In this week's episode we take on the Parks of...
Yes, Desi still holds out hope that for fleeting moments we are capable of passing as native Frenchfolk. Then she goes and does something like this in the Bagatelle Gardens:
For his part, Sean is comfortable with his inherent "otherness." Here, he earns pocket change by performing an interpretive dance known as "Not All Americans Are A**holes, But We Sure Dance Like Ones:"
Ain't nothin' right about any'a dat.
Gotta say though, there is a certain amount of nuttiness in the air out there in the Bois de Boulogne... as evidenced by this really
weird woman
taking pictures of an
action figure!
Bizarro! Houdini was like "These Frogs are freaks!"
We must, however, amend our friend's impolitic assertion by voicing our profound appreciation for the legality of public wine consumption. It made our 9-month-wedding- anniversary picnic feel all the more special:
Nine months! Woah. Check
us out.
Now, our favorite urban green space is just a few blocks away from home, and has been featured in these pages before: the classically beauteous
Place des Voges. Last Sunday Sean spotted a famous face among the sunbathers there, and it weren't no marmot this time...
Our other close brush with actors proved even more titillating, when Julia Roth and friend Marushka (both matriculating into NYU acting programs in the fall) celebrated Bastille Day by brunching with us on their last day in Paris. Our sunglasses insisted we Never Hide, and we obeyed:
That night, we got all patriotic-like and walked five miles round trip to have another wine-spiked picnic under the Independence Day (
Quatorze Juillet) fireworks on the Seine. We passed bridge after bridge teeming with Parisians...
(
Pont des Arts)
...before Desi spotted the ideal perch on the
Pont de La Concorde, right beside a family of eight Sri Lankans who shrieked with delight every single time this happened:
But back to the parks, if you insist. On the east side of town, we made an incursion into the
Bois de Vincennes, and flaunted our touristic essence by playing frisbee all along the
Grand Alee some ancient monarch once cut through the heart of his giant woodland.
Tiny in the background there you can just make out the medieval castle and cathedral that we're ignoring in favor of a spinning piece of plastic.
And this is the last image we have of Desi, seconds before she got her face gobbled off by a 4 foot tall Van Til-vorous water lily. Close observers will notice her shoulders smoking from the sunburn she's getting. A resultant fun adventure involved trying to explain to a French pharmacist why Desi desperately needed Aloe Vera gel.
Haven't you heard? After Bastille Day, they did away with that austere metal
Tour Eiffel and remodeled it in bungee cord for the digital age. Here, Sean conquers it. At night, he sparkles on the hour.
Our landlord Barnabe noticed the sparkling, so he dropped in on us for a "mail pick-up and
bavarder" visit. We like him and admire his life-long devotion to the yogic practice. He just spent two straight days and nights in a tree to regain his mental focus and balance, and now is off to West Africa for the month of August. (He's still looking for a sub-letter for the apartment for the month! Get on board everyone!) We theorize that if we lived here, we would befriend him and attend his classes.
We'd probably also go to the farmers' market every weekend...
But buying flowers makes Desi soooo sleepy.
Now that you mention it, here's more evidence that we aren't dining out every single night:
You may not want to be made aware of the fact that we are consistently documenting the other end of the alimentary process as well... We'd post the pics, but the faces we make are not as cute in those shots.
One meal on the town well worth documenting was had at the north African
resto "404" in the Beaubourg District... Thanks for the suggestion monsieur Fred Berger. We inhaled several kilos of couscous in your honor, while admiring the decor and magical lighting:
The value of the dollar ain't the only thing plunging around here!..
And
finally, a few more store-fronts that we think need to be franchised in the States:
You made it all the way through! Your reward will come in heaven.
Paris didn't fight fair, of course; it threw everything it had at us -- paradisiacal sunsets,
the Tour de France zipping by right outside our front door (more or less),
a fun evening and delectable meal at Desi's favorite restaurant Le Petit Prince care of our good friend Jon Goldman's parents (part-time Parisans themselves), the charmingly Astrophysical Marty and Helen,
a magic-hour picnic dinner on the Pont des Arts with several dozen of our dearest French neighbors,
and then a final Van Til family reunion dinner at Desi's cousin-via-great-grandfather Roland's jungle roof deck in the 20eme arrondissement, along with his husband Jean-Yves and their good ex-pat New Yorker friend Lee.
After all of that, we were almost ready to throw in the towel and just surrender ourselves to this darned city (where all one does is eat amazing meals, to hear us tell it). The fact of the matter is, our battle to part with Paris did whoop our a$$es in some ways -- Desi was confined to bed-rest for four days with a high fever, and Sean briefly lost his marbles and began assaulting women in the parks,
(well, the part about Desi's true, anyway. Thanks to Doc Christian Felter for your transatlantic diagnosis) -- but we called in the reinforcements and made a final push to escape Paris' merciless grasp...
We got ourselves a GPS navigator and entrusted our fates to its guidance. On August first we mounted up in the least attractive rental car we could find, an Opel Meriva micro-minivan, and sped southward. Hold your breath, 'cause there is more posting to come, and soon! Yeah!! We're back on the road, baby!
