Bordeaux and Palmiers

A lot of people come to Paris to see the churches. That’s fair: we have a lot of them here, and they are gorgeous. However, with all of the people who come to look at Sainte Chappelle and Notre Dame, I’ve never once had a tourist ask me how to get to the Mosque of Paris.

It’s probably a good thing: up until a few weeks ago, I had no idea where it was.

Then I found out that it was a few blocks away from my house. My master lack of directional sense strikes again.

I’ve always had a sort of tug to churches. While my relationship with the Church (big C–the one in Rome) has always been a little bit on-again off-again, the actual church buildings have always felt so comforting to me. I don’t have the same intrinsic relationship to mosques. I feel as though someone just plopped the big building down on a random street corner with no regard for all of the buildings around it that look so stereotypically Paris–so exactly the same.

It reminds me of the changes that Paris has undergone in recent years. Parisian culture has moved away from what it once was, and to actually live in Paris forces the acceptance of immigrant groups that are having more and more of an effect on the city.

Like with this mosque, Parisians sometimes try to ignore this changing aspect of their city. Maybe it’s because I too am an outsider that I can accept Paris for what it now is.

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I live right off of a fairly large and busy street called les Gobelins. It’s big enough to have a métro stop named after it. I lived here for several months before I realized that if I wandered down my street in the other direction, I came to rue de la clef, a street that is everything you expect a tiny Parisian street to be.

It’s hard to believe the incredible differences at either end of my tiny street. On one end is Starbucks, various buses all making stops… and a man living out of a bright red van that I never noticed until Alex pointed him out, and now suddenly, he’s all I see. Rue de la clef is the antithesis of this: the first thing you notice is this playground, dotted with trees, that looks like it would fit better in a tiny town than in the sprawling metropolis of Paris.

The sidewalks are narrow: too narrow to walk comfortably side by side. It’s all right… there’s hardly ever any cars anyway.

At the end is a wall covered with ivy. I’ve always loved walls covered with ivy… they look so old.

Wow… I’m having a vocabulary meltdown today.

Don’t pay attention to me. Pay attention to this staircase. It makes me smile every time I pass it.

Oh ! Une luciole qui vole.
Je voulais crier ” Regarde ! ”
Mais j’étais seul
- Taïgi

I was walking on boulevard Saint Germain when I came across a man selling paintings. A lot of them had poems and famous quotes on them, and so I stopped to look. When I found this one, I couldn’t help writing it down in my notebook: I feel this way so often: the poem describes the sensation when you notice something beautiful and you have no one to share it with. It’s a bittersweet feeling, and now that I’ve really been taking advantage of Paris, I feel it most every day. So I’ve decided to share those moments on this blog.

This is a statue close to the rue du Bac métro stop on rue de Grenelle. I see it all the time: the first time I ever stayed in Paris, it was in an apartment a few blocks down. I can’t help but notice it every time I go past, though: it marks the transition between the shops of the Saint Germain des Près and the official international buildings and offices of rue de Grenelle in the 7th.

I love that landmarks that everyone’s heard of just blend into the background in Paris. In the end, Les Deux Magots is just another café. Notre Dame is just another church.

Last time we chatted, I was heading down boulevard Saint Germain. Today, I’m going to explore the Saint Germain des Près neighborhood with you. As I headed up the boulevard, I noticed an image that, for lack of a better word , had me completely bouleversée. I know that I should be used to the Paris landmarks, and for the most part, I am. It’s when they creep up on me, like being able to see the tip of the Notre-Dame cathedral from a few blocks away, that they still take my breath away.

The Saint Germain des Près neighborhood begins here: where the boulevard Saint Germain still runs vaguely parallel to the quai of the Left Bank of the river Seine. As such, it starts at the border of the Latin Quarter, which is as opposite from Saint Germain as can be. While Saint Germain is not nearly as ritzy as the 8th, home to the Champs Elysées, over the years, this section of the 6th arrondissement has started taking on more and more upscale shops, and restaurants and cafés have gotten more and more expensive.

One such restaurant is Les Deux Magots, whose famous patrons included Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Ernest Hemmingway. The café is still opened, along with its equally famous cousins, Brasserie Lipp and Café Flore.

For me, the continued popularity of these restaurants are merely signs that this neighborhood’s quirks are long gone: writers like those mentioned and many more used to frequent Saint Germain and the Latin Quarter because, at the time, this part of the Left Bank was extremely inexpensive. The fact that these cafés have since jacked up their prices so that you can sit where the masters sat is just another example of milking a neighborhood’s history long after the history is gone.

You can probably tell that Saint Germain is not one of my favorite areas in Paris, and yet I spend quite a bit of time there: the easiest way to walk from where I used to live, in the 7th, to where I live now, in the 5th, is to walk along this stretch of boulevard. When I lived in the 7th, I was often in the 5th, and now that I live in the 5th, I find myself having to head back to my old neighborhood every once in awhile.

I’ve come to appreciate certain things about Saint Germain… small things that I sort of hope to myself that no one else notices.

For example, I love this street: Passage de la petite boucherie. A passage is sort of like the English word “alley:” too small to be called a street. I love the street name: small butchershop’s alley. It makes me think of the shop that probably inspired the street name, a butchershop that I assume is long gone now that the neighborhood has become upscale. But the street name remains as a physical memory of what once was.

In the same vein is this church: the church of Saint Germain. A sign proudly touts it as the oldest church in Paris, but you won’t see a lineup of tourists like you would at the nearby Notre Dame.

It’s directly across the street from the aforementioned Deux Magots, but instead of rich American tourists, often the only people coming and going here are actual parishioners.

Actual parishioners make me smile.

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Paris smells like Cannes today. It doesn’t help that I’m listening to Regina Spektor again… but it’s definitely there. In the smell. I can smell the city baking in the sun. I can smell the water from the Paris fountains evaporating, and it almost smells like the sea.

Paris in the springtime has a crazy effect on me, and I get terribly nostalgic and deliriously happy all at once.

I came upon this church as I turned from rue Monge to boulevard Saint Germain. The boulevard is famous for being the centerpiece of the Saint Germain des Près neighborhood, in the 6th arrondissement. While Saint Germain des Près has its own charms, this church, which was still in the 5th, made me stop and stare. Something about it was so attractive to me… maybe the fact that it’s so unassuming. On a street full of stores and business, it just quietly sits on a corner. It can’t help being beautiful.

It’s called the church of Saint Nicolas of Chardonnet.

“The first chapel was erected on the field “du Chardonnet” meaning of the thistles, or “Thistle Field.” Its belfry was rebuilt in 1625, and the entire church was rebuilt between 1656 and 1763. Only the facade dates from 1934. Its famous parisioners include the painter Charles le Brun who designed the western door of the transept and the tomb of his mother, which was sculpted by Collignon; his own tomb was ordered by his widow at Coysevox, and the tomb of Jérôme the first of Bignon, the grand master of the King’s Library, is the work of Girardon. Paintings from the 16th century from the Dutch school painted by Coypel, Restout, Natoire, Lagrenée and Corot decorate the church. Its organ dates from 1725.”

I don’t know about all of those paintings… I didn’t go in. What truly drew me to the church was this:

Gloria deo pax terrae. I only took one year of Latin, and I was very bad at it, but I know what this means: Glory to God. Peace on Earth.

There’s something about familiar sayings in another language. I’m a child of Vatican II, and so I don’t remember mass being said in Latin. To me, it’s always been in English: “Glory to God in the highest. Peace to God’s people on Earth.” There’s something about translating a familiar phrase that makes you understand it so much more. Each word has to be contemplated, replaced. Each word becomes a separate thought with a separate meaning. It reminds me of finally looking at the words of the Pledge of Allegiance years after I had to say it every morning and truly realizing what the words meant.

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Yesterday, I took you all on a walk down rue Mouffetard. Rue Mouffetard runs very close to another large market street: rue Monge.

Rue Monge is home to the Place Monge market, but it’s also home to a lot of secrets that I had never seen before… and I walk down this street every day. This time, however, I did it armed with a camera. I started right by Place Monge and walked down the street towards the Seine.

Just in case anyone was wondering… this is why I moved to Paris.

Moving on.

I had never noticed this door before my walk down rue Monge. It looks like any door leading to an apartment building. But today, for some reason, it was opened, and so I peeked inside…

And found an old Roman arena!

I love these signs. They’re all over Paris, and they alert the visitor to the history of the place where they are standing. Sometimes, they appear in random locations to let you know where a famous historical figure lived or died.

This one explains that the arena I found is called the Arena of Lutèce, which was the old Roman word for Paris… or the city that stood in the location where Paris now stands in Roman times.

Unfortunately for American tourists, the signs are not translated. Fortunately for American tourists who read this blog, I speak French!

“This amphitheater was probably constructed at the end of the 1st century AD. It is built simply out of stones without the use of any bricks. It was ruined by barbarian invasions during the 3rd century, and its materials were used by the Gallo-Romans, who took refuge in Ile de la Cité. Its existence was ignored in the middle ages, and its exact location was unknown until 1858. It was rediscovered with the opening of Rue Monge in 1869, on a piece of land acquired by the Compagnie Générale des Omnibus, and it was to be destroyed to leave space for stables. The public tried to buy the land back, but the ampitheater was not, in fact, restored to its current state until 1917.”

Or something like that.

It appears to be used as a sort of park nowadays. It was lunch time, so some kids from the local school were hanging around, playing soccer and talking.

I absolutely love to watch old men playing pétanque.  Culturally, the game has a lot of significance in France, especially in the South. I wrote a sociology paper on the differences between pétanque culture up here in the north and in the south, where I used to live. I’ll spare you all the details, but I’ll say now that watching these men assemble, all dressed for the game, every day at the same times, makes my heartstrings go all wacky. I love them. I want to go over and hug them. But pétanque rules do not allow for that sort of malarky.

My heart goes out to this bench. It looks so lonely.

This could be because I was just tearing up about the old men playing pétanque and smoking Gauloises. It could also have something to do with the fact that sometimes, my heart goes out to inanimate objects.

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When I was growing up, I lived in New York. Everyone else I knew lived in New York. I didn’t know anything else.

Which is why it surprised me when people I met at summer camp swooned over my hometown. It was just where I lived… it was nothing exciting.

It’s easy to get nonchalant about the place where you live, which is why I’m starting a walking tour segment on my blog. I want to show you all what it’s actually like to wander around Paris… and I want to see some new things myself.

I started out by heading down rue Mouffetard.

Rue Mouffetard is a pedestrian shopping street offering everything from clothing boutiques to artisanal cheese stores to wine shops and cafés. Like other streets of its kind in Paris, most things are closed on Mondays… even the chain supermarket, Franprix.

I kind of prefer it this way. Sure, it’s not great for getting things done, but you notice the little things a lot more, like this church at the end of the street, just where Mouffetard meets the Place des Gobelins, where I live. It’s the Church Saint Médard, which sits on the Square Saint Médard, housing a small playground for local kids.

It was my brother who told me while visiting Milan that he feels uncomfortable in any city where you can’t see where the people live and where the kids go to school, and I have to agree. Lucky for me, my neighborhood is chock full of real people.

Rue Mouffetard, though, is a pretty common tourist attraction. I can see why: it’s quite pretty. Fountains hold up the street at the top and bottom like bookends. If it were just a little bit warmer (not that I’m complaining… 60 is awfully nice), I would have loved to sit at the edge of this one for a little while and read.

I’ve always loved old signs like these painted onto the sides of buildings. As you can tell, this one is advertising a bowling alley, which is supposed to be across the street at number 73. Number 73 proved to be a café, but I still love this sign: it reminds me of all of the people who have passed on this street before me, of what this neighborhood may have looked like fifty years ago.

Rue Mouffetard

5ème arrondissement- Métro Place Monge, Censier Daubenton

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Or not.

I keep telling myself that the longer I live here, the less I’ll notice things. The architecture. The people. The quaint little signs that make me laugh.

No such thing.

How could I, when my walk to work looks like this:

I walk out my front door and down the cute little street I live on to the Place des Gobelins.

I see this. Two buildings, nearly touching, separated by a perfect stretch of blue sky. Wrought-iron balconies and full shutters couldn’t be more Parisian.

I look down, and I see this:

A fountain, right in the middle of a busy street. And as if that weren’t enough, there’s one of those revolving billboards you see everywhere here.

I get on the bus. The bus driver always calls me “charmante demoiselle” when I get on.

“Bonjour, charmante demoiselle.” Bonjour, oddly flattering bus driver. Thank you for making my morning happy. I’m just going to sit here and drink a liter of coffee and listen to my headphones for awhile.

When it’s time for me to get off, he says, “Au revoir, charmante demoiselle! Bonne journée!” But because everyone in the whole bus can hear him, seeing as he’s calling from the front of the bus, and I’m getting off at the back (it is strictement interdit to get off French busses at the front), I just sort of scurry off and mind my own business.

I always recognize my bus stop: it isn’t hard.

Morning, Notre Dâme. Morning, tourist people. Love to stay and chat, but I’ve got a train to catch.

That train. And yes, in television, it is perfectly Kosher to take a 10:50 A.M. train to work. Of course, it’s perfectly Kosher to take an 8:30 P.M. train back, so don’t start hating yet.

And just 25 minutes later… I’m right… back… where I used to live.

Funny how things work out.