Saturday November 22 – Monday, November 24, 2014

Saturday I did nothing!  I had a cold.  I was up much of Friday night coughing so Saturday was a day of rest.  Unfortunately, we had to cancel plans to meet our Australian friend (and her husband who came to town later in the week) for beer and food since I felt so lousy.

Maxine, on the other hand, was out and about. Recall that last week she talked about the food market on Avenue Wilson and said she planned to do a good portion of her food shopping there?  So far she’s true to the commitment.  While I slept, she bought 4 mini quiches, some roquefort & rocamadour cheese, lemon tarts for me and an almond tart for her, some beef bourguignon, and fresh fruit.  We had dinner at home!

Maxine went to the pharmacy and got some good cough syrup, which helped me sleep Saturday night.  Sunday, having gotten much more rest, we made plans to visit the Paris equivalent of what Angelenos would call the west side, in this case, the 6^th arrondissement.  There was a free pipe organ concert at the church around the corner from the apartment we rented 8 years ago, the Eglise San Sulpice. 

Turns out that neither Maxine nor I are very much into pipe organ music.  We left after 3 “songs” to meet our Australian friends for a stand up dinner of wine and finger foods at L’Avant Comptoir.  We had a great visit with them, tried several good red wines and ordered small plates of interesting food from a “menu” of items hung like banners from the ceiling.  Among the 4 of us, we had raw scallops, foie gras, chanterelle mushrooms with a poached egg, a beef “sandwich” with horseradish foam, cheese croquettes.  Very interesting food and lots of fun visiting together.

We also did some more wandering around the area, looking in store windows at sometimes interesting and, very often expensive, clothing.  We did find one curious place – it sold used clothing “by the pound”, or at least that’s what the sign said.  We also found a place that sold candy by the kilo.  That we did take advantage of.  

Finally, not wanting to go home yet since the weather was so amazing, I convinced Maxine that we should get off the Metro early to wander the Champs Elysees Christmas market.  I’ll have a more complete blog and pictures from it at a later point.

Monday started out rainy.  See my earlier post about the apparent inability here to forecast rain!  It cleared by mid morning and we decided to check out a restaurant we’d both been curious about, Le Verre Vole.

We took a bus over, which, when the routes make sense, I actually prefer to the Metro.  You’re above ground and can watch the city pass by, it’s easier to get a seat, and it’s never as hot as the metro cars.  This routing went through Pigalle, so we got a completely different view of the city.  It’s a bit seedy, but in a French way.  I’ll leave that to your imagination…  We also drove down a street that seemed to be dedicated to outfitting people for weddings with many dress and tuxedo stores.

We arrived at Le Verre Vole which is a tiny (!) wine bar in the area by the Canal St. Martin – the area we visited with Emmy nearly a month ago.  It’s hard for us to believe that we’ve been here a month!  Unfortunately for me, their menu was largely seafood.  So I skipped having an appetizer and had chicken for lunch.  The wines were good.  A crisp white Vouvray to start and then a red from Cahors with the chicken.  Maxine tried abalone for the first time and liked it.  Abalone is endangered in California so you don’t see it on restaurant menus.

As Le Verre Vole was the organizing principle for today’s excursion, it was a jumping off point to explore this neighborhood, the 10^th arrondissement.  Truly, some of the most interesting things in Paris seem to be going on in these more fringe, Northeast neighborhoods.  It was quite a contrast versus window shopping in the 6^th arrondissement the day before.  We also stopped for dessert at Du Pain and Des Idees, a bakery that we’d read services one of the city’s great restaurants, Pierre Gagniere (where Maxine celebrated her birthday on our last trip).

We’re spending the evening catching up on things.  For me, first a couple hours writing these journals of our week.  And after that some planning for our upcoming trip.  We’re going to Toulouse for Thanksgiving with my college roommate and his family.  But, since Thanksgiving isn’t really a holiday here in France (think about it…), he’s having it on Saturday.  That gives us some time to take a less direct route south, stopping in Burgundy for 2 nights.  We’ve rented a car and now Emmy gets her first big excursion.  We hope she plays well with Bill’s family dog, Helene.

Tuesday November 18 – Thursday November 21

We’re always behind on these!  The pictures from this time period went up days ago!  Well, here goes…

Tuesday, Maxine took the day off from Paris.  Stayed home.  Read.  Organized lists of restaurants.  I went on a neighborhoods walk.  Paris is always a pretty city, and there are countless interesting streets to explore.  On some future occasions (I did this once the first week we arrived), I plan on taking busses to wherever they go, but for now we’ve worked from the idea that having one specific thing we want to see (or place to eat) is an organizing principle for checking out an area. 

I’ve had in mind that I wanted a bottle of Calvados (apple brandy).  I started the trip with some absinthe, but that had run out.  So, as my organizing principle, I headed off to a store called the Maison du Whiskey.  It had been on my list 8 years ago, but I never got there.  The closest metro was the one that let me off outside the Grand Magasins, so I got to check out the upside down (4 stories worth) Christmas Tree at Galeries Lafayette.  There were pictures of it in the blog earlier in our trip.  Also got to check the Paris branch of Uniqlo, which is a Japanese chain that I’d read about and had visited the Santa Monica branch of, which is the size of a 7-11 and difficult to figure out the theme.  Here it was obvious – discount fashion staples. 

Along the way I passed a knife store and checked out the Laguiole knives.  That’s sort of troubling in a sense.  That sense being that they look great, but I’ve already got one and have used it perhaps 3-4 times in the 2 years I’ve owned it (for slicing open case packs of soda and waters from Costco…).  So, I’ve got no purpose in looking at their knives.

Hopped the metro back towards Champs Elysees and in the general direction of our apartment.  Took a walk down Avenue Montaigne, yet another spot I didn’t get to 8 years ago.  I had a note that it was supposed to be “interesting shopping”.  It was high end, Prada-type shopping.  But, interesting windows.  Hopped the bus home in time to have lunch with Maxine at a café close to the apartment that she’d been interested in trying.  It was authentic – I asked for my steak to be “medium” and it came out “blue” (the French have some aversion to cooking their beef much at all).

Later that evening we made our way to the 11th arrondissement where we met an Australian friend for dinner.  She’s someone that we first met here in Paris 8 years ago.  In the time since then, she’s done all sorts of interesting things and traveled to more interesting places on at least 3 continents.  In the interim, we’ve done???  She’s now living in Provence and it was fun to catch up.  And, Maxine got to check out one of the restaurants on her list, Au Passage.  Maxine’s note:  highly recommend Au Passage – interesting, small plates food, casual & fun atmosphere, reasonable prices, good wine.

Wednesday

Did some more walking, this time heading largely south from the apartment.  This was an area that I’d spent no time in till then.  Sorry to be boring here, but again, interesting buildings and food in windows. 

As a second organizing principle, I followed the walk with lunch at my 4^th beer place, called Falstaff and over by the Montparnasse tower.  Had a very good burger which I paired with Gulden Draak.  And Lindemann’s Framboise with my chocolate mousse dessert. 

For the evening, we went to a UCLA alumni event.  Had some very interesting conversations and actually met a couple from New Jersey who knew one of my college friends and live very close to our Paris apartment.  Small world. 

I wanted to make note of something – we’re out and about every day, and, unlike in LA, aren’t bringing our cars with us to carry our stuff.  So, I’ve been carrying a messenger bag.  With the weather starting to turn, I’ve been packing it with a scarf, gloves, various maps of the city, a French language guide, and…an umbrella.

Which brings me to my next topic, weather!  Yes, I really do believe that Los Angeles has about the best weather in the world.  So, I’m spoiled.  But, I’m not complaining here about the weather that arrives – we’re prepared, albeit grudgingly, for cold and rain.  I’m complaining about how BADLY(!) the weather forecasters are at predicting the weather.  At least 4-5 times we’ve been surprised by rain.  Surprised when the forecast SAID 0% likelihood of rain.  Maxine and I find it odd given that a) the weather comes from the west, so the forecasters could just call over there, and b) Paris is a pretty big city – you’d expect them to try fairly hard to get the forecasts right.  Anyway, we’ve been rained on.  And now my messenger bag pretty much permanently includes an umbrella.

Thursday

We ate raw meat.  Maxine covered our lunch at Hugo Desnoyer in another entry, so I’ll only quote what a friend said when I told him we were going to do this, “When I go out to eat, I prefer that the chef do some work, like cooking the food”.  It was a good meal though.

Thursday was also Beaujolais Nouveau day.  It’s a made up festival, the 3^rd Thursday in November and when the first of the first wines from that year’s harvest is available.  There’s nothing special about Beaujolais that would make its wines the first to be available, but the head of one of their wineries decades ago came up with this as a marketing angle.  And it’s worked!  The wine is air shipped everywhere, to the US and to Japan (to pick 2 different directions).

We made plans to try some of the new wines with a new friend.  It wasn’t tricky to find a bar serving the Beaujolais Nouveau’s, they’re everywhere.  Our goal though was to find it at a less touristic place and also one, ideally, that served good (in a relative sense) Beaujolais Nouveau.  Found an article that listed a dozen places, picked one, and agreed to meet there at 7.  They weren’t open yet!  So, found another place down the street and had some of the general purpose, quite mediocre, stuff at 7E/glass.  Basically, a rip off.  However, after that bad start we went back to the now open L’Entrée des Artistes and had a nice evening.  We 3 were probably the only Americans in this tiny bar.  Dark.  60’s American Jazz posters on the wall.  Tables pushed aside to make room for everyone.  Unlabeled bottles behind the bar.  A small green metal tool box for a cash register.  You know, typical.  At least it was my ideal for how to do this!

Tried 2 different Beaujolais Nouveaux at 4E each, played balloon soccer with another patron (to my credit, I did it with a glass of wine in my hand and mostly we passed the balloon back and forth with head shots).  I’m not a soccer player, but balloons move pretty slowly.

One last digression…  Every day, in fact many times every day, we use our map of the Paris Metro system.  So, I offer praise to Harry Beck…  In 1931 as a personal project (meaning, because he believed it should be done – he wasn’t paid to do it), he designed the London Underground Map.  You might not have seen it, but if you’ve ever seen the underground rail system map for any city, and in some cases, the above ground mass transit maps, they all look the same.  Broadly speaking, they look like electrical diagrams with straight lines, the various lines colored differently, not much in the way of references to what’s above ground.   In other words, plain and simple, BUT, easy to figure out.  Personally I think it’s incredibly cool that Harry Beck’s idea of what a transit system map should look like has been replicated around the world.  Look him up if you’re curious.  I just know that in our current era of Steve Jobs where we’ve over-personalized our homage to design (you know he really didn’t design the iPhone, right?), in this case it really was the work of one person.

Hugo Desnoyer

Lunch on Thursday, November 20

On Thursday we had lunch at Hugo Desnoyer.  This is actually a butcher shop known for the quality of its meat and, especially for steak tartare.  Hugo won best steak tartare in Paris.  Neither of us had ever eaten steak tartare so this seemed like a good place to try it.

It is actually a butcher shop with seating for about a dozen people in the shop.

Maxine began with two house terrines -- rabbit and veal with pistachios.  The rabbit was especially good.  

Tom had quiche lorraine since he knew he'd be eating plenty of meat in the next course.

Then we had the steak tartare.  It was delicious!  There were onions and herbs added to the hand-chopped meat.  I was afraid it would be mushy so I asked for the coarser chop while Tom had the classic version.  Not something I would order every day, but definitely a good experience.

The staff, including Hugo Desnoyer, had a great attitude -- professional, friendly, helpful.  I wish I'd thought to take a picture with Hugo when he introduced himself and shook our hands or when he helped serve our table.  Hopefully we'll have a chance to go back for another lunch.  Next time maybe carpaccio and one of the cooked beef dishes.

Pictures from Nov 18 - 21

Some random scenes from walking around.  First, a typical bakery window...

We've noticed here in the 16th any number of private streets.  I'm not at all sure if they're new or always been there, but it interesting to see this in Paris.  Privacy... 

A cafe named "The Cat Who Smoked".  Odd...

From the second bar we went to for Beaujolais Nouveau

The wines we drank there.  Babies!

Pictures for Nov 15-17

Some pictures from the Cat Stevens concert...

 

 And from the Hokusai Exhibit at the Grand Palais (although these aren't actually Hokusai's -- I was told no pictures, even w/out flash)

The Food Market...  You sometimes know more than you want about the food...

Saturday, Nov 15 thru Monday Nov 17

Saturday Maxine was in charge of the daytime activity, so naturally we went to an outdoor food market.  Food markets in France can be pretty extensive.  Not as much in the way of prepared foods as we’ve seen in some in the US (e.g. Portland), but they can be quite large and worth walking through.  This one, since it’s in a more residential neighborhood, seemed to have lower prices than the Raspail Market where we went our first week in town.  They had a stand dedicated to potatoes.  They also had one that I thought was amusing, a stand dedicated to spherical things to eat.  That’s not how they identify it, but if you consider that all they sold were olives and nuts…

From Maxine – I can’t believe it’s taken a month for me to find the outdoor market on President Wilson adjacent to our neighborhood!!!!  This is a great market with a wide variety of vendors, good prices, some delicious looking prepared food.  We bought a roasted chicken and potatoes for a future dinner.  We also bought a camembert from one of the cheese stands.  You tell them when you plan to eat the cheese and they find one that is appropriately ripe.  The market is open on Wednesday and Saturday -- I plan to come here at least once a week for shopping. 

Saturday night we went to a free wine tasting!  Unlimited wine.  People to mingle with.  A great event.  Recall that very early in this trip we went on that bicycling adventure – the one where we all pedaled while sitting around a table drinking wine and otherwise enjoying ourselves.  As I type this it strikes me that there really is a difference being here in France.  Biking isn’t something you do strenuously in stretchy clothes.  It’s a social thing!  (I realize that using that experience to generalize is a reach, but humor me!)  Well, the guy who organized that biking event also organized this wine tasting.  He was contacted by a French market research company interested in learning what kinds of wines Americans liked, with the thought that they would export the most popular ones to the US.  We were, of course, happy to oblige in this market research project.  We saw some people we’d already met at other events, and met some new people.

Sunday was really about one thing.  We went to the Cat Stevens concert.  Maxine and I are both old enough that we remember his music from our teenage years.  He stopped touring in 1976 – the concert video from his last US tour was actually found (!) in 2004 and released.  It was filmed (I think they probably DID use film) at my old college and, when I watched it 2 years ago, I recognized people in the audience!  So, we were excited to have a chance to see Cat Stevens in person.

The concert was great.  He made some odd choices about the songs he performed, doing 5-6 covers of other peoples’ work.  And he didn’t do enough of his own great songs which, of course, isn’t possible since his work could fill several concerts.  BUT, he did a wonderful job with the 10 or so “oldies” that he played, including an INCREDIBLE rendition of “Father and Son”, which is a dialog between a father and son.  It seemed all the more poignant since, when he would have last performed this, his age was the “son” and, now at 66, he’s the “father”.  The acoustics were outstanding and we could hear every word of every song.  And it was different to be in Paris and hear 6,000 French people singing in English.  Maxine was seated next to a French woman and they both enjoyed singing along and together.  At the end the woman hugged Maxine and thanked her for sharing the joy of the event.

Someone in the audience put it up on Youtube.  Note as they zoom in that you can see a sign saying “Paris”.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ztHwu75Phvc

Monday started with an errand.  A month ago we bought SIM chips for our phones – they’ve proved absolutely invaluable.  The trick is that they’re sold in one month usage increments.  Meaning that we had to renew and pay for another month, now.  I tried last night and again this morning to do it on line, but Bouygues’ site wouldn’t accept the payment, so we made the trek over to the store.  In all, counting the walk and the wait in the store, we spent nearly 2 hours on this should-have-been-simple errand.  We just sigh and say “France…”.  The guy at the store even said it was normal for the website to be down.

In the afternoon we had timed entrance tickets for the Hokusai exhibit at the Grand Palais.  They took over this grand, two story building to run a retrospective on a 19^th century Japanese painter/wood block/magna artist.  Despite it being a Monday afternoon, in November (for an exhibit running for 5 months), it was mobbed!  I guess we could have assumed it would be since we read a write up of the exhibit LAST SUMMER, in the LA TIMES!  We enjoyed it, and as a souvenir, I bought a book with prints from the exhibit.

From there we took a metro over to drop off our rent check.  We’d intended to spend the afternoon walking our way over, enjoying looking at streets and a neighborhood we hadn’t seen, but it was raining.  The rain surprised us – nothing in the forecast, and we’d trusted the forecast and did not have umbrellas.  So, it was a rushed visit, with a stop for coffee (Maxine) and hot chocolate (me).  Dinner at home after a stop at the local Nicholas wine store since the rain had us cocooning

Some other random observations and happenings from the past few days.

1       Christmas is coming!  The local café has 2 trees up with red lights on them.  And, the holiday market at the Champs Elysees is open, with perhaps 200 stands selling everything from stocking caps and candles to hot mulled wine and sausages.  It’s not that far, and I imagine as the season progresses, we’ll be back there more than once.

2       There are differences in the quality of baked goods.  At home we probably buy one loaf of bread/month, but here we’re buying about 5 loaves a week.  It’s that much better, very fresh and often still warm, and an accompaniment to meals.  When we were in the Bastille neighborhood last week, we found a bakery even better than the best of our local ones, a place called Ble Sucre.  Maxine tried a kouign amann  there – a pastry from Brittany of brioche with layers of butter and sugar – that she absolutely loved.  It doesn’t seem as common as other pastries but she’ll definitely be looking for more versions as we continue our bakery “research”.  And, an interesting thing I noticed today.  Many, many times we’ve seen people with baguettes poking out of their backpacks or bags.  It reminds me of LA, except in LA it would be purple yoga mats sticking out.

3       The other day, walking Emmy in our neighborhood, we passed a building with a French police man guarding it.  We asked him what he was guarding and he reluctantly told us that it was the Israeli ambassador’s residence.  Note, this isn’t a secret address or anything.

4       Historically France has limited stores to 2 official seasonal sales/year.  The winter one will be shortly before we pack up and return to the US (we’ve already got it on our calendars). But, we’ve also noticed quite a number of spot sales on this trip.  Don’t yet know what the story is and why they’ve relaxed the laws.

5       This is a city where men wear scarves and that suits me fine.  I hurt my neck (osteoarthritis) wrestling in high school and my neck is most comfortable when it’s warm.  So, I own perhaps 8 scarves and brought 4 of them on the trip.  It’s hard to wear them in LA, both because the weather is warm, but also men just don’t wear scarves much unless the weather really demands it.  Here in Paris, it’s nice to be among people who wear scarves all the time!

6       Things we brought with us that have proved to be even more important to our comfortable existence than we expected:  cell phones, the netbook computer, and the Bing translator software (installed on the phones and ipads).

7       Emmy has proved to be our way to meet and talk to Parisians, as I hoped she would be.  Today at the cell phone store, she wandered over to the businessman in front of us in line, and we had a conversation with him while he played with Emmy.  She also “met” a mother and daughter in line behind us.  And, this evening, we met a French/New York couple after Emmy started to play with their dog.  Finally, on multiple occasions, Maxine has run into a woman at our neighborhood park and they’ve talked to the point that Maxine greets Enzo by name and the woman does the same with Emmy!

The Week of November 10th

We’re settling into living in Paris now.  Shopping.  House cleaning.  Dinners out.  Evenings in.  Reading.  Watching TV or movies.  Taking Emmy through the neighborhood.  Just life.  Trying to understand in what ways this life is the same and in what ways it is different than back in LA.

Monday was simply a day for catching up.  Our guests got up at 5:30AM to get ready to head back to the US and to some extent we got up with them…  Spent the rest of the day cleaning up, and catching up.  Maxine introduced me to Casino, a real supermarket about a 15 minute walk from our apartment.  It changes around how you shop when you know you’re going to wheel it home, or carry it home in a backpack.  But, it’s part of figuring out life.  Of course, if we’re ever really ambitious, we’ve been told that if you buy over $70 at the store (not that difficult) they deliver it for free.  We’re just not sure how the logistics would work given that this is a 4 unit building and the front door is locked.  We suppose we could give them the digicode (electronic passcode) that gets them in the first door, but then they’d leave the groceries in the first floor hallway…

Tuesday was, as we talked about in that other post, Armistice Day.  As part of our living at home experience, Maxine made dinner both Monday and Tuesday nights.  This isn’t to say that Maxine making dinner was an accomplishment, far from it.  Just suggesting our migration to life like at home.

Wednesday we rallied for exploration of a new neighborhood.  We decided on the Bastille area (yes, that Bastille, as in “storming of” to start the French revolution).  It seems that development in Paris is happening in these decade long waves.  Historically areas like the 16^th (where we are), the 6^th (where we stayed last time), and the 7^th arrondissements were popular.  New restaurants.  Interesting shopping.  People living their lives.  But, the 16^th and the 6^th/7^th have become pricey/popular and that causes stagnation.  So people move to cheaper areas.  A decade ago it was the Marais, which has now “grown up” and now it’s moved on to Bastille (which is roughly adjacent to Marais).  Both of these were cheaper areas, so people could more readily open stores and restaurants.  And, the restaurants (especially) are less stagnant.  Which brings me to my point…

It’s starting to seem to us that finding restaurants with good reviews, which have been “discovered” in English language publications, is something of a kiss of death.  The restaurant gets locked into a menu.  Prices go up!  The dining rooms are filled with English speakers.  The French have moved on.  That’s happened to 3 of the places that we adored last time we were here.  We adored them 8 years ago and now, having been to each of them this trip, we’d never go back.

So, Wednesday we tried a place called Bistrot Paul Bert.  “Back in the day”, it was this “rough, traditional, off the beaten path, authentic bistrot”.  Now, it’s a place trying to maintain that same attitude while English speakers (not everyone certainly, but enough from what we could see) throw money at them.  A nice enough meal, but it has Maxine and I thinking that to really ENJOY dining out we have to rely less on reviews.  Not sure what we’ll replace them with… 

Lunch there was rich enough that we pretty much skipped dinner.

Thursday we did some shopping.  Biggest thing we did was buy concert tickets.  Wednesday night I was watching some old concert videos and happened across some from Cat Stevens (who hasn’t toured since 1976, but I’d prefer not to get into politics here).  As I was watching the YouTube videos, Maxine and I both said that, if he did tour, we’d be first in line to get tickets.  THEN, the surprise…  I went to his website and not only is he doing a 15 city (across the world) tour, he was going to be in Paris this coming Sunday.  So, to end this long story, our big errand was to go to the FNAC store and buy tickets.

Dinner Thursday was an expression of what I said above about finding good food in different ways.  We went to La Fine Mousse, a craft beer place at the edge of the 11^th (an out of the way/out of favor arrondissement).  Interestingly, La Fine Mousse is also walking distance from the other great craft beer place we went to several weeks ago, Le Trois 8.  This was nice.  In both cases, there really wasn’t an option to buy a dinner, but both had outstanding charcuterie plates that we ordered.  The crowd was young, we probably had 20 years on anyone there.  But, it wasn’t a problem. 

I had Correzienne Brewing’s (in the Dorgogne region of France) Imperial IPA (8.5%) while Maxine started with BrewDog’s Old World Imperial Stout (9.5%).  We’re both fans of BrewDog’s beers – they’re in Aberdeen Scotland, they’ve got a pub in London that we visited twice 2 years ago, as an ego thing they make some very high alcohol limited release beers.  And, 2 friends of mine got to brew with the owners for a reality TV thing this summer.

OK, for our second round, I had St. Rieul Brewing’s Silvanecte Triple (8.5%).  Maxine’s developing an interest in cider so she tried Val de la Seiche’s Cidre Brut (5%), which was great.

Friday the weather reports predicted rain and it came true.  Spent the day at “home”.  Cleaned up some more.  Among other things, I cleaned bathrooms and Maxine did laundry.  Did some reading and planning.  And we’re heading out for a truffle oriented dinner tonight at Terres de Truffes.  We knew the restaurant from our previous trip and found a Groupon for a truffle dinner.  As I type this, what occurs to me is that this dinner flies in the face of everything I said above about restaurants.  We’ll see…

Friday night's truffle dinner

This foie gras tasted much better than it looked!  And the center is both chopped and sliced truffles.

Tom had beef (with more foie gras on top) and truffled mashed potatoes.  He thought it was great.

Maxine had shrimp with truffled risotto.  See all the sliced truffles on top.  Delicious!

It's a little harder to incorporate truffles into dessert.  But those dark specs are truffles added to the sauces.  This is a baba au rhum with rum sauce using French (i.e. sugar cane rum vs. molasses rum).  Tom could actually tell by the taste.

Chocolate lava cake with a truffled caramel sauce.

What we saw while waiting for the bus home on Friday night:  Fauchon has Christmas decorations in the window.

Church of the Madeleine across the street.

And finally, a funny name for a restaurant -- "Bistro without panties"

Armistice Day, Tuesday November 11th

Veteran's Day in the US, the holiday was initially created to honor the end of World War I.  A relatively big deal in the US, it's a very large holiday in Europe, for the obvious reasons.

Part of the benefit to being here for such a long stay is that we can take the time to go to more locally interesting events.  The Armistice Day celebrations closed down the Arc de Triomphe and ALL the roads leading up to it, as well (we assume) as the Metro underneath.  For us, not an inconvenience but an opportunity to do something largely attended by the French.

We'd read that the signer of the armistice agreement for the Allies was French Marshall Foch.  His name was given to the spoke road off the Arc where we take Emmy daily.  It's very wide, tree lined, with those stretches of grass.  The agreement was signed on November 11th at 11AM, and that's when the French President, Hollande, lays a wreath at the French tomb of the unknown soldier, which is located underneath the Arc.

We're sorry, but our pictures for this aren't terribly good.  We were in the shade (cold!) and pretty much everything was in the shadows.  Also, we'd assumed that this would be about parades and marching bands and it seemed to be more of an event of recognition.  So, while there was a brief parade of horses that accompanied Hollande, that was it.  Bands and military guards surrounded the wide roadway circle of the Arc, but the police were keeping everyone very far away.  It looked like most foreign ambassadors attended, including the US.  We saw embassy cars (quite a few Mercedes) drive by from our vantage point on the Champs Elysee (which was otherwise closed!).  Without the large screens, it wouldn't have been possible to see much, but we were glad to be there anyway.  Here are our pictures:

The horse parade that escorted Hollande

Troops being dismissed following the event.

Difficult to see, but the guy in the center of the picture leading the group of men is Hollande.  He shook a LOT of hands today.

Nice picture of the Arc de Triomphe with an extremely large French flag hanging from the center.

Soldiers heading away after the event.

French TV interviewer commenting on the event.

Pictures from the Weekend of Nov 7/8/9th

Friday night, the waiter serving the Aligot (cheesy mashed potatoes)

Posing after dinner that night at the restaurant

The Gare de Lyon train station (from the restaurant I had lunch at Saturday)

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Dinner chez nous (Dinner at our apartment)

Some pictures from the Bateaux Mouches boat Sunday night

(I could NOT get that picture to rotate properly!)

More from the boat ride

Only other place in the world you could see this sight would be the Las Vegas Strip...