website called www.troc.com that now has 190 second-hand shops in France so we chose one about three-quarters of an hour from the centre of Paris in the western suburb of Orgeval.

We found quite a few goodies, including a coffee grinder, a long-handled bed-warming pan, a set of pewter jugs, a coffee pot, some scales and a Moustier fruit bowl in troc.com and a new expresso/cappuccino machine and a steam iron in another place called Cash Converter, also a chain, which has a lot of musical instruments, hi-fi equipment, small appliances and other household goods. We learnt that you can see the items for sale at troc.com on-line and even reserve them. We’re going to see if we can get some dining-room chairs that way.

We got back to Paris just in time for dinner at La Bastide Odéon, which specialises in cuisine from the south of France. As we were walking along towards our destination, I suddenly saw a restaurant which looked as if it had towels rolled up on the tables outside.  How very odd! I was trying to imagine what sort of Valentine’s celebration was in the offing there when Relationnel said they were blankets for people to sit outside. The blankets even have the name of the restaurant on them – Le Comptoir!

Our restaurant didn’t have a terrace with rolled-up blankets so we sat upstairs.  Relationnel thought he had discovered a new venue but in fact we had eaten there once before with friends from Canberra and enjoyed it. The tables are fairly spread out but there was a lot of noise in the room next door which we weren’t too thrilled with. At one stage, two of the people came out and Relationnel immediately recognised Robert Badinter, famous in French history for having successfully abolished the death penalty on 9th October 1981. After that, we didn’t mind the noise!

They had an excellent set menu for Valentine’s Day at 49 euros per person, starting with champagne and a little sweet pepper (piquillo) stuffed with goat’s milk cheese (very tasty). It was followed by a choice of two entrées – creamy scrambled eggs with black truffle or carpaccio of sea scallops with spicy avocado, sauce vierge (which just means olive oil) and horns of plenty (excellent) – and a choice of two main courses – grilled fillet of bass with candied lemon, creamy risotto and sea shell bouillon (which we didn’t take) or roast rack of lamb (extraordinarily tender), mutton stew gravy (sounds better in French – jus de navarin), eggplant caviar and candied tomatoes (they didn’t look very candied to me).

For dessert, you could have a soft-centred chocolate cake (moelleux au chocolat) with chestnuts and condensed milk ice-cream (all very tasty) or candied pineapple with lavendar honey, fiadone (a Corsican soft cheese dessert) and brown sugar biscuit ice-cream (speculoos) (Relationnel’s choice).

A bottle of wine per couple was also included in the menu. We could choose from two wines – a pouilly fumé sauvignon from the Loire Valley or a côtes du Rhône. We took the red, which we regretted afterwards – not because we didn’t like it, but because it was 15° !!!

As we walked past Le Comptoir on the way back to the car, we noticed that all the outside tables were taken and everyone had their blankets around their knees.

La Bastide Odéon, 7 rue Corneille, 75006 Paris, tel 01 43 26 03 65, contact@bastideodeon.com, www.bastideodeon.com, M° Odéon lines 10 and 4, RER Luxembourg, open every day. 
 

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Food, Paris, Restaurants

The Dry Tree

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Well, it’s not really called The Dry Tree but L’Arbre sec. You’d think that a translator could come up with something better, wouldn’t you? But in fact, it has an historical reference that the more learned amongst us will no doubt know. It’s also called the Solitary Tree and was first recorded by Marco Polo somewhere in the wastelands of northern Persia. So, since my culture does not quite extend that far (unfortunately), I think I can be forgiven for the poor translation.

It’s actually one of our neighbourhood restaurants, called La Taverne de l’Arbre Sec, on rue Saint Honoré, better known (at the other end) for it’s exclusive shops. We mainly go there to have côte de boeuf, but it has other things such as rumpsteack and sea scallops Provençale, with prices ranging from 14 to 25 euros. They have a good choice of vegetables which is great for those of us who are not natural skinnies – gratin dauphinois, home-made ratatouille and home-made chips. I chose the ratatouille of course, even though my côte de boeuf probably took up half the plate, so I was not exactly obeying the 1/4 protein, 1/4 carbs and 1/2 vegetables rule.

The service is unfailingly friendly and the clientèle is French and local, usually in the 20 to 30 year age group, but we don’t let that bother us, obviously. You can get wine by the glass, pichet or bottle. They have a covered terrace in the winter, one side for the smokers and the other side for the non-smokers, which is unusual. It’s very old and dark and atmospheric with lots of rough timber beams. The room downstairs has a vaulted ceiling.

When we were leaving, I asked the owner, Sylvain Lemarchand, if I could take a photo for my blog. He told us that he was very admirative of people who wrote blogs that other people could benefit from, and gave us his cheesiest grin!

La Taverne de l’Arbre Sec, 109 rue Saint Honoré, 75001 Paris 01 40 41 10 36
 

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History, Paris

Powerwalking to the Pont Neuf – Part 2

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Town hall, Romanesque tower, Saint Germain l'Auxerrois

It’s not that I’m doing any powerwalking at the moment. It’s too cold. Today, the temperature got up to 1.5°C and there’s sun, but it’s still a little chilly in the Tuileries Gardens and along the Seine with that Siberian wind blowing through. But I got a little side-tracked last time before I got to Saint Germain l’Auxerrois which is connected by a very tall belfry to the 1st arrondissement Town Hall that Black Cat thinks is a good wedding venue.

17th century vestry pew

It was built in the 7th century in what was to be the centre of Paris up until 12th century and was the first Christian basilica. I’m sure you know what the difference between a basilica and a cathedral is. It took me ages to understand. A basilica is simply an important church building designated by the pope as having some special spiritual, historical or architectural significance. As far as hierarchy goes, the basilica is higher up on the scale than a cathedral.

 

Ex-voto pillar

So the oldest surviving part of the church today is the beautiful 12th century Romanesque tower. Most of it was rebuilt in the 15th century. Because of its location, it became a favourite with the royal family after the House of Valois returned to the Louvre Palace in the 14th century. You can still hear one of the bells, called Marie, struck in 1527. I think it’s great that bells have names. We visited a very interesting bell foundry on Lake Annecy one rainy day last summer.

Moorish-style poor box

Anyway, Saint Germain l’Auxerrois has had a somewhat checkered existence. When they renovated it in the 18th century, they took out the jubé (you have to go to Saint Etienne-du-Mont in the 5th to see one now) and some of the original stained glass windows. During the Reign of Terror (7th June 1793 to 27 July 1794 when Marie Antoinette was beheaded), it was converted into a place to store fodder, a printing works, a police station and even a saltpeter works to make gunpowder. Despite several other attempts at demolition, it was eventually restored by Viollet-le-Duc, who was also responsible for renovating Notre Dame, and returned to the Catholic church in 1840.

 

Poor box for the curé's charities

Then about twenty years later, they started tearing down the delapidated buildings around it and threatened to demolish it again. Fortunately it was defended by Baron Haussmann who suggested drawing inspiration from the church to build a Town Hall. So they designed an identical façade with an adjoining flamboyant gothic style campanile.

One of the finest pieces inside is a monumental 16th century Flemish altarpiece in one of the northern chapels showing the passion of Christ, a gift to Louis-Philippe in the early nineteenth century. There’s another altarpiece from the north of France made of sculpted wood with painted doors in the southern ambulatory, depicting scenes from the life of Mary.

There is also a pulpit built in 1635, an organ from Sainte-Chapelle, a beautifully carved vestry pew made for Louis XIV and his family in 1684 and a wrought iron gate built in 1767. You’ll find a 13th century statue of Saint Germain d’Auxerre in the Virgin chapel and a 16th century statue of Mary the Egyptian.

Holy water font

But what I like are the ex-voto pillar with all the thank-you plaques to Marie, Notre Dame de Bonne Garde (Our Lady of Safe Custody), the Moorish-style poor box with its mosaics, the cherub holy water fonts, the curé’s poor box and the beautiful flamboyant gothic door near the sacristy.

 

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Family, France, Paris

No Oysters on Sunday

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I think our cold snap this year has even reached the news in Australia. February is always the coldest month in Paris and we usually have a couple of snow falls during the winter but the temperatures rarely go below freezing. But we’ve just had two weeks in Paris with minus 2 or 3 degrees throughout the day and much colder temperatures at night.  We’d actually been having a very mild winter so the cold snap took everyone by surprise.

Brainy Pianist alias Michelin Man

Brainy Pianist, who desperately wanted to see some snow, was searching for somewhere to go and I suggested Strasbourg so he and Thoughtful went there last weekend by train. It didn’t snow in Strasbourg – at minus 12°, it was too cold – but they saw a lot of snow on the way. Brainy Pianist, looking very much like the Michelin man, was dressed in long johns, two pairs of jeans, 2 T-shirts, 2 jumpers, 2 pairs of socks, a neck warmer and a scarf, two beanies, one with ear flaps, and rabbit-fur lined gloves he’d had the good sense to pick up in Rome after he read my post! He hadn’t thought to take a second pair of gloves, but Thoughtful did! Plus they were both wearing anoraks of course.

Thoughtful alias The Terrorist

It’s snowed in Paris since, to Brainy Pianist’s delight because he missed the first snow fall when he was in Strasbourg, but there wasn’t a lot so it didn’t stay on the ground for long. The Palais Royal Gardens looked very pretty though and the water in the fountains next to the Glass Pyramids at the Louvre was all frozen over. But the cold has persisted.

In winter, I usually just wear wool mix trousers, socks, long-sleeved shirt and wool mix jacket when I go out, with ankle boots, parka with a hood, long scarf to keep the hood in place and rabbit-fur lined gloves. When it’s minus something, I add a pair of tights. My hands get very cold though. I have a pair of thin silk gloves somewhere that have obviously disappeared at the moment, just when I need them!

Me, not Black Cat

Black Cat turned up for afternoon tea yesterday in a summer dress with a cardigan over it, thick tights, long boots, coat, hat, scarf and gloves.  Looking very chic as usual. She’s even got special iPhone gloves so you don’t have to get freezing hands when you answer your phone. I need some too. She immediately took off the cardigan because our apartment is overheated, usually 23°C with the radiators off because of the hot water pipes from the central heating. The water has to be hot so that the apartments on the lower floors are sufficiently heated (we’re on the fourth floor). At her place, though, they have electric heaters, which are expensive to run, so she always has to keep a jumper on. Plus her Australian flat mate is always opening the windows and turning off the radiators and forgetting to turn them back on, particularly in the morning.

Directoire chest of drawers

Yesterday was the coldest I’ve been in a long time. We went off to a dépôt-vente in Nogent sur Marne looking for more furniture for the house in Blois. It was minus 2° both inside and out! I don’t know how the people can work there. We bought a directoire chest of drawers with a marble top. Despite the gloves, my hands were completely frozen by the time we got back into the car which, being a Volvo, doesn’t heat up very quickly. You’d think the Swedish could do better than that! Our Renault Scenic is almost immediately warm.

I went to the market this morning to buy fish and eggs. We bought everything else from the supermarket yesterday because last week’s fruit and vegetables were damaged because of the freezing temperatures and the ground’s so hard now you can’t dig anything up. The fish don’t seem to mind the cold. I felt sorry for the fish mongers though. They have to clean and gut the fish. No oyster man. Last week we ate inferior “fines de claires” instead of “spéciales” so this time, we decided not to have oysters on Sunday. Sigh.

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Family, Lifestyle

The Travel Itinerary

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Working out a travel itinerary has become my most time-consuming holiday task. That wasn’t always so.  When I was young and adventurous, I used to set off with a backpack and follow whoever knew when the next bus, train or boat was leaving. Or just stuck out my thumb. It made it very simple. There was always someone else at the other end offering a room and a bath. I usually slept in those shared dorms which even back in those days could be co-ed. I accidentally found myself in one on my first honeymoon, but that was because I didn’t know you had to ask for a letto matrimonial. There were six single beds. Fortunately, we were the only ones there.

An unforgettable trip to Malta (in lieu of Australia because I stupidly thought it would be easier) when Leonardo was four months old put an end to such spontaneous travelling.  Although he was fully breastfeed and theoretically transportable with my trusty baby sling, he was still a hefty little fellow and a light sleeper and I arrived home more exhausted than when I left. Somehow, travelling wasn’t the same any more. The spontaneity no longer seemed appropriate.

And once Black Cat arrived, travelling, except for our 3-yearly trip to Australia, became synonymous with camping.  Not that that was really a piece of cake. The kids loved it, but I spent most of the time getting sand out of the bed, cooking on two gas rings, washing up in a communal kitchen, taking showers with the kids, shopping for food and peeing outside the tent at night in the hope that no late revellers would go past.

My first real holiday since my pre-Malta days came when I took 12-year old Black Cat across France to Heidelberg by car. She was a model companion and we played it by ear. The only slip-up was that I had forgotten to take her passport with me. However, we decided to take the risk and cross the border at some little place whose name I can’t remember. No one came near us. We had a lovely time, having breakfast at the hotel, picnicking at lunchtime and eating out at night. We always seemed to find a hotel without too much trouble. We stayed in Reims, Strasbourg, Metz, the place I can’t remember, Heidelberg and Colmar. And when we’d had enough, we went home.

After I met Relationnel, we used to rent a holiday house for a week or two at a time, usually in Brittany, and take the four kids with us. We always went shopping in the morning by ourselves and finished off with a bowl of cider afterwards. We came home one day and were immediately confronted by the elderly couple next door. They told us that the “older ones” had been attacking poor little Thoughful and they were about to call the police.

Brittany in the summer

Mystified, because the four of them usually got on like a house on fire, we said we’d look into the problem. It turned out that they were all inside, pretending to have a fight with their pillows, screaming as though they were really hurt, Thoughtful louder than any of the others. We had to make them promise to behave themselves while we were out. I hate to think what the neighbours would have said if they’d known we were a blended family !

When Relationnel and I were finally able to go on holidays on our own, we would choose a country, book the first hotel and take off in the car, stopping wherever the mood took us. But as we always travelled in the summer and there weren’t any mobile phones in those days, not to mention the fact that I have become fussy about where I sleep since my backpacking days, it didn’t seem to be such a good idea any more.

Now, we plan everything beforehand. We work out the itinerary together and I book the accommodation. It does take a lot of time, but it certainly makes life much easier once we’re on our way. Now that you can check out the internet, consult Trip Advisor and see what the bloggers have to say, there aren’t too many bad surprises, although it’s amazing how a photograph can be so completely different from reality!

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Lifestyle

Little Bo Tweep

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In Twitter Twitter Little Star, I explained about the basic uses of Twitter, but since then, I’ve been learning lots of new things. I’m no longer a #tweep and am now a #twitterian, having joined the #500tweetsclub. Soon I’ll be a #tweeting machine.

Let’s take it one at a time. Now tweep can actually mean a few different things. It’s a combination of Twitter and Peeps to start off with. Peeps, I discovered (talk about not knowing ANYTHING) is short for people, but you probably knew that unless you’ve been living in the wrong country for more than 35 years.

But sometimes it can be more specific. One of my followers tweeted to his “peeps and fans“, including me. So I asked him what a peep was: “Ah, well peeps is my definition of people living in Paris and fans are tweeters interested in Paris but not living here :)”. So, I’m his peep. Hmm. He did check it was OK. Not sure what Relationnel will think about it though.

So, now from peep to tweep if you’re still following all this. A tweep is a person you’re following and who’s following you.  But it can also be a Twitter user who’s new to the game and hasn’t made many tweets and is therefore the lowest of the low on the Twitter scale. If you’re at the top, you’re a twitterian. You can say, for example, “Thanks to all the tweeps who RT my last tweet” which means “thanks to all the lovely people who retweeted my last tweet”.

From tweep, we move to “tweeple” who are people who use twitter. So peeps and fans are tweeple as well.

A bit more on hashtags.

I received a tweet with #FF which I thought meant Fan Friday but Andrea tells me is Follow Friday (see comment), which is much more logical! This is when you tweet several people at the same time to suggest that they mutually follow each other! Took me a while to work it out. I’m waiting for Friday so I can use it myself! What are your favourite hashtags so I can learn some more and really earn the title of twitterian?

I’ve discovered a couple of new iPhone apps as well. Viber is the first. It’s like What’s App except that you can send text messages AND talk for free to anyone who’s got the same App (iPhone or Android), so long as you have a wifi connection ;

Then there’s instagram. To quote the publisher, it’s “a free, fun, and simple way to make and share gorgeous photos on your iPhone”.  I haven’t discovered all the ins and outs yet, but it looks fun. I already use the PhotoShop Express App which makes posting photos on Facebook and Twitter much easier. The photos below demonstrate what you can do with instagram. The second photos are the “sunny” and “black & white” versions.

Original photo taken with my iPhone

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from the Tropics to the City of Light