40th Wedding Anniversary in Paris

We’re returning from Paris and our 40^th Anniversary Weekend. It was a whirlwind weekend in which we enjoyed some really wonderful tours. We used Context Tours, which allowed us to schedule our own tours and offer them as group tours. As it was, nobody joined us on any of our five tours, so we had private tour guides all weekend. These were:

• Saturday afternoon at The Louvre. We got the “crash course” from a medieval history professor. We saw it all: antiquities (carvings and other objects from Babylon and Mesopotamia), Greek and Roman sculpture, renaissance painting, and Dutch, Italian, and French paintings. We saw Venus de Milo, Winged Victory, and the Mona Lisa. We also saw the Hammurabi code, Madonna on the Rocks, the Reubens gallery of Marie de Medici paintings, and the fortress walls in the basement. We were delighted with the tour.

• Saturday evening on the Left Bank. We went through many Left Bank neighborhoods and had an extended discussion with a PhD student on the history of Paris. It was a Roman settlement, and there are still extant Roman baths. We also saw the Pantheon, the Sorbonne, and the Saint Suplice fountain plaza. Our guide, Frank, told us how the Sorbonne went out of existence officially in 1968, when universities were made (a) free and (b) unified under the “University of Paris” name. Free tuition creates its own set of problems: anybody can go to any university. They must pass an exam at the end of the semester in order to move past the first year, and that weeds some people out. Still, there are many graduating with worthless (or near-worthless) degrees. Jobs are scarce. 
  

• A Right Bank tour that showed us the courtyards of the Louvre, the Pompidou center, the Royal Palace and Royal Gardens, and the Opera. This included the Au Pied de Cochon (Pig’s Foot) restaurant, markets (Les Halles), and the world’s first shopping mall (1770).
  
• A Hemingway walk that allowed me to finally see where Hemingway moved to Paris for the first time in 1922. (I missed this last year by a few steps – it’s behind the Café Descartes and I turned the wrong way).  We saw where he wrote and walked, where he drank and gathered with friends, and where he got ideas for his four novels. Hemingway was not very nice to the people who helped him, and was particularly nasty to those who helped him most. His main novel written in Paris was The Sun Also Rises. He also wrote, at the end of his life, A Movable Feast. 
• Our final tour was a chocolate tasting tour. It was led by Cassandra, a young woman from California, who was working in Paris as a pastry chef. I enjoyed this thoroughly.
  
  The chocolates were delectable. We went from the most traditional (and longest-lived) chocolate store in Paris (and maybe the world!) to the most modern and innovative chocolate boutique. They had the appearance of diamond stores or goldsmiths, and the chocolate was delectable. Along the way we enjoyed a traditional maker of macaroons (a French pastry made of tasty filling between two meringue halves), a modern macaroon shop, the shop of the Breton inventor of salted caramel, a Belgian chocolate shop, and a store that sold only cream puffs – made to order. We’ve had cream puffs before, and I always found them a bit bland. The flavor in the cream filling of these was amazing! I had chocolate and Robbie had caramel and the flavor burst in your mouth. And, as the pastry was left unfilled until the time of purchase, it never got soggy.
  

The coup de grace of our trip, however, was on the evening of our anniversary. We booked a river cruise on the Seine. We chose a smaller boat, Le Carife, which began boarding around 8PM and raised the roof awning at about 8:40. We were able to watch the sun set on Notre Dame, the evening lights come up along the river, musicians of all types – buskers to planned parties, and passed under numerous bridges. Parisians celebrate nightfall with panache, and it became clear why Paris came to be called the City of Light. By 10PM we were cruising by the Eifel Tower, which switches from its intricate line of lights along the triangular trusses to a riot of sparkles on the hour. The boat reached its western turn around at the model statue of liberty, and circled the sculpture. The wine, the food (Robbie had lamb, I had duck) was superb. 

More pictures are available at my photo-bucket page.