We spent the 4th of July taking in a beautiful, sunny, mild, fresh day in Paris. We didn’t get out until noon, but got a lot accomplished.
My first order of the day was to get a haircut, something I hadn’t had in too long a time. Right around the block we’d noticed a salon, so we went back there. Suzie has adopted a strategy of sometimes leaving me on my own so I am forced to speak French, so after ascertaining that they could take me in a few minutes, she left with the boys. I was forced to try to communicate with a young woman who spoke very, very limited English about how I wanted my hair cut. How short? This short? Shorter? Finally I just said to her, “Vous decidez” — you decide — which she did. She ended up giving me an excellent haircut, albeit quite a bit shorter than when I went in (apparently that is the style here; sitting on the balcony this morning watching men go by, I saw almost no one with longer hair, but many with shorter hair).
About 3/4 of the way through, she said she needed to shampoo my hair, which seemed odd, but I went with it. What I am about to say may seem odd (it sounds odd to think it), but I’ve never had a shampoo like this one. I am by nature someone who has never liked going to get my haircut, mostly, I think, because I don’t like strangers touching me. So the shampoo thing is not high on my list. But this young woman had a way of doing it that was so gentle and so relaxing that I actually did relax and enjoy it. Very odd, that experience, very odd. Anyway, the result is that my hair is much shorter. Suzie says it looks great, but the boys are calling me “The Sargent,” although I believe that is hyperbole.
After that we wandered along our new street, stopping from time to time in stores that were having sales. This picture gives a good sense of the neighborhood:
Our other mission was to buy Metro/Bus passes for the four of us. We eventually found the right place to buy a pass, but were told we needed photos. Suzie (always thinking) had saved the photos I’d taken for our French visas, so we decided to walk back and get them rather than pay for new ones. En route back got lunch at a take-out sandwich stop and ate it on a bench along the street. Eventually we did get our pictures, and our passes (our French seems to be better this time, or else we have run into people that are better at understanding us), and decided to use them by taking the Metro to the St. Germain des Pres area, one of my favorites. We ambled around, sampling food at stalls set up along the street, and eventually decided to go see the Seine, turning on Rue de Seine to accomplish that. I had been, however, completely turned around coming off the Metro, so rather than heading north as we wanted, we were, in fact, heading south, which turned out OK as we eventually came to the Jardin du Luxembourg, one of the more beautiful and useful (and used) public spaces I’ve ever been in. We sat for a while and listened to a (not very good) band (with bagpipes!) playing a very strange selection of music (Moon River and King of the Road back-to-back, for instance), before we decided to take the bus back home.
On our way to the bus, we passed a quintessentially French sign, which I have entitled, “How to Pick Up Dog Poop” for self-explanatory reasons.
I love the line “Saisissez la Dejection,” both for the wonderful word “dejection” (my dog, you see, does not shit, she evacuates), but also for the use of the verb “saisir,” which, my attorney colleagues will be interested to note, means to grab hold of or seize, and comes from the same root as the old real property term “seisin.” Anyway … this is the scene we saw waiting for our bus:
I saw another very typically French sign on the window of the bus. It said, in effect, that passengers could open the windows of the bus if they desired, but that in the event of a disagreement over whether the window should be open or closed, then the person or persons wanting the window closed would prevail. I don’t know why that strikes me as funny, but it does … a window open-or-closed tiebreaker.
After returning home, we rested a bit, then I took Andrew and Will on a skateboard park search, which unfortunately proved unsuccessful. We found an incredible skatepark, but it was behind a locked fence, and the groundskeeper (the first unfriendly person we’ve met so far in Paris) said that it was opened only on Tuesdays, which made no sense at all. He eventually found another one (thanks Suzie) and in any event got to skate all the way to the locked park and back.
I am running out of steam, but I wanted to mention that while I was out with the boys, Suzie went grocery shopping, and bought ingredients for and cooked a wonderful first dinner in in Paris — salmon and fish, salad, bread, and for dessert, an apple tart with creme frais on the side. Delicious, and not the unhealthiest thing we’ve eaten in the last 3 weeks for sure.
I do not know why I feel so comfortable in Paris. It does not seem right that the small-town kid from Iowa should have it feel like home. But it does. Perhaps I will suss that out in the months to come.
Categories: Travel -- France
Tags: Paris France