Capital City Summer, Part I: Paris

And we’re back.

Hi all!  It’s been a good first year at Princeton, and now that it’s over I’m lucky enough to be filling this summer with travels.  I’ll spend most of my time (two months) in Beijing, doing an intensive Mandarin language program, but the summer itinerary as a whole is really wide-ranging and very exciting: Paris for five days, Delhi for six, Princeton in Beijing for the middle two months, then Shanghai for a couple days, and home via Hawaii, where I’ll see a bunch of my family.

I can’t believe I’m doing this and it feels just totally indulgent, but I’m so pumped up!

I’m actually in Delhi already. Paris was so busy that I didn’t have time to write up a blog post from there, so I’ll fill you all in.

I’d never been to Paris before. Everyone told me that it would be exquisitely elegant and beautiful and refined, and while it’s one thing to know that on an intellectual level, it’s completely different to experience it for yourself.  Paris was beautiful in pretty much every direction I looked.  It’s a culture that is genuinely concerned with aesthetics: buildings and clothes and food serve all the same purposes that they would elsewhere, but why shouldn’t they look great at the same time? I thought this occasionally bordered on the self-absorbed (e.g. down coats and scarves in 75 degree weather), but by and large Parisians were not the chain-smoking snobs the media had told me they would be. People were basically kind and helpful.  Eventually, though, since I didn’t know any meaningful French, I defaulted to Spanish and pretended to be someone other than my suburban New Jersey self.  This worked much of the time, and it both assuaged my own silly insecurity, and made communicating a whole lot easier.

Anyway, some things I saw and did there follow:

I stayed with my friend Morgan, who is there studying French for the summer.

Morgan and me at the Notre Dame

She has this wonderful tiny little apartment seven floors up.

There was no elevator

We made dinner there the first night

It was good. Also, in Paris, baguettes never cost much more than a dollar because they believe everyone should be able to buy bread. It is a good city.

I just ate really well in Paris.

The felafel shop in Marais — the city’s Jewish quarter — that everyone who had ever been to Paris recommended to me. Delicious.

Banana nutella crepe, also in Marais

Breakfast: cafe au lait, pain au chocolat aux amandes

I did some exploring, too.  One day I just walked all over the city for maybe four hours. Here are some pictures of that day and some miscellaneous ones:

I took the metro over to Marais, where I began my walk.

You can open the windows on some metros, and the car’s acceleration is accompanied by a whirring sound that rises in pitch. I kind of expected that it would peak with a pop like a champagne bottle being opened, but we always just slowed down for the next stop instead.

Paris is a museum, so it only makes sense to have labels.

The Hôtel de Ville, which is a city hall, not a hotel.

The Louvre, which was closed that day.

The police at the Louvre wear roller skates.

Grown men (and women and children) ride scooters in Paris unironically, sometimes in full business attire. I had no way of anticipating Paris’s quirkiness.

I wanted to race the funicular up the steps to the Basilica of the Sacré Cœur in Montmartre — the city’s most artistic area at its north end. I was not allowed to do so.

Morgan and I met our friend Noah, who is also there for the summer, for Tibetan food. We took pictures of the food and got kind of carried away.

Noah wisely realized that 2001 was a bad year for the Parisian mustache.

Gypsy jazz!

At Shakespeare and Company, a famous English language bookstore in Paris.

I went running with Drew, a family friend, in the Bois de Boulogne, on the west side of the city.

Bois de Boulogne

Updates from Delhi and beyond to come soon!

Warmly,

Doug