Things we won't & will miss about Paris...

We are almost ready to leave, so we decided to make a list of will and won't miss.

WE WON'T MISS: 

Josh: dog poop, crowded metro, my apartment, the accent on french words, pickpockets, the rain, rats, the homeless, homeworks, the teachers...

Isa: the waiters in the restaurant, the teachers, the bank, the drunks and the homeless all over the city, the dirt, the rain, the dry-cleaning close to home, the security doors in the metro, the stairs to our front door, the smell in the metro, the weirdos all over town, the hairsalons, our noisy neighbors, the dust on the furnitures, carrying luggages in the metro without elevators, the clercks in public offices, Orange telephone customer service...

WE WILL MISS: 

Josh: crepes, baguettes, pain au chocolat, the view from the Eiffel Tower, the museums, my friends,
casual conversations with people you just met, going to buy groceries across the street all by myself, staying at home while mom and dad are having dinner in a close by restaurant, macaroons...

Isa: the musicians in the metro, the fromagerie and the boulangerie at the corner of the street, picnic in the public parks with cheese and wine, the old buildings, the cabblestone, the health system, my friends, the moules frites, the escargots, the courtyard of our apartment, free museums for the kids, the ads , my colleagues, the monokini, the farmer market every other day, the English bookstore close to the school, my Monday morning coffe-breaks with the other moms, walking around the city at night without fear, not using a car, the poems, french books, the chocolate store, crepes, les baguettes aux cereals, my Navigo card, rock salt, my son talking in French, smoking in a bistro, concerts in churches...

LACMA in L.A. or Bourdelle in Paris?

Hard to tell...last week I decided to visit a small museum close by....actually smaller than the Louvre but quite huge! It's the Musée Bourdelle, in the 15th. As soon as I walked in, I saw this statue ...

and I had the feeling I've already seen it somewhere....then I realized I saw the same statue back in L.A., at the LACMA:

The museum is interesting, very secluded and quiet: the sculptures, both in the gardens and in the halls,  are impressive for the dimensions.

An unexpected discover in the middle of the city. When you have completed all the major museums in this city...

Puck and other "encounters" at the Bois de Boulogne

Today, for some inexplicable reason, it wasn't raining...such a surprise! After spending one week in planning how many raincoats and umbrellas and boots I should have packed to go to the Bois de Boulogne, all of a sudden I realized that a simple t-shirt would just do it. I've never been to this park, even thought it's just around the corner where I work. So I thought that the regular planning with my interactive metro-line application would be enough. Soooo wrong. As soon as we were out of the metro, I looked at the directions on my smart-phone...and I realized that this stuff is not smart at all. How on earth can a GPS application give me directions when it can't locate me without less than 4 km approximation? That's the entire Bois de Boulogne. As a matter of fact, we got lost. We went all the way north just to realize that we were heading toward the wrong direction...the blue arrow still immobile on my screen. Stupid app! Finally I got in touch with a friend of mine who was already at the Jardins de Shakespeare and she gave me some advice. So we walked...approximately half an hour. 

It was 2 pm and there were thousands of families in the park, playing, sunbathing, reading or just having their picnic. Kind of an awkward setting for prostitution, right? In fact when Josh asked me what was that "lady" doing, with her short skirt, sitting right in the middle of the curb...I didn't even have the time to come up with some ridiculous and totally false explanation...I just splatted the truth right in front of him: nothing, honey, she's just selling sex for money! Yeap! Like that....Just the time for him to turn around and give her another quick interrogative look, that the "lady" was carried away by a client in his car. No more comments from my son. I know I can't hide him forever from the ugliness of this world, but I wish I was less direct.

We finally joined the group of parents from the school, had a quick lunch then we entered the open-air theater where the "Midsummer Night's Dream" was played. Four girls from Josh's class were acting in the play and they were absolutely wonderful.  The setting was incredible: the Théâtre de Verdure is considered, for good reasons, one of the most beautiful open-air theatres in the world.

The audience sits on a large lawn around which are planted the flowers, trees and plants, so that the stage is completely natural and perfect for the play: the actors came on stage from different entrances and exits, and there are all sorts of narrow paths and steps for the cast to gamble around. The Théâtre de Verdure is worth a visit even if no performance is scheduled. Of course, you'll have to work hard to find it, first! 

The picture above? There is an explanation: the weather, this crazy Parisian weather, as usual played a trick on us: this time it wasn't the rain, quite the opposite. We spent 2 hours and 15 minutes burning and sweating under the torrid sun. Some of us literally collapsed!
Can't we just have a regular day? Can't there be something in between a thunderstorm and a Saharan sun? I'm puzzled...

Musée Nissim de Camondo - a history of power and betrayal

Today Mimi, Patricia and Kim and I visited the Musée Nissim de Camondo, close to Parc Monceau. 

I was honestly impressed both by the astonishing beauty of this home-museum as by the story of this unfortunate dynasty, now died out. Sepharditic Jews expelled from Spain, they moved to Istanbul where they made a fortune with their bank (they were known as the “Rothschilds of the East.”). Once they obtained the Austrian then the  Italian citizenship (thanks to the King of Italy, Victor Emmanuel II who made them “Counts”), they moved to Paris where they became art collectors … Isaac apparently spent a fortune to by  paintings by Monet, Cezanne and more than 30 works by Degas (painting he later donated to the Louvre!). His cousin Moise, who lived in this home as a child, decided to transform this home in a living collection of Louis XV and Louis XVI furniture and decorative arts: the building itself is inspired after the Petit Trianon, where both Madame de Pompadour and Marie Antoinette lived. 

 Inside, each room was especially made to showcase the precious  collections, certainly one of the greatest of 18th-century French furniture: it includes rarities such as a table topped with petrified wood that was once owned by Marie Antoinette, an outstanding collection of Chinese porcelain, fine French paintings, carpets from Versailles, tapestries from Aubusson illustrating La Fontaine fables, the fabulous Sèvres Buffon service with each piece decorated with a different bird, and the bronze and the silver from Russian Empress Catherine II, and so much more.  

One of my favorite area of the museum was the cuisine: approximately 30 by 40 feet in dimension, tiled in white and black from floor to ceiling, it contains the most extraordinary stove and oven I’ve ever seen. The stove occupies almost half of the kitchen, has eight burners which could accommodate enormous pots side by side. The oven, separated, has four ovens and two steam cabinets.  On the opposite wall there is a huge work counter with cabinets beneath and numerous long shelves above displaying beautiful pieces of copper cookware, bowls and more. 

The fifteen domestics who lived in this house would eat in the adjacent room, which communicates with the main kitchen through a “passe-plats”. 

We are not done yet: another door takes you to the chef’s office, which has a “vertical passé-plat” communicating to the above formal dining room. The chef was also the only one, among the servants, allowed to communicate through a telephone with the exterior (mainly with the butcher…). 

 Next to the door there is a “intercom” which, by means of lightened small bulbs, would allow the servants downstairs to easily understand in which room of the immense house their service was requested. Cool! 

There was even an elevator next to the main staircase… 

When Moise’s son, Nissim, died in WWI while fighting for France, he decided to make his house into a museum in memory of his son. His daughter Beatrice, together with her kids and former husband, were arrested by the the French Vichy government deported to Dracy and then to Auschwitz, where they all died. 

First of all, there was quite a discussion among us regarding how handsome was Nissim: some say he was an Andy Garcia type, some say he looked more like Sacha Baron Cohen....I'll let you decide. 

While walking through the different areas, I tried to imagine how difficult it must have been to be raised here as child, without being able to jump on sofas, without a chance of touching or moving thins around. Not certainly a child-proof home! Probably even the owner’s wife felt unease in this museum-home…in fact she fled with the horse trainer! But my mind was mostly taken by another thought: when we watched the movie about the family, I was shocked to learn that, despite the family donation to this Country in terms of lives and money, the French government didn't help them but actually approved their tragic deportation. So much for friendship!

I hope you enjoyed my blog on this amazing museum. As always, comments are welcome and encouraged. Cheers!

Château de Fontainebleau, with cranky boys and rude waiters..

It couldn't have been a better day for a visit to this Château. The weather was beautiful, no home works... But we had to work hard in order to make it a memorable day...First, the website provides you with wrong information to how to get there (the navette bus leaving hourly from rue de Rivoli? It's a scam! It just links you to a tour operator that organizes expensive day trip to the site). So my friend and I decided to meet at the metro station and go by train. It would have been a good idea...but the boys decided that they couldn't spend 25 minutes on the train without playing video games on our mobile phones ("We're getting bored! There's nothing to do, nothing to talk about, nothing to see", and so on). Somehow we survived this first whining episode. Only to find out that, once you arrive at the train station in Fontainbleau, the navette bus to the Château runs only once every hour.  So we had to wait a long time. That's when the second whining scene happened, with both kids starting together as a choir: "Why are we here? Another chateau? Can't we go back to Paris and stay home?". Relax, take a breath, don't react. 

After about an hour we finally reached our destination but we decided to make a deal with the kids: we would stop in the gardens first, have a quick lunch and then go to the castle. That was a good idea, since we enjoyed almost half hour of no-complains. 

The paradox is that they actually loved the visit to the castle, as much as we adults did. All the weapons, the furniture, the paintings, the rooms with the tapestries! The carved ceilings and the galleries...it was just gorgeous! 

It was early afternoon when we moved to the great gardens where the Canal and once again, after a short time, both the boys started again asking to go back to Paris. 

We gave up, we started to walk back and agreed on a playdate (as if they weren't spending time together....) but immediately turned down the offer when we found out that they only wanted to spend the rest of the afternoon in front of a videogame. Can't they just play without thinking obsessively at the latest game version? Whatever! They are both smart, lovely and great kids. Just do the right thing! 

Before going back we sat down at a coffe-shop and ordered some ice-cream....wrong! 

As soon as Josh asked for a personalized version of their offers in the menu, the waiter (obviously non American!) answered him, rudely:" No, you can't have it. It's Sunday, it's 5 pm, there's hundreds of people here and I can't have everyone doing their own variation on the menu. Perhaps, if it was a week-day, I could think about it. But today is a no!". 

OK, we get the point. We are just customers, we are foreigners, you don't like us, you don't appreciate our effort to order you in French, we don't have any right to be treated nicely. Just give us the quickest ice-cream and stop with your sermon!

We had the ice-creams, which were really good. Then when we paid (my friend was almost tempted to give him a tip, when I stopped her), Josh, obviously forgetting about the previous preach, asked the waiter if he could have one more decorative umbrella. The one they put on top of the ice-cream. 

It would have been to easy to answer "yes" or "sure, no problem". This is not the right country. Again he started:" Kid, don't you have already one? Why do you want more? Don't you see I'm busy? I can't waste time with your request....". 

Gone. Before he even finished his second telling-off, we were gone. I had it for the day. Enough with people complaining. Having to deal with boys who occasionally complain is one thing...by the way, those are our boys and it's part of the deal that they whine and we control ourselves. But a waiter? Forget it. I'm out of here! 

Of course we had to wait another 30 minutes for the navette bus to take us back to the train station but it was fine. Also this inexplicable lack of organization between the trains and the buses was a small problem at this time of the day. We were happy for what we saw, tired because of the long day, happy that the kids didn't fight but seemed to enjoy their time together. All's well that ends well. 

Tomorrow, Canal St Martin? Perhaps. Why not?