Paris Journal 2009 – Barbara Joy Cooley Home: barbarajoycooley.com
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At last, the Big Quiet Holiday
Weekend is completely over. Paris will
gradually start coming back to frenzied life now. Yesterday, we went out a bit
later than usual and had difficulty finding one of the two newspapers we
usually buy – the International Herald
Tribune – mostly because so many Presse shops were closed. In the places that were open, the papers
had sold out sooner. But work kept us busy during
the day, so it just was not convenient to go out earlier. We’d have the papers delivered, except that
the gardienne collects them along with the mail in the general mailbox for
the building, and often she doesn’t deliver them until the afternoon or even
the next day or day after. We do have
a key to the mailbox, but the only way to make delivery work is to get down
to the mailbox before 9 or 9:30 and hope that she hasn’t collected the mail
yet. It is a bit of a hassle. After buying Le Parisien and walking around to try
to find other Presse shops or newsstands, we finally gave up and went for our
evening stroll on the quiet Allée des Cygnes in the middle of the Seine. It was a lovely evening. We walked from the Allée down the boulevard
de Grenelle and checked out La Gitane for dinner, but it is closed on Mondays
in August. So we decided to finally
try Le Suffren again, ten years after experiencing crude service there. The service at Le Suffren was
just fine this time. The place was
busy with locals dining on the special of the day, mussels called moules de bouchot. According to the web site at http://www.pleinemer.com/bouchot_travail_en.htm,
the “Bouchot mussel grows on wooden poles in the sea so that it is out of
reach of predators. It is the best mussel: it is yellow-orange and its taste
is unique. . . . Bouchot mussels are easily
identifiable: the shell is small, the fish inside is fleshy and yellow or
orange. Usually there is neither sand nor parasite (crabs…) inside. Their
taste has nothing to do with any other mussel. . . . Moreover, to protect
consumers, mussels sea farmers created the ‘Moule de Bouchot’ trademark.
Thus, bouchot mussels are sold with a label with a logo.” Indeed this pot was different
from the last pot of mussels I consumed.
That was at the Belgian chain restaurant, Chez Leon. The preparation at Chez Leon is one that I
like – in a thin sauce of spices, tomatoes, white wine, and butter. It is the way that Tom and I prepare
mussels, on the rare occasion that we do. But these Bouchot mussels were
very nice indeed, and I enjoyed them with the accompanying homemade
fries. However, it was a bit much; I
could not finish the entire pot. Tom had the carpaccio of beef
again, along with fries. We even ate dessert. Tom ordered a very good lemon pie and I had
the crème brulee. The crème brulee was
okay, but it is better at La Gauloise and even better at Bistrot de la Grille
Saint Germain. This morning I went out to get
the papers earlier in the day. I
stopped to check on the price of a pair of earrings I’ve been admiring in a
nearby shop window on the rue du Commerce, just north of the rue du
Theatre. The shop was closed for the
long weekend, and so today was my first opportunity to ask. I did notice the shop, but not
the earrings, earlier in the summer.
Nobody shops there, it seems.
That’s not a good sign. Indeed, when I stepped in and
said bonjour, the shop girl looked mildly annoyed because she was busy
texting someone on her mobile phone. I
told her what I was interested in and she muttered, not even a full sentence,
“vingt euros,” or so I thought. I repeated it, and she said, in
very garbled French, “CENT vingt euros.”
A hundred and twenty euros. I
actually like the earrings enough that I might have even considered buying them
if she’d been nicer, but really the price is too high for what they are. At any rate, I think she’d prefer not to be
bothered with making a sale. Whoever owns that shop should
look for another employee to replace the bag of lazy bones who is there now. I very politely said “Okay,
merci, bonne journee,” and exited the shop while she said nothing at
all. What horrible manners! Today I think we will make one
of our pilgrimages to the FedEx office/shop on the boulevard Haussmann to
send a packet off to W.W. Norton in New York.
This will be one of our few forays into the right bank this summer. |
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
The magnificent one-man-band, Bernard Constant, performing on
Sunday afternoon in the passage to the Tuileries under the right bank end of
the Passerelle Solferino.
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