Ahh, New Year’s Eve…I’ve realized that the older I get, the less I want to celebrate this changing of the calendar in the confines of a club, bar, or other establishment meant for partying. However, I also feel pressured to do something “fun”, or at least with the appearance of fun. So, when we heard that people in Paris celebrate New Year’s Eve by walking around the Champs Elysees and basically just, well, walking around, that sounded right up our alley, so we booked the train and headed off!
As the past couple of trips have pointed out, we’ve been spending a lot of time outdoors walking around cities in the freezing cold. Well, since we don’t have any muse
ums in Paris we’re aching to see at this point, the itinerary lent itself to continuing the subzero-walking thing we’re getting so good at. This time we armed ourselves with maps of a handful of restaurants, a smattering of bakeries, and more Asian grocery stores than you can shake a red pepper at, and headed out on our “random neighborhood” tour of Paris!
Let me just say, we hit some gold mines. Paris just has so much to offer; you can find virtually anything you want. Need a new frying pan, and don’t want to pay Geneva prices? Go to Paris! Need some Korean fish sauce, and can’t find it in Geneva? Go to Paris! Want some organic wines from up-and-coming producers in the Loire Valley? You get the idea…but as a result, we had one of our best city trips, without seeing any of the real sights.
This type of travel is fun, as it lends itself to weird occurrences. My favorite was while we were walking through one of the markets, just south of the Eiffel Tower. One of the stands had some freshly-cooked chicken wings, and as Soph and I hadn’t had chicken wings in over a year, nor had we eaten breakfast yet, we decided to buy a little bag of them and scarf them down. Finding a park bench off to the side, we ravenously dug into them, breaking the all-important French rule of not eating with your hands. As we were doing this, an old woman walked up to this pile of boxes on our left, which were clearly trash, and started digging through them. Within a minute she had found a raw chicken breast, and she picked it up and put it in her bag! I can’t make this stuff up;
anyway, as she looked normal enough, I couldn’t tell if it was an issue of her not having enough money to buy a chicken from the vendor, or if she was simply thinking “hey – free chicken!”
The true funny part of this story, however, is that as this was going on, one of the vendors saw us sitting on the bench, eating our chicken wings (which were awesome, by the way). He then yelled over to us, half-mockingly, half-friendly, “bon appetit!” We smiled and yelled “merci” back, at which point the five Parisians standing in his line slowly turned their heads to us, and in succession, either sneered or completely ignored us, then turned back. Not even a smile at the ingenuity we were showing by eating the chicken wings right there, rather than waiting to take them home and eat them. No issues with a woman going through the garbage and taking out raw chicken breasts, but don’t eat chicken wings until you’re out of the confines of the actual market! Guess they’re afraid the tourists are going to invade their market, which is a reasonable enough fear, because that market ruled! I mean seriously – they had awesome croissants, specialty cheeses, and chicken wings – where else on earth can you find all three of those in the same place?
One thing I would advise against visiting in Paris are the sidewalk cafes. I know it sounds sacrilegious to skip these, but at the end of the day they don’t serve a quality product, and virtually all of them charge exorbitant prices. The coffee you’ll get will be decent, but the hot chocolates are often just cocoa packets with water, and the wines are below average at best. The only bright spot of these is that you’ll get to sit down for as long as you want, which is good for people watching in the summer, and escaping the cold in the winter, but they’re not the cultural experience they should be. That said, if you look hard enough, you ca
n find some stellar wine bars that serve great stuff. Same goes for restaurants – we found a couple of fantastic, moderately-priced bistrots that were simply phenomenal. Have a couple more we didn’t get to, so guess we have to go back to Paris in a few months!
So yet again, Paris has proven itself to be a fantastic city, offering up everything we were looking for. And New Years? Well, after walking around the Champs Elysees (with our open containers; the American in us just can’t get used to that, so we kept hiding them whenever we’d see police!), we headed to a bridge over the Seine, where we had a perfect view of the Eiffel Tower. No fireworks or anything, but it did light up at midnight, and everyone cheered, then went home. More or less uneventful, but really, it’s probably more fun that way. 2009 is looking like it’s going to be a good year!
Next week: Sitting around doing nothing!
New Years in Paris!
