We arrived quite late Friday night and had been warned well in advance that weekends in Paris can be
overwhelming, so we started out slow. Saturday morning we explored the 10
th arrondissement, the
neighborhood of the apartment I have rented for these two weeks. It is a quiet area, away from the tourist attractions that is filled with a range of diverse people speaking a great number of languages. That afternoon we followed a self guided tour along the Seine, taking hours to weave through the oldest parts of the city. And the guidebooks are right - the lines that stretched out in front of
Notre Dame seemed endless. We ended our walk at an Alsatian brasserie where I had an amazing bowl of
cassoulet and Aaron ordered the
choucroute, a pile of sauerkraut topped with assorted sausages. He kept commenting on how the liver sausage was good, but so odd. I had been so taken with my food that I hadn't really been listening to him, but then suddenly heard and saw what he was talking about. That's not liver sausage. Then what is it? Blood sausage! He grimaced, then shrugged and said he was glad he had tasted it before he knew what it was because it wasn't all that bad. He then proceeded to polish off the entire plate.
Sunday we did a second self guided tour through the Marais, which began in the 14th century gardens of Charles V and then wove through trendy boutiques to the Pletz, Paris's oldest Jewish Quarter where people were lined up down the middle of the very narrow Rue des Rosiers to get what we would later find out was very delicious fallafel.
By this time I had a sense of the lay of the land and I spent the rest of the afternoon sculpting out and confirming plans for the rest of the two weeks. What's next to what and what closes down on which days. It is a pretty exciting plan.
No comments:
Post a Comment