Hiatus
"Entrelesmurs" will be
dehors les murs for a little while. Janet and I will be visiting her parents back home so there won't be any Parisian adventures to post until we get back.
Janet in her natural habitat, the upper deck of a 747 - note the protective colouration that enables her to blend in with British Airways.
Canal St. Martin
On Sunday we took K to explore with us another part of the city, the
St. Martin canal. We walked it from the
Place de la Republique to
le Parc de la Villette at the edge of the city (partial
map, here). Being the first really nice weekend, there were plenty of people strolling with us, roller-blading, walking dogs and kicking balls.
My expectations, set by historic photographs and paintings, were for a verdant scene, with green banks and tall trees. In fact, there were multi-story buildings (of recent vintage) quite close to the sides, and in many places the area for walking was relatively narrow. My picture above contributes to the media misprepresentation by making it look more bucolic than it is. It was an interesting exploration, but not quite the walk in the park I thought it would be.
Almost Summer
Now we're getting somewhere: at last some real sun and warmth. We opened the windows today and let a breeze blow through the apartment.
Leaving our jackets behind, we went up to the eighth
arrondissement to run an errand. Then we just went for a stroll, all the way up to Sacre Coeur and back down to the second. In the old covered passageways that we poked through there were antiquarian book and art shops, with bins of posters, books and photos out front. Back in our neighbourhood we did what people do everywhere on the first warm Saturday afternoon, and sat in a café with the newspaper.
This evening we went out for dinner with a work friend of Janet's, who is in town for an interview, and her husband. We walked up half of the sixteenth to a pleasant little bistro near their hotel called
Le Bistrot des Vignes.
Rive Gauche
Our friend K is in town for a wedding this weekend, and I dragged her off to wander around the
rive gauche in her jet-lagged state.
We eventually wandered into the
Jardin du Luxembourg, which was thronged, for a weekday. In addition to the chess players and the sailors, there were children taking pony rides, a film shoot, some runners and hundreds of strollers (as in walkers, not perambulators, although there were a lot of those too).
The children rent these sailboats, which can move surprisingly quickly in a very light breeze.
A Birthday
Emma loves ribbon and always offers her help with birthday presents.
Janet loves apples, and there is a restaurant in Paris, called
Pomze, dedicated to the fruit. Apples are an ingredient in every dish, including the butter that came with the bread. We do eat out on occasion, and have naturally had some excellent meals - but this one may well have been the best we've had since we got here: Excellent
fois gras, a delicately flavoured lentil salad, very fine goose leg with red cabbage, a superbly light apple cheese cake, and each course accompanied by a well-matched cider.
Modern Paris
There is a side of Paris we think of less often, we who delight in the statues, palaces, and grand avenues, and the centuries of history that seep from the cities stones; but after Louis XV, Napoleon and Haussmann came those who saw no reason not to place modern Europe alongside the historic. So the
Louvre is not far from the
Pompidou Centre, the
Arc de Triomphe is lined up with the
Grande Arche de la Defense, and yesterday I stumbled into a park that might have been created as a counterpoint to the
Tuileries or the
Champ de Mars. Just down Rue Exelmans and across the river is a park with the straight lines and right angles of 20th century architecture, filled with squared-off gardens, ruled paths and planar fountains.
It is called the
Parc André Citröen, and in the middle of it is a tethered balloon in which one can take a ride to get a view of Paris.
Speaking of parks, the sun came out for my morning run in the
Bois de Boulogne, and there are leaves on the trees and forsythia in bloom. Perhaps now we'll see what this "springtime in Paris" folderol is all about.
Pyramids of Glass and Stone
Supposing that the Louvre will only become more crowded as spring and summer advance, we decided we'd better go while the crowds were manageable. As we discovered at the
Musée du Monde Arabe, Saturday afternoon isn't really the best time of the week to go to museums in Paris. And truly, I pity the poor tourists if we're right and crowds get a lot worse.
Assuming that we're going to be regularly hosting visitors who want to "do" Paris and thus spend some time at the Louvre, it seems likely we'll be back more than once. That means that we'll be trotting up to see the Mona Lisa and her friends from time to time, so this trip we spent mostly in the Egyptian section. Short of the museum in Cairo, there probably isn't a better collection for both quality of the pieces and temporal coverage of the pre-Christian period.
I have developed a habit of looking for images of dogs in works of art to send to my friend J, so some time was spent photographing Anubis (actually a jackal, but I think that counts) and other dogs we came across. And this lead to the mummified cats, which Janet observed look like sock puppets.
The French in the Streets
We seem to have missed most of the excitement over the
CPE (the new law governing hiring under 25s). The week before we left I encountered in the sixth
arrondissement some of the trash and broken glass that was the aftermath of one of the first demonstrations, but most of the brouhaha took place in our absence.
However last night we tripped over another demonstration of French contempt for authority. They really do park just anywhere they feel like it: on verges, at corners and around centre medians. Driveways often have to be lined with poles to prevent drivers from parking on the sidewalk. This fellow is not only parked across a crosswalk, which is quite commonplace, but has simply backed up to the curb as though he had a Smart car.
Jiggity-Jig
Safe and sound we made it "home again, home again..." from the desert. From Nizwa we took an adventurous road up Jebel Shams and had a fantastic hike along a gorge to rival the grand canyon. We drove to the edge of the empty quarter and spent one night in a tourist camp (disneyland in the desert, but the dung beetles were real); then drove back to the coast and the town of Sur. One last 4x4-rental-justifying drive up the coast brought us back to Muscat. And there we treated ourselves to a night at the brand new
Shangri-La resort in Muscat (thanks to special opening prices). It was a nice way to emerge from our dusty, sandy, buggy previous few days and we made the most of it (see below).
Our long flight home was punctuated by a stopover in London. Janet likes to fly BA and to shop in Heathrow. And the BA lounge make the itinerary worth it in itself. They have hot showers, all kinds of food and Johnnie Walker Blue at the self-service bar.
For once the buses cooperated to bring us home from Charles de Gaul airport - or appeared to be doing so. We caught the Air France shuttle without difficulty for once, and hopped from it directly onto our local bus. Janet commented on the unusual good fortune, and jinxed it: a mile and a half from home our bus stopped at a barrier marking the route of the Paris marathon. I don't know who was still running at four in the afternoon but the police prevented us from proceeding (although many motorists drove blithely under the tape). We wound up waiting for most of half an hour, observing in our fellow passengers a mixture of Gallic indifference and irate posturing. Eventually we continued via a detour on the
pérephérique, which caused us to have to walk an additional quarter mile home with our luggage.
We had a utterly terrific time and are plotting our return, but we, with Emma, are very happy to be home. (I'll post more of our pictures from the trip on my site - but they are in line behind the wedding pictures.)
Desert and Mountains
We are now in the mountains, staying near Nizwa. It's similar yet different from many places: Southern California for the heat and rocky desert geography, Egypt for the human activity, and Canmore for the small-town-in-the-valley feel; but it's a lot tidier than Egypt, hotter than Canmore, and the people just aren't very SoCal at all.
We have been exploring the nearby towns and forts by means of a rented 4x4. The beast is a gas guzzler, but then a litre of gas costs less than half what it does in Toronto. We've seen the local fort in town, as well as a castle called Jabrin fort at the nearby town of Bahla. These are grand structures most of four hundred years old, with period household items inside to give a flavour of life at that time.
Bahla has another fort, closed for renovation - one thing that we can't help noticing is that there is a lot of money splashing around here for civic works. The highways are broad, smooth and sport streetlights their length; there are large new-looking mosques (with the king's name on them) and the tourist sites such as the forts have been extensively reconstructed and restored.
Despite some busloads of Germans, the tourist infrastructure is still a little weak. This is good and bad, since we don't have to contend with the hordes; but we have had some difficulty finding the maps, guidebooks, signage and such that enable us to find our way to the interesting sites. We stumbled across
beehive tombs yesterday, but there was nothing there but a sign warning us of the penalty for removing articles or disturbing an archaeological site.
My few words of Arabic have served me somewhat better here than in Morocco. If nothing else, the effort is recognized; the Omanis seem quite delighted to meet a Westerner speaking Arabic. But I have even managed to use it to have what might almost be termed a conversation (a little too much charades to really qualify).
