Send Cheerios!

Sonja has done it: She got over baby jet-lag! This will no doubt sound rather unimpressive. A week ago I would have thought, “big deal.” It is now her second night in a row of going to sleep with out a marathon freak out session lasting into the wee hours of the morning, so we are now enjoying not only our days in Paris, but also our nights.

Ken and I have had two day of language lessons. I’m a total beginner (unlike Ken), and it is an immersion class. Fortunately everyone in the class is similarly clueless. The teacher played a little conversation tape today and asked us to describe what happened. From a 30 second conversation we were able to tell her there were 3 people talking, and that someone had said “photo.” This may take a while…

A few wonderful moments so far: an accordion player coming on the metro for one stop, discovering adorably shaped sugar cubes in the grocery store, Sonja’s first merry-go-round ride in the Jardin des Tuileries, happening upon a building by the architect Adolph Loos.

One surprising fact: Cheerios have not broken into the French market. Breakfast cereal seems to be strictly a sugar-fest. Where is the breakfast that will cut our cholesterol in 6 weeks?! So Sonja will not have her traditional stroller snack of cherrios and water, but somehow I don’t think she minds the substitution of Corn Puffs.

~Rachel

Fashion Conscious

Being in Paris is making us feel very unfashionable. It’s no secret that the French like to look sharp. It has me wanting to go clothes shopping and Rachel wanting to get a new hair style.  I at least need to get an awesome new jacket.

We’d probably feel like this in any major city, but I think Paris packs the biggest fashion punch.  Men in Paris really do wear jaunty little scarfs. Dare me to wear one?

Little opta, potty training français, and the goatgurt

We’re so used to those big American suburban stores that sell everything (eg. Target, CVS, supermarkets, etc.) So it’s challenging having to visit a different shop for each item that we need to buy.  It’s fun trying to figure out which store we need using my very limited knowledge of French.  It involves a lot of peering through the windows. Once we find the right store, it can still be a challenge to find the right product. Selecting products takes some extra time and a lot of careful examination.  On our first attempt to find a grocery store, we wandered into a natural foods store. (Think Paris’s take on Whole Foods.) Rachel accidently bought some goat’s milk yogurt (which we’ve since named the goatgurt.) This is especially silly because she has always had an aversion to dairy products which come from an alternative animal (goat cheese, sheep cheese).  When I went to buy some milk, I was so busy making sure there was a picture of a cow on the bottle that I nearly picked up buttermilk.

There’s a shop just up the road called “Little Opta”.  If you didn’t guess, It’s fashion eye-wear for toddlers. How wonderfully French.  

Yesterday we saw a toddler being potty trained, being held in a squat, peeing over the edge of the sidewalk.  How wonderfully French.  

While Rachel was at her first drawing class this morning (Saturday), I had a great time wandering around Montmartre with Sonja. It was finally a sunny day, and the city was alive. On Saturdays, at least a mile of Rue Caulaincourt (the main road at the top of the stairs) becomes an enormous sidewalk flea market.  Mom: You would have spent the whole day there. To Sonja’s delight, there were a lot of toys for sale.  I got her a lot of toys, and got myself some coffee cups.  I had some other things in mind to buy, but it seems things sell quickly in these markets.  In fact, everyone was doing land office business.  Some things that I went back for had already sold. Next week we’re going to make a list of things we need for the apartment and get them all at the sidewalk market.  

My sense of direction in cities is terrible.  I keep getting thoroughly lost in Montmartre’s maze of winding cobblestone streets, occasionally coming across a playground I recognize, or turning a corner to find I’m in a tourist area and have to push my way through crowds of people staring at maps or taking pictures of everything.

I’m going to go post some pictures on Flickr now.

-Ken

L’appartement, etc.

We’ve decided to keep a blog after all. I think we’re going to share one blog between me and Rachel. Sonja might start her own blog if she has any free time.

Once again we laid over at Keflavík International Airport. I highly recommend Icelandair as the greatest way to get from Boston to France if you’re too cheap to fly direct. It’s 5 hours to Iceland, and then 2.5 hours to Paris. The airline is wonderfully no-nonsense. (It took all of 15 seconds to check in with all of our luggage at Logan. I don’t remember seeing a safety demonstration on either flight.)  We only paid for two seats, but on both legs of the trip we ended up with an extra seat for Sonja to lie down.

We have a great little furnished apartment in the heart of Montmartre. The apartment is larger than we’d imagined; a classic example of the benefit of low expectations. We’re on the second floor (le 1er étage.) We have a living room with a window out to the street, a bedroom with a window to the courtyard, and a small kitchen. There’s a large storage closet which we’ve repurposed for Sonja’s bedroom. The living room features a pullout couch. The kitchen is probably too small to be preparing any elaborate feasts, but definitely sufficient for re-heating a roast chicken (un poulet roti fermier).

The neighborhood has everything we need. Montmartre is very dense and diverse. It seems there are grocery stores, fruit stores, bakeries, general stores, tabacs, ATMs, laundromats, cafés, restaurants, cheese shops, and boutiques on every block. Not having ever lived in the city, I’m reveling in the fact that I can buy almost anything I need in just a minute’s walk from our door. This is assuming I can figure out what kind of store to buy it in. Parisians don’t have the kind of megastores we’re used to in the USA. Stores are small and cramped, and often each thing we need requires visiting a different store. For example, “une pharmacie” has only medicine, no toiletries.

As we’re interested in learning as much French as we can while we’re here, we just signed up for French lessons. We start intensive classes on Monday. While going over to the language school, we experienced both the smallest and largest elevators I’ve ever been in. The elevator in the Lamarck subway station held about 50 people. The elevator up to the language school’s flat hardly fit me and Rachel together. We start classes on Monday.

I just got back from trying out two different cafés for petit déjeuner (breakfast). They were both rather upscale with fancy looking employees. This is in contrast to the place we tried yesterday which was very similar to the café portrayed in the movie Amelie. (It even had a tabac at the end of the bar.)

Our apartment is on the corner of a main road and the bottom of one of those stair streets that Montmartre is known for. It’s not a picturesque stair street, but I think it might be one of the longest and steepest stair streets. There’s a popular youth hostel at the top of the stairs. We’re a 5 minute walk from from the Sacre Coeur cathedral and just a minute from the Le Metro. I can’t wait to explore all the winding streets in this area. Today I hope to buy a used bike.

A few years ago we fired Verizon and transferred our home phone number to a really cheap VOIP service. There’s this tiny box the size of a pack of playing cards. You connect an ethernet cable to one plug and a telephone to the other, and voila, instant phone service for $7 per month. The really anti-intuitive part is that it doesn’t care where in the world you’re doing this. It’s the internet stupid!  So to make a long story short, if you dial our Haverhill number, it will ring here in Paris and not cost us anything. Neat, eh?  As for the cell phones, I’ve unlocked my PEBL, and purchased a pre-paid SIM card called “Mobiho”. That’s right… “Mobiho”. I’m going to do the same for Rachel’s phone so we can stay in contact around the city. But internationally it’s best to just use our VOIP line. I think I’m SOL with the iPhone though as it can’t really be unlocked and I really don’t want to pay for international roaming on AT&T. I might just buy a new 3G here in Paris and sell it when we’re done. It’s still somewhat useful because of the Wi-Fi though. 

Sonja’s new words of the week: “Yes”, “What”, “Going”, and “Buckeye” (It’s a long story: Also this week she figured out how to use her pockets, which she filled up with chestnuts which she calls buckeyes.)

-Ken