It’s day three of 19 consecutive days off from the job and I say hello from Paris.
I’ll be in France at least through October 2.
Four nights in Paris, seven nights in Toulouse and four nights in Lille. The last two days of the trip are open. I’m leaning towards ending this long adventure with a couple nights in Antwerp, Belgium given its cheap hotels and proximity to the Brussels airport where I’ve successfully departed home in each of the last two years. But I’ll see how it goes.
The six-and-a-half hour flight from Newark to Charles de Gaulle on Friday evening was especially nice because there was an empty seat up front. The amount of space I had in my assigned pod could have been occupied by an entire family. The ice cream sundae made to order is always the service highlight in the forward cabin and the crazy amount of room to get comfy really makes the trip painless.
The Boeing 777 cruised at 35-thousand feet and nicely absorbed the brief rough patches encountered over open water.
The plane went dark after the ice cream was done and everybody seemed to zonk out.
This is my third consecutive September visit to France although each of the prior two were limited to spending time in Toulouse. I decided this year I would try to devote more attention to other parts of the country.
Earlier this year, I took weekly French language lessons over a span of about five months. My vocabulary remains badly limited but I’ve learned past, present and future conjugations of about maybe a dozen or so important verbs which I hope will allow for some basic conversation with both friends and regular people I encounter.
Two good friends from Toulouse – Sebastien and Julien – are now living in Paris – and I met them and a couple of their friends at a bar in the Belleville neighborhood Saturday night.
Like NYC, the whole world is here in Paris.
One sees the whole world – including the recent surge of immigrants from war-ravaged Syria as you move about the non-posh parts of the city. It’s impossible not to contemplate the world’s fairness when you see new immigrants (including many young children) sitting on cardboard mats as both natives and tourists go about their regular routines.
Short-term survival and then long-term integration via the government’s helping hand is the cold, simplistic hope for these resilient people but the future will and tilt of this country at the moment doesn’t seem to offer much promise of that prospect.
I have a small room at a hotel on Rue Blanche in the ninth arrondissement. It’s a quick walk to the Metro.
A five-day unlimited pass on all forms of public transit in all zones (including to and from the two major airports) cost 63.9 euros.
The Paris Metro is great for its reach and frequency but I don’t love the configuration of the subway cars. The positioning of the seats is ill-conceived. Many of them face your fellow rider with little room to avoid basically being knees-on-knees. I usually stand unless I can score one of those pop-out seats near the door. It’s also impossible to avoid lots of stairs as you enter and exit the system. So, in that way, it’s not easy if you’re lugging a heavy bag.
On Monday, Seb and I plan to visit St. Cloud racecourse for an afternoon with the horses.
-Kudos to sportswriter Billy Witz for his excellent Yankees game story in the Times sports pages last Tuesday. My Dad and I sat with the Creatures in section 203 for the 8-2 Yanks loss to the Dodgers Monday night. As we walked into the Stadium when the gates opened at 5 PM, we could hear a massive chorus of “Let’s Go Dodgers” from River Avenue. It boomed. And then just before first pitch, a huge gathering of noisy Dodger fans could be seen seated together at field level near the left field foul pole. During celebratory moments of the game, that group of fans unfurled a giant blue banner with the interlocking LA logo. The whole ballpark reacted with surprise. It’s rare for road fans at New York’s two ballparks to have such distinct and organized forms of support backed by a unified group of that size. Witz’s game story deviated from standard style and devoted almost the entire recap to this very unique assembly of road fans. Witz clearly left his seat in the press box and spent a good amount of research time explaining who these people were and where they came from. Interesting to me was the amount of interesting detailed facts Witz shared including a description of the banner and the fact the group received advanced permission from the Yankees to bring it in. Many game stories written on deadline are formulaic and stale. Witz saw what was special and different at the ball park that night. He left his perch – got out of the comfort zone of his day-to-day beat – and wrote a great sports story.