Everything we had eaten, even the croissants from the supermarket we had bought when nothing else was open, was delicious. At the creperie we had watched as the chef squeezed a lemon over our crepes, scraping the seeds off with a long, thin spatula.
"In America," my companion observed, "they would have squeezed that lemon juice three hours before, and it would have been sitting there. Or they would have just bought pre-squeezed lemon juice. And it's amazing. You can taste the difference."
We ate our crepes walking down my favorite street in the Marais, rue Veille du Temple, a quiet and lovely line of shops and restaurants. One shop we discovered has nothing but jam. Delicious jam and honey in every flavor you could imagine, including Apricot Lavender, Pear Vanilla, Raspberry Champagne. I bought two sample sizes as presents to take home, and the woman behind the counter wrapped them in brown paper and tied them with a gold ribbon.
Our apartment, just at the border of the Marais and a neighborhood I am less familar with, Republique, was even smaller than mine in New York. You could cross the room in four strides. My favorite thing was the window. In Paris the windows are all huge, almost as tall as I am, and ours looked out towards Sacre Coeur, a beautiful church on the northern side of Paris, clearly visible and rising over the rooftops.
We couldn't afford to eat out every night, but I didn't mind at all, when the alternative was choosing something lovely from the Parisian supermarket and eating it at the table in front of the window. We never got tired of that view. Everything from the supermarket was delicious, despite our tiny kitchen and lack of culinary expertise. On our last evening we ate store-bought truffle ravioli, and the whole kitchen was filled with the warm, rich smell of truffle oil. The whole package of ravioli was only three euros.
And so I learned how easy it is to eat well in a place where the ingredients are so meticulously selected, where food supply regulations are so strict, and people's expectations are incredibly high. In one boutique near our apartment there was a charming poster that read, "Je ne suis pas snob...Je suis Parisienne" meaning "I'm not a snob...I'm a Parisian."
The cheapest mode of transportation was, surprisingly, not the subway, but the Velib city bicycles. A weeklong pass was only eight euros. So we got to know the city from those bicycles, French traffic speeding along behind us.
"What are the rules?" I wondered aloud.
"I don't think there are any," my companion replied. I think he was right. I was petrified the first ride, as pedestrians rarely hear your bell or move out of the way, cars nearly run you over, trucks reverse without looking behind them, and you are forced to swerve hurriedly out of the way, right into oncoming traffic or into the curb.
You get used to it. By the end of our week in Paris I was smiling and cruising along the bike lane next to the Seine, and yelling, "hey!" at the cars who almost ran me over, and ringing the bell merrily at the pedestrians who still took little notice of us.
Since our apartment was all the way up on the seventh floor, the air that came through the window smelled remarkably fresh for such a big city, and sometimes carried with it the sounds of our neighbor playing his piano, the people next door's dinner conversation. My companion made friends with a little boy in the window across the way. They would pretened to shoot at one another with imaginary machine guns. The little boy loved it, donned a cape, and started calling out to us in French. We could hardly understand him, but for a few words. He seemed to be rather shy when I came to the window, but would ask about me when I wasn't there, calling, "ou est la fille?" with a smile.
The language was the only disappointment. My French was better the last time I was in Paris, but still a few people I spoke with seemed surprised we were Americans, but laughed at my companion's attempts at speaking in French. We joked that he always gave us away. What gave me away, which I realized at which point in the conversation people switched suddenly to addressing me in English, was when I got my articles wrong, said "le tartelette" instead of "la tartelette."
The day we left we walked to Gare du Nord in the early morning, talking and watching the shops open. A few people were on the street, smoking and talking on benches, in cafes.
I can't wait to go back.
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