trip log: the flight & Paris

I am going through my trip journal and posting the hilights from our summer trip over several posts.

We thoroughly cleaned our apartment, packed, and left home at 11:30 AM on Friday Aug 12th. We took the bus to the metro, went to Namur station, and went to Pushap for lunch. It was super-busy there – it is a really popular restaurant. After lunch we got back on the metro and caught the bus to the airport. We got there well in advance of our flight and had lots of time. It was great, since we checked in and went through security at a very relaxed pace. Having flown to the US twice after 2001, I always forget how easy this is to do in any other country. No taking off my shoes or x-raying my luggage!

The flight went fine except that it wasn’t very confortable as usual. Also, although the flight was only about 6 hours long, they showed three movies. What is with that? Don’t they realise people might want to sleep during the flight? Since it was an overnight flight we saw the sun rising over the English and French coastlines – beautiful.

When we arrived we had no problems getting our luggage and after a bit of conflusion, caught the Roissybus to Paris at about 7:30 AM. The driver didn’t want to accept our 50 euro bill as payment at first for the tickets, but finally relented since that was all we had. We arrived at Opera station at about 8 AM and were undecided whether to go to the hotel or walk around a bit. The check-in was not until 3 PM so we had some time to kill. We realised that there was a wine store near the station we wanted to visit and it opened at 10, so we decided to stay in the area until it was open. We quickly found the Obelisk and the Tuleries gardens and were able to take some nice pictures since it was practically deserted at that time of day on a Saturday. We walked to the Seine and sat across from the Musée d’Orsée. It was really, really peaceful and hard to believe we were finally on a trip together!

We walked back to the wine store. It was incredible – the main floor was quite small but then we went into the basement. I am convinced it actually went under the street the store is located on. It was a real cave du vin. There was a very friendly and helpful person working there who helped us pick two bottles of wine – a beaujolais and a bordeaux. The beaujolais was only 8 Euro but was very good (we tried it for supper that evening). We are keeping the bordeaux for next Christmas. Supposedly it goes very well with confit de canard so we will try to make/buy it.

We walked to our hotel and arrived by noon. They let us check in, so we took our luggage up to the room and went back out to explore some more. Unfortunately we soon discovered that the eerie emptiness was not just a side effect of it being Saturday – it happened to be during the national month-long vacation and most of the Parisians had gone to St Tropez and other warmer climes. So unfortunately a lot of the stores we wanted to visit were closed. We tried going to Boulangerie Jean-Luc Poujauran but alas, he was on vacation too. We found another boulangerie and bought a pizza and baguette. Finally we were too tired to stay awake any longer and crashed at the hotel.

We woke up at 4:30 PM and walked past Hotel des Invalides and found the poshest fromagerie in Paris. Unfortunately it was also closed. Fortunately we found something that wasn’t – La grande epicerie de Paris. It was like a department store for gourmet food. The first thing we saw was the dessert counter. Wow. They have a bakery, deli, packed sweets section, butcher, fish counter ready-to-eat counter and a very nice fruit/vegetable section all stocked with incredibly good-looking gourmet food. In the dairy section there was an entire isle that consisted of only yogurt! The good news was that we could get something to eat here (we didn’t fancy eating in the hotel restaurant and everywhere else was closed).

I waited in the very long line at the deli and successfully ordered a duck and pistachio mousse and a salmon aspic in French. The reason I waited in line for so long was that the people working behind the deli counter were really serious about their work. I saw one guy cut some sort of cured beef thing into 6 super-thin slices and it took about 6 minutes. They used only very sharp and professional-looking knives. Also, they have these whole cured legs (of pork I think) there set up on these very fancy carving braces. The upper part of the leg rests on the board while the lower part (i.e. the bone) sits in a little cusp and is held in place by (ready for this?) a bow. There is a person who slices thin bits of it off on demand. Its both disgusting and lovely at the same time. I can’t seem to find a picture of this on the web anywhere though!

Anwyay, we picked up a rather interesting salad, some goat cheese, a pistachio French macaroon and a square of raspberry cake. We brought our gourmet goodies back to the hotel and violated the “do not eat in your room policy” with the Beaujolais wine.

On the way back to the hotel we saw this really strange store that looked like it sold coloured metal spools. Intrigued, we went inside for a closer look. It turns out it was a store that sold one kind of very odd espresso machine made by Krupps. The metal spool things were actually little coffee packets for the machine! We tried a shot – it was ok. We liked the colours of the spools though!