The City That Started Everything (And Never Stops)
France | Paris | March 2009 + March 2013 (4th and 5th visits)
Paris is our travel home. We've been there more times than anywhere else on earth, and every single time the cab comes around a corner and I see the city appearing outside the window, I feel it. That specific thing. I don't have a word for it, but it's somewhere between relief and joy, like being let back in somewhere you belong.
Our first return trip together after our Honeymoon (which was our second visit together) was in 2009. We arrived the way you always arrive after an overnight flight: feeling like we might not survive the day. Then we got to the hotel, found out there'd been room flooding and they'd moved us into a full apartment down the street with a kitchen and a balcony, and suddenly we felt completely fine. Paris has that effect.
We started at Cafe de Flore on Boulevard Saint-Germain because that's what you do, you sit outside on the sidewalk in the sun and watch Paris go by and eat baguette that doesn't need butter and couldn't be improved by it. Paris baguette is its own category of food. Perfect chew, perfect crust, soft interior, that specific flavor that doesn't exist anywhere else. Matt had ham and eggs with gruyere. I had Welsh Rarebit, which is not rabbit, it's a molten cheesy baked thing on toast and it's wonderful. The real highlight was the Kir: white wine with black currant liqueur, entirely French, entirely perfect at any hour including lunch. We were there two hours. We didn't rush.
That trip we visited the Musee de Cluny, which holds our beloved Unicorn Tapestries from 1500, one for each of the five senses. We have a small replica of one in our dining room. Matt swears the Cluny has the best ceiling in Paris and also the best doorknobs, which is such a Matt thing to care about and I love it. We went to Sainte-Chapelle, which has some of the largest stained glass windows in the world and takes your breath away every time. Then bought tickets to a classical violin concert inside Sainte-Chapelle that evening. Pachelbel, Mozart, and Vivaldi while the sun went down outside and the light faded through those extraordinary windows. I got a little emotional. Some things you don't want to end.
Pere Lachaise Cemetery was a full afternoon. 105 acres, Jim Morrison, Chopin, Oscar Wilde, thousands of other graves in a labyrinth of narrow stone paths. I had visited in 1996 and been moved by one particular grave: two people buried side by side with their hands joined on top, connected in stone. I'd taken a picture of it then but didn't have the name. Finding it again in 105 acres of graves felt impossible. Literally two minutes after I thought about it, there it was directly in front of me. I still can't fully explain that.
The Moulin Rouge did not live up to billing. Matt's exact quote was that "it sucked ass," and the Rockettes in New York are a thousand times better and they're not even topless. That is a direct quote and I stand behind it.
The 2009 trip was also when we finally got the Paris photos we'd always talked about. We'd once planned to come to France and elope. That plan changed, but our desire for photos in the city never did. So for our tenth anniversary together we hired a photographer named Bruno Cohen, who takes stunning photojournalistic-style portraits. Three hours of jumping over puddles, running, pretending to feed ducks, doing an authentic European double-cheek kiss. Bruno had been to Secaucus, New Jersey, somehow, which made us love him even more.
By the 2013 trip it was our fourth visit together and the comfort of it was different. You navigate differently when a city has become yours. We had a full apartment in the Marais neighborhood and immediately went to the market to stock up on Nestle caramel custards, because they sell them in French grocery stores and I would eat them at every meal if allowed. They are nothing like what you buy at home. They taste like creme brulee in a little pot and they cost less than a euro.
On that trip I took two classes with La Cuisine Paris, which I would recommend to anyone who loves food and Paris in any proportion. The first was a market class, starting at the Maubert market with our chef instructor Eric, who had worked in two-Michelin-star restaurants, spent time in Washington DC and Australia, and briefly on a cruise ship before concluding that cruise ships were not for him. He walked us through the market explaining produce, seafood, cheeses, the difference between how Parisians actually shop versus how tourists imagine they do. Then back to the school on the Seine to cook: zucchini veloute with goat cheese whipped cream and mint, duck breast with potatoes cooked in the duck fat, roasted vegetables, and an almond cream cake with roasted pears. Wine and bread throughout, because what meal would be complete without both. I also discovered my new favorite dessert: Paris-Brest, a choux pastry filled with hazelnut cream. The name is what it is. We all enjoyed it enormously.
The second class was baguette-making with Eric again, which I took partly for the pure obsession with it and partly as a personal tribute to Julia Child. Eric taught us that a proper French baguette has exactly four ingredients: flour, yeast, water, salt. That is the law. They check. Everyone in France buys baguette every single day. It is not optional, it is a part of the rhythm of life. I made four small baguettes and some focaccia, about twenty minutes of kneading each, and went home with flour on my shirt and a deep new respect for every person who makes this for a living.
Matt spent those mornings at the Musee de l'Armee and Invalides, the Louvre, Montmartre and Sacre-Coeur, including climbing the 300 steps to the dome for the views, which his calves reported back on at length. He also watched a ring scam operate outside the Opera Garnier, where a person pretends to find a gold ring on the ground and then presents it to you as if you owe them for the discovery. As he was telling me the story, the exact same scam was happening ten feet behind him. Paris is endlessly consistent.
Versailles on this trip was one of our best days. We got a tip from the information desk about a guided tour for seven euros more that grants access to the private royal apartments and the Opera House. The Opera House was built specifically for the wedding celebrations of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, who were fourteen and fifteen years old at the time. The whole thing was completed in two years because Louis XV wanted it faster and wood was cheaper than marble. Sitting in a room like that and knowing that history is what Paris keeps doing to you, stacking centuries on top of each other until the weight of it becomes something almost physical.
Marie Antoinette's Trianon estate had pink marble on the outside and bold colors inside and everything about it was extremely her. She had 10,000 shoes at her death and is credited with starting French fashion. The French people actually adored her, which is not how the story usually gets told.
Notre Dame on this 2013 trip was the 850th anniversary, which meant there was a giant structure out front blocking the full view for photographs, which I found personally irritating. But inside, I lit a candle for my dad the way I do every single time I'm there. I think about my first trip here in 1996 when I was young and he was so excited for me, little-kid excited, in the way parents get when they know something big is about to happen to their child. He gave me that trip. Paris changed my life on that first visit and everything that came after it is in some way traceable back to him standing there being excited on my behalf. So there's always a candle.
Sainte-Chapelle on a sunny day, when the light comes through those windows and the whole interior turns colored and luminous, is one of the most beautiful things I've seen anywhere on earth. It never fails. It never will.
The apartment, the market runs, the morning coffee, the easy familiarity of knowing which streets to take. This city keeps giving us new things to find and lets us feel at home at the same time. Je t'aime, Paris. Every time.