Retour à Paris

Gosh, it's hard to believe that it's been nearly seven months since we decamped the City of Light for our newly adopted and already-beloved Bath. Paris has for us already become that camp friend you swore you'd write every day and visit the following week.... but visit we finally did, last weekend.

The impetus was my friend C's surprise 40th birthday shindig. The surprise's utter success can really only be attributed to me, since during our Devon weekend in August I suggested she supplement her 40th birthday getaway in Spain with a spiffy soiree in Paris, then continued to badger her by e-mail over the next four weeks with nagging inquiries as to the planning of said fête . Then, I had to spend the next three months awkwardly dodging her e-mails and pretending we were not coming to Paris anytime in the near future, and certainly not the weekend of November 20.

The trip across the Channel should have been a breeze, jet due to various lame excuses (which do, somehow, sound less irritating and faux in French) cited by ground crew, was delayed for over an hour. Add a forty-minute wait at CDG for our sad and tattered MacLaren poussette (yup, still sounds dirty) and an extremely trafficky commute into Paris, and it was around 4:30 by the time we rolled up to the fabulously campy, Art Deco Hotel Lutetia – just fifty yards from our old apartment on Boulevard Raspail (gotta love kids and their special senses of time and place – when we asked Josie what she was most looking forward to about the trip, she said "Going to my old apartment and playing with all my toys.").

Starving (I had fantasized about a leisurely lunch at my favorite tartine restaurant on the Rue Cherche-Midi and failed to pack any snacks of substance) and more than a little bedraggled, Josie and I rushed right over to my friend E's beautiful penthouse apartment for a play and catch-up with her daughter, Josie's faithful copine CW and bouncing Baby Brains. Then a mad dash through the magical Grande Epicerie for sorts of staples, from foie gras to truffle butter to cranberry sauce (for next week's Thanksgiving to Remember). Thankfully we've stayed in touch with one of our fabulous babysitters, who offered to pitch in both evenings and watch Josie; we were thus able to venture back out for a magic Paris date night.

Magic Paris Date Night as a tourist doesn't, as it turns out, go so differently from Date Night as a Paris native. All the best-laid plans go by the wayside. First I'd been determined to whisk Jeff over to his favorite gallery, the Grand Palais, for the much-lauded Monet exhibit. Strike One, as the exhibit is sold out through its entire run (until March!). I was somewhat placated with the discovery that Paris Photo, a fabulous photography expo, was again running in the Carrousel de Louvre. So off we went. But teetering slowly in my cute Paris-night-out shoes, dawdling to goggle dreamily at the Seine, the romantic buildings, the Tuileries in the moonlight, we didn't roll up to the Louvre until nearly 8pm. And what time did Paris Photo close? You got it – 8pm.

Our utter failure to absorb any culture did present, however, an opportunity to visit another Parisian landmark we'd missed during our two-year stay: Cafe Marly. Date Night was saved as we sat, gazing out the steamy windows at I.M. Pei's pyramid and dozens of snogging couples and sipping champagne (only sips for moi, don't worry!).

The nighttime view from Cafe Marly. I did not take this picture.

The day was capped off by an exquisite and always-entertaining evening with E and her dashing, irreverent husband H. After a typically long, large, three-course meal including venison, squid, sea bream and duck at the delicious L'Epi Dupin, we (after nearly being bounced out for lewd gestures and worse jokes) retired to the Lutetia's cruise-ship bar for a nightcap; but Jeff and H brought along their two-man show. One might not guess that slightly foppish Belgians and New Jersey Jews share uncannily similar –read: raunchy – senses of humor, but this is, in fact, the case; evenings with E and H always end up with many laughs, more than a few tears, and the inevitable bending of several laws of morality (during our farewell dinner at Josephine "Chez Dumonnet," to cite one example, H tortured our waiter, Jeff tortured the French language, and I somehow landed in a meat locker with the cute sous chef).

After days of foreboding forecasts from weather.com, we awoke on Saturday to a sunny, cloudless sky. We were determined to squish all our favorite things into the next eight hours and I daresay we did pretty dang well. After breakfast at our neighborhood Pain Quotidien, where we bumped into not one but two families we knew, we trekked back across the Seine so Josie could run around the Louvre courtyard.

Then we gave Josie the run of the rest of the day; she wanted to go to the "Toy Store" so we sauntered over to the fabulous Galeries Lafayette (pausing to remark that the reasons for our mutual weight gain upon moving to Bath were becoming quite clear, as it wasn't yet 11 a.m. and we'd already walked several miles) where Josie delighted at the store's lovely, weird, totally-French Christmas displays. Inside a pleasant saleswoman spent ten minutes helping me, totally rusty Francais and all, find several gifts (Paris, how you've grown!) and an impeccable, imperial French maman shushed Josie severely for playing the display toy piano too exuberantly (ahhh Paris... you haven't changed a bit!).

Rockette Dancers in leather dominatrix masks...Christmas in Paris.

Laden with overpriced toys –including a large stuffed Snoopy for Le Deuxieme (plush Snoopies are very hard to find!) – we then hopped onto the subway to Trocadero, rounding the nautical museum for the money shot of the Eiffel Tower. The look on Josie's face was absolutely priceless; beaming, she jumped out of the stroller to give the Tower her signature "hug." If there is one symbol that ties our family and Josie's memories to Paris it will be that controversial pile of twisted iron (I for one, still absolutely love it too).

Josie and her 2 favorite bods of steel

After another hour of frantic shopping (Josie clothes, more food and candy, baby gifts) and a quick primp, it was off to the Event of the Year, C's fab and fashionable party. C's culinarily gifted husband J had truly outdone himself, with a foot-long hors d'oeuvres menu and an extremely comprehensive cocktail list that included both "appletini" and "apple martini" – as a forced teetotaler I wasn't able to fully investigate the difference between the two.

Stuffed painfully back into my "cute shoes" – my feet had expanded to twice their normal size after all that walking – I managed to catch up with all of my crazy, beautiful Parisienne copines. Jeffrey happily drank for both of us, making his way down and back up the cocktail menu and sneaking off with Seattle M's wacky French Canadian husband to smoke "cigarillos". Something tells me, however, that this bromance may be a bit one-sided:

So then this one time, at math camp...

Angels, on the other hand, always stick together.

Sunday morning we awoke to a comforting and more typically November Paris drizzle, and after packing popped out to my ultimate Parisian happy place... the Marche Biologique. Holding hands, Josie and I meandered dreamily through the corridor of culinary wonders: pudgy potirons, fleshy, fresh squids, pungent handmade soaps, and of course, potato pancakes, which Jeff gamely volunteered to procure from his age-old nemesis. Same old play, same old lines.

Jeff: Trois galettes des pommes de terre, s'il vous plait.
Cranky Potato Pancake Man: Would you like them hot?
Jeff: Oui.
Cranky Potato Pancake Man: So, no bag?
Jeff: I would like them in a bag, please.
Cranky Potato Man: So you are not going to eat them now?
Jeff: Yes, I am going to eat them now.
(Five minutes later, we find Jeff clutching three steaming pancakes sans sac)


But my favorite organic farm stand owner was as predictably nice as Potato Man was cranky, insisting we take three juicing oranges for free (when all we were buying were three clementines totaling 1 Euro 50!). As vigorously as I defend English cuisine and English grocery stores (adore Waitrose), there is really nothing to replace the Marche Biologique. I nearly burst into tears (again) remembering other rainy mornings, and the often unfamiliar items I'd bring home to assemble delicious Sunday night dinners: chestnuts, bavettes de boeuf, lamb shanks, farm-fresh eggs, runny, smelly cheeses.

In fact I'd say 30% of this trip was spent wandering around misty-eyed – with nostalgia, largely for our initial few months and how difficult everything was. Two years ago I was still a relatively new mom, and had left a comfortable suburban life, with everything I might need just a short car ride to Target away, for a completely strange neighborhood and a major language barrier, suddenly having to procure every necessity on foot – pushing stroller – on elevators, on buses, on metro lines requiring carrying said stroller down death-defying staircases.

I sniffled for the lonely Thanksgiving when I cooked a chicken and Jeff's favorite sweet potatoes, for the Christmas the three of us wandered the Marais and then ate a dinner completely assembled from Picard (the amazing frozen foods store). The difficulty of it all really helped me grow and stretch as a person – and our little family formed an even tighter bond than we might otherwise have.

The locals were sometimes rude. The private French lessons were excruciating. The existence often felt isolated. But I loved every minute of it. Paris, je t'aime.