F is for France
Tuesday, August 25, 2009 at 4:24PM Living in London and more specifically in Camden gives us fantastic access to Europe. St. Pancras International Rail Station is an easy 15 minute walk from our front door. Since I have been in England I have not fully taken advantage of living so close to Europe but starting now Emma and I are going to start!
This August we decided to do a long weekend in Paris. We booked tickets on the Eurostar train service to Gare de Nord Paris, leaving London at 6:55 and arriving in Paris at 10:00. Because we live so close to the station we were literally 4 hours from our front door to the hotel we had chosen.
;)
Our hotel in Paris was a small Best Western in the St. Germaine area on the left bank. We chose it for its location and most importantly in August, for its air-conditioned rooms. If you have been to Paris in the summer you know it can be hot, and you may also know that most hotel rooms are on the small side…a potentially uncomfortable sleeping arrangement! We chose wisely, it was a scorcher weekend, the air-conditioning was a real plus, at 120 euros a night however the hotel was simply adequate, of course we didn’t mind, we were not going to spend much time in it anyway!
So we arrived at our hotel a little after 10 in the morning, our room was not yet ready so we stuck our light travel bags in the hotel luggage room and headed out for a wander. The weather was spectacular, a bright blue cloudless sky and temperatures hovering around 30C. Our loose goal was to get to a nice lunch spot and we happily left the hotel, tourist map in one hand and iPhone in the other.
I had thought that having the iPhone would be very handy with its built in GPS and link to Google maps however it turns out the charges that using these ‘data’ services (any feature other than calling and texting) are very expensive. I was going to have to be careful and not use it too much, I had already used it to find our hotel as I steered us a bit wrong initially after emerging from the subway stop after leaving Gare de Nord. That cost me about 5 pounds!
We wandered in the pleasant heat happy that we had dressed in light summer clothes. Neither of us had showered and we were not looking our sharpest, we had assumed we would freshen up in our hotel room when we arrived. We were a bit worried that we would not be allowed into the very nice L’Atelier Joel Robuchon restaurant that we had chosen to lunch at.
;)
Well they did let us in and it was fantastic, the restaurant had been recommended to us by Jacob Richler, a brother of our friend Emma. Good recommendation! The restaurant does a tapas type menu so we ordered 4 dishes, two each. I had a super squid and artichoke dish and surprising but delicious marinated shredded beef (think tuna salad but with beef) while Emma had a roasted aborigine and mozzarella stack and pigeon breast coated in duck foie gras wrapped in a cabbage leaf with a side of the creamiest yummiest mashed potatoes you have ever had. YUM.
Well pleased with our start in Paris we drifted back to the hotel and freshened up. We spent the rest of the afternoon exploring the left bank and stopping at the odd street café for refreshing beverages (I was having a delicious French beer, a lager with a fruity, lemony flavour while Emma enjoyed some Rose). We decided on a small Italian pizza place for dinner and an early night. The pizza was good but the beer they served was no where near chilled enough! Our plan for the Saturday was the D’Orsay, a look around Galleries Layfayette and dinner at a highly recommended bistro, Andre Allard’s.
Saturday morning saw us out of bed and out hunting a breakfast by 8:30. We were looking for an Eric Kaiser boulangerie (bakery) to have a sit down coffee and croissant but to our disappointment his chain (there are a dozen stores in Paris) was mostly closed due to the national holidays. We found an open store but had to do take away; still the croissants and brioche were delicious. With partially full stomachs we made our way to the D’Orsay to look at some art.
Both Emma and I were mostly interested in impressionist paintings so we focused on the floors that showed them off. The collection is impressive, Monet, Degas, Rembrandt, and Van Gogh are well represented, and interestingly it is here that you will find one of the most famous American paintings, Whistler’s Mother. We spent several hours poking around and ended in the gift shop were we bought a few nice prints and a good fridge magnet. The D’Orsay is great building. It is a converted railway station with huge open spaces and lots of pointless (considering it was a station) but beautiful ornamentation.
We struck out from the D’Orsay and made for Paris Opera House and the Galleries Lafayette. It was a good walk through what you might call the proper downtown of Paris. Paris is full of striking buildings, grand boulevards and impressive monuments and statues. I was very irritated that I had left my good camera at home. My poor iPhone was a poor substitute but better than nothing! Click here to see the photos!
Once at the Galleries Lafayette we made a beeline for the gourmet foods section. This section is part supermarket, part deli, part restaurant and part liquor store. Lots of fun. We were like kids in a candy store although we managed not to buy more than a few edible goodies and held out on the wine. We did have a mid afternoon pick me up from the wine bar though. It was hot trudging back to our hotel so we stopped at the air-conditioned Orangerie to look at the art in there. Monet created 8 huge murals for the Orangerie and had them placed in two oval rooms, four in each. His theme was a water garden and standing in the oval rooms the murals portray views over the water garden from dawn through to dusk. Fantastic.
After the Orangerie we had just enough time to have a bit of rest in the hotel, a quick shower and then we were back out again. We had about an hour before our 8 o’clock dinner reservation so we pared ourselves at a little café and sat watching the world go bar over a glass of wine.
Dinner at Andre Allard’s was very good. The restaurant has been around for a long time and has a real authentic French bistro feel. The two dining rooms are small, packed with tables and decorated in 1950s chic. The air even smells a bit musty. The wait staff were all dressed in back suits and the large maitre de was suitable friendly and brisque at the same time. The authenticity was only marred by two things, the wait staff spoke passable English (though I was a champion and insisted on practicing my French) and the restaurant was pretty much full of American tourists! I cannot complain about the tourists, after all there we were sitting as well, a Canadian and an Australian. We decided to order off the menu rather than the set meals, we both had starters and a main and we shared a cheese plate for desert, this was all washed down by an indulgent bottle of wine. We engaged both the waiter and the maitre de in helping us chose a nice bottle of French wine, they managed to up sell us by a few euros after we gave them our price range but we were rewarded with good bottle of wine. Emma was amused by overhearing our fellow diners at the next table comment on our wine choice, they were doing their maths and working out what would have been the shocking cost in Australian dollars. It is good to earn pounds sterling! The wine actually was not as good as we had expected for the price but I think that is more done to our taste in wine rather than the quality of the wine itself, we wrote after in our wine log "The red was good and got better as we sat...". If you don’t try you don’t find these things out!
The Australians sitting next to us turned out to be from Sydney, a city Emma knows well and Emma had a good conversation with them. They solved the mystery of the American tourists in the restaurant, the hotel they were staying at (George V, Four Seasons) was recommending it to their guests. Oh la-la. By the time we were finished the restaurant had more French clientele, it seems the Americans eat earlier than the French!
Day three started a bit later, we ate an average breakfast at a nearby café and struck out for the Eiffel Tower. I have been to Paris several times yet I have never been up the tower. This trip was no different. By the time we got to the base of the tower large (huge really) lines had formed. One of the two elevators was under repair so waiting times to get up the tower were extreme. I have been up the Arc de Triomphe and it offers a great view of Paris so I was not too disappointed to give the Eiffel a miss…again.
We had set our lunch sights on a deli called Bellota Bellota. We knew it had an outlet in Galleries Lafayette but wanted to try its main store. Yet again we were disappointed by the French national holidays. Bellota Bellota was closed. Not to be denied we trekked back to the Galleries and ate at the outlet there. Bellota Bellota is famous for its very authentic and excellent cured meats. We had hoped to get a samplers tray to eat but due to the holidays and due the time of our arrival they only were serving sandwiches. They had four sandwiches on offer and Emma and I each chose one to enjoy with a beer (and a glass of wine for Emma). They were very tasty. Our timing was good too as they quickly ran out of food as we sat munching, first one sandwich then the next was taken off the menu…important note, get there early to get the best choice of food!
Having spent three full days in the baking sun walking around Paris we decided that getting out to Gare de Nord for our train was not a bad idea. We grabbed our gear, hopped on the subway and arrived at the station with plenty of time to spare. Too much time really, we had a full hour to kill in the station. Gare de Nord is not the most exciting station at the best of times, in the middle of the holidays it is just plain boring. We killed the hour reading and eating some French fries at station café…nothing memorable there…except for watching one of the waitresses scooping ice out an ice bucket with her bare hands and plopping it into peoples drinks. She was our waitress too. We drank our soft drinks directly from the bottle and let our ice melt in the glass!
The Eurostar home was fast, comfortable and efficient, a great way to get around Europe and we were happily home by 7pm on Sunday. The dog was very happy to see us though she did miss the love, affection and hand feeding that our good friend Emma gave her while we were away!
Reader Comments (3)
BTW "pigeon breast coated in duck foie gras wrapped in a cabbage leaf" would normally send me running for the door, but having eaten pigeon in Paris I'm sure it was great.
Musee D'Orsay is great, I loved the building as well. It also has lots of decorations because train stations were an important part of first impressions when you arrived in Paris, had to make sure you knew you'd arrived in a cultured location ;)
Jessica is going to Cairo? /jealous