Marche Maubert

December 30th, 2017

We are lucky to live a 10-minute walk away from a great food market, the Marche Maubert.  It is, in some sense, Paris' oldest market, too.  It has existed since the 6th century, originally on the Ile de la Cite, and moved to its current location centuries later when it outgrew its spot there. 

On the Saturday before Christmas, I took Kate and Anna with me shopping for Christmas eve and Christmas day dinners.  We needed bread, salad greens, cheeses for a cheese tray, clementines, haricots vertes, olives, eggs, butter, mushrooms, duck rillette, and beef for braising.  We managed to consummate most of the transactions in French---we're getting good at market/store/restaurant French---but resorted to English to ask about the soft-rind cow's milk cheeses at the cheese monger.  

The most entertaining interaction by far was with the butcher, a very animated and jovial Corsican.  There are considerable differences in butchering practices between France and the US, so the particular cuts of meat that I'm used to buying may not even exist here.  There was something that looked like a flat brisket, but I was not sure.  I explained (in French) that I wanted a piece of beef that I would cook for a long time in liquid and needed to feed eight people.  I figured the butcher would suggest the brisket-type cut.  Instead he came back with no fewer than four cuts of beef and demonstrated, using his own body, where on the cow the cuts had come from.  I told him that it was too much and pointed to the largest cut he had brought over and said that was enough.  No, the rest is necessary, he insisted.  You need the bones with marrow and chunks of fat and the pieces of tail for flavor.  He said, "Do you want to look at the meat, or do you want to eat it?"  He showed me a medal he had won for the quality of his meat and insisted that I trust him.  Then he said, with a sly smile, that I needed to look away when he tallied up the total---it was Christmas, after all, and I wanted the best meat for my family regardless of price.

Interesting historical note:  Place Maubert is believed to have been named for Albertus Magnus, also known as Albert the Great or Maitre Albert, a German polymath who gave lectures at the Sorbonne in the 13th century.  His lectures were so popular, they had to be held outside, in what is now the square named for him and the location of the Marche Maubert.  He was a pivotal figure in the intellectual history of the Catholic Church and was considered to be perhaps the greatest intellectual of his time.  He was subsequently beatified. 

                 

Opera Garnier

December 29th, 2017

There are two main opera houses in Paris, the 19th century Opera Garnier and the modern Opera Bastille.  Opera Garnier is the famous, iconic one, featured in movies, literature, and drama, and that was where we saw Mozart's opera "La Clemence de Titus" on Christmas day.  The building was remarkably grand and opulent, worth a visit even if you aren't interested in attending an opera.  (I believe they give tours.)

The house itself was beautiful, with gilt-decorated balconies and a Chagall-painted ceiling. 

The most impressive part, though, was the lobby of the building.  It was a several-stories-high space with marble staircases and landings, columns and capitals, carved balconies and banisters, and elaborate light fixtures.

We enjoyed the performance tremendously, too.  The opera was artfully staged, in addition to being beautifully sung.  During the course of the opera, the stage was dominated by a huge marble block (or a facsimile) that was progressively carved into a massive bust of Titus.  We saw the bust emerging gradually as Titus evolved in his position as emperor and gained confidence in his decisions.  The set walls and the marble block were always askew, at awkward angles to the stage.  The lighting was interesting as well, with bright spots trained on the bust, illuminating it and creating dramatic shadows on the set walls.  The singers were often left dimly or indirectly lighted.  Their positions on stage were stylized and stilted.  Each character's costume was monochromatic, symbolic of attributes of the character:  Titus in white, the members of the senate in black, Vitellia in dark purple, Sextus in gray.  The members of the senate had outrageous and sculptural hairdos, sometimes towering a foot and a half above their heads.  It all combined for a dramatic ambiance, which I thought was very effective.

   

A Little More Christmas

December 28th, 2017

Caroline and Anna have flown over to Paris to celebrate Christmas with us.  My sister Katie and her family have come as well.  We're having a wonderful time shopping at the markets for dinners at home, introducing the whole crew to some of our favorite restaurants, showing everyone around the neighborhood, and exploring new places.  I'll write more about their visit later, but now just want to share a few more pictures of Christmas cheer around Paris.  

A Christmas Party

December 19th, 2017

The full title of this post should be something like "A Christmas Party:  Tiny House Edition" or "How to Host 20 Teenagers in About 200 Square Feet."  We threw a party last night for Kate's Adaptation Class at EJM to celebrate the season, as well as the end of their "compos," or term-end exams.  It was billed as a chocolate fondue party, but since we were holding it from 6pm-8pm, I figured we needed to provide plenty of more substantial savory food as well.  Half of the attendees were boys, and it turns out that adolescent boys eat a lot.  We served plates of italian charcuterie---proscuitto, mortadella, and finocchiona---other antipasti---scamorza affumicata, olives, artichoke hearts---a French brebis with rosemary, radishes with butter, bowls of nuts, baskets of sliced baguette, an English cheese tray---Stilton, Lancashire bomb, apricots, and gingersnaps---and tomato soup shots and gougeres.  Then we had trays piled high with Belgian waffles, clementines, and bananas to dip into the fondue.  Pretty much everything got eaten.  I think the kids had a really good time, taking selfies wearing tissue-paper crowns, arguing over playlists, playing "Never have I ever."  We had fun, too.  It was great to see the kids interacting and enjoying themselves so much.

Our Christmas trees, sporting an Eiffel
Tower ornament that Hunter and Angela
Brooke brought us as a host gift

We invited parents to join us as well, and quite a few did.  We rearranged the guest room, removing the mattress and separating the two halves of the bed platform into two "divans."  We brought in an ottoman as a cocktail table, and, voila, an adults' lounge.  It was really nice to relax and chat with some of the parents. 

I am spoiled by our set-up for entertaining in Newton.  We have a lot more space, of course, both in terms of square footage and in terms of number of separate spaces for parties to spill into.  Two kitchens (i.e., two ovens, two big sinks, two microwaves, two fridges, two dishwashers, two sets of counters) is a ridiculous luxury, but really comes in handy when throwing a party.  And, over the years, I have acquired a lot of platters, trays, ice buckets, wine glasses, champagne flutes, cocktail plates, and so forth.  I had to do a lot of making do this time, and I also planned the menu to include very little cooking.  All told, though, I think it went well, people enjoyed themselves, and I certainly did, too.      

Rolando Villazon

December 15th, 2017

On Saturday night, we attended a concert by the Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz, featuring soloists Rolando Villazon, a tenor, and Ildar Abdrazakhov, a bass.  It was at the 2000-person Theatre des Champs Elysee.  Kate is in school with Rolando's son, and we have become friends with Rolando's wife, Lucia.  We had never met Rolando before, though.  The concert was fabulous.  (I thinking of becoming a fan of opera.)  Their voices were so expressive and strong, and their rapport with the audience was funny and charming.  The orchestra was also excellent.

Lucia had arranged for us to meet with Rolando after the concert.  It was an honor.  I didn't think to take Kate's picture with him, so I'll include this publicity photo of the two soloists instead.    

After the concert, we walked around briefly to see some of the Christmas lights and watch the Eiffel Tower sparkle, as it does every night for a couple of minutes on the hour.  It was a magical evening.     

Books on Paris

December 14th, 2017

The potential Paris-related reading list is immense.  There are the standard travel guides, of course, but also many books about food and cooking, books about fashion, books about art, books about shopping, novels set in Paris, novels written in Paris, ex-patriot memoirs, philosophical tracts, and many more.  I am a slow reader and will only make it through a handful this year, but still I already have a number to recommend.

I will start with one I just finished, a rich history of the Saint Germain des Pres neighborhood in Paris, in whose southeast corner, according to the boundaries given in the book, we live.  It is so rich in anecdotes and interesting facts about theaters, bars, shops, former residents, restaurants, streets, parks.  And of course it is of particular interest to us because we walk the very streets, enjoy the very parks, and eat at the very restaurants he describes in the book.  John Baxter has written a number of other books about other Paris neighborhoods and Paris in general.       

I mentioned before the book on the history of Paris, Seven Ages of Paris.  I would recommend it for a good, all-purpose history.  Even though it starts at the very (prehistoric) beginnings of Paris, is it not a difficult read and it is quite informative.  It provides a useful sweep of the evolution of Paris, physically and politically, over the ages.  The pre-19th century sections were heavy on political and military history, with only the occasional detail about culture and everyday life that I really enjoy.  The rich cultural details start to become more  prominent especially in the 20th century sections.  I was fascinated by his description of the Nazi takeover of Paris, collaborators and resisters in Paris during the occupation, and the repercussions of the occupation after the defeat of the Nazis.

My favorite book so far has been Adam Gopnik's Paris to the Moon.  It is charming, opinionated, familiar, and philosophical all at once.  His observations of life in Paris as an expat with a young family are often laugh-out-loud or read-to-your-husband funny but always with a deep insight and a refreshing self-awareness.  And his prose is beautiful.  Gopnik is a writer for The New Yorker and this book is a collection of diary entries and a few of his New Yorker essays during his five years as their Paris correspondent.  He and his family lived close to where we live, so I enjoy the descriptions of familiar places in this book at well.  

A more low-brow choice might be Paris Revealed by Stephen Clarke.  It's a dishy and saucy insider's guide to living in Paris:  fun to read, also very funny, and informative about all kinds of things, but without Gopnik's beautiful prose or philosophical insights.  I especially enjoyed his guide to the Metro, with cultural characterizations of each line and tips about the most interesting stations.  

I suppose the classic expat in Paris volume would be Hemingway's A Moveable Feast.  I had read it many years ago and reread it over the summer in preparation for our year here.  Like Gopnik's book, it is a memoir-ish collection of essays he wrote about his life in Paris, but of course it was 1920s Paris.  Again, he lived in the basic vicinity of where we live, and many of the restaurants he writes about still exist.  (I suppose they exist in no small part because he wrote about them and his disciples still travel to eat in them.)  The Paris he lived in is long gone, though, at least in our neighborhood:  divey hotels, flats without heating or plumbing, prize fights and prostitutes and gin joints.  Also, I will not be the first person to say that this was not Hemingway's best book.  All told, though, a great read.    


Finally, I'll mention All Abroad, but not to place it in the same category as the other books.  It was written by an American who moved to Paris with her husband and three children for two years.  Her children attended an unnamed bilingual school in the 15th (which we assume must be Kate's school), so her descriptions of shopping for school supplies and dealing with the school administration were useful.  She also included an excellent shopping tip:  the all-frozen foods grocery store Picard has surprisingly good quality.  The author is no Gopnik for sure, and the insights and quality of the writing are, well, nothing to write home about.  (The reviews for this book on Amazon are extremely strong, much higher than A Moveable Feast or Paris to the Moon,  for instance.  This fact just serves to reinforce my view that sample selection is everything in online reviews.)       

  

Ecole des Mines

December 7th, 2017

I was invited to give a talk at the Ecole des Mines in Paris yesterday.  This is the school where Maurice Allais taught, winner of the 1988 Economics Nobel Prize.  The school is located very close to where we live in the 6th.  In fact, entirely by coincidence, they arranged the post-talk dinner at the restaurant on the ground floor of our apartment building.  

It was a nice crowd, and I received a number of useful comments on my paper.  Overall, it was a lovely day and I was very happy to have gone.  The most remarkable thing, though, was the room where I gave my seminar:  oak paneling, coffered ceiling, intricate hand-carved details, chandeliers, a beautiful view of the Luxembourg Gardens.  Hands down the fanciest seminar room I have ever presented in.  (The wifi antennae were hidden behind the carved cherubim above the door, by the way.)

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

December 4th, 2017

 Hotels, restaurants, and shops are putting up decorations in their windows and garland around their doors.  Our whole neighborhood is sparkling at night.  

Paris Cultural Events (so far)

November 30th, 2017

Obligatory declaration at this point in the year for everyone on sabbatical or spending a year away:  I can't believe our year is one-third over!  (In fact, I can't.)  

With one-third of our year under our belts, I wanted to reflect on some of the cultural events we have been to during our year, and how language barriers have altered the experiences.  

In Boston, we have settled into some habits in terms of what events we attend.  Some of this is based on conscious decisions, but, just as often, on historical precedent and social reasons.  We see the symphony fairly regularly, rarely see opera or ballet, and go to a lot of theater.  We never go to movies.  I think it is simply because you typically don't buy movie tickets in advance, so they don't hold the same commitment value that, say, theater or symphony tickets do.  

So far this year in Paris, we have been to an opera, two concerts, a musical, and a play.  We have chosen the performances with our language limitations in mind, but they have not all worked out as we predicted.  

I already mentioned the first concert, given by the pianist from Toulouse.  It was fantastic.  We figured, in general, that concerts would be safe and not pose too many language issues.  We went to a second concert a few weeks ago.  It was a benefit hosted by Kate's school, where a few musicians with ties to the school (mostly children who attended, I suppose) performed.  It turns out that French pop music is quite a bit more lyrical than American, with a lot of emphasis placed on the storyline.  We really felt like we were missing an important dimension of the performance.  It made me wonder how much I would appreciate American popular music if I didn't speak English.  In addition, one of the performers was a stand-up comedienne/singer.  With her, we were really in over our heads.  I would say that we pretty much missed all of the humor, even if we understood the broad context.

We also went to "Welcome to Woodstock."  It was a "Mama Mia"-style show with a thin plot built around classic songs from the late 60s played by a live (and quite good) band onstage.  That was great.  We did not understand all of the dialog, but it basically didn't matter at all.  And Glenn and I knew almost all of the songs from our childhoods.  Kate and her friend Roya came, too, and enjoyed the show.  

When Glenn's mother and her friend Ingrid visited in September, they took us to the Paris Opera to see "La Veuve Joyeuse." (It was playing at the very modern Bastille, not the Palais Garnier, the famous opera house.)  The opera was mostly in French, with some German, but with surtitles in English (and perhaps French as well).  It was wonderfully performed and a true joy.  The surtitles made comprehension a breeze.  We enjoyed it tremendously.        

Theater here is a bit of a challenge, but we gave it a try last night.  We walked across the street to the Theatre Odeon to see a production of Chekov's The Three Sisters.  I swear that I saw on the theater's website either that it would be performed in the original Russian with French and English surtitles.  Whatever I read that I earnestly thought was that was not.  It was performed in French with nothing like a surtitle to be found.  (We certainly did not understand everything that was happening on stage, but we can also say with some certainty that the French translation was not entirely faithful to the original Russian, written around 1900.  Our suspicion is based on the number of times phrases like "hashtag," "Kanye West," and "motherf***er" popped up.)  Luckily, we had read the synopsis before going, so we followed roughly what was going on and even got a few of the jokes.  (Update:  My friend Katia, who also attended the play and speaks fluent Russian, French, and English, said that there were a couple of silent performances of The Three Sisters, around the same time, in Russian sign language with English and French surtitles.  That must have been the webpage I originally saw.)   

Even given the language issues, I was glad to have seen it.  It had one of the most beautiful, impressive, and effective sets I have ever seen in a theater production.  The stage was large enough that an entire (small) house was constructed on stage.  It was built in a mid-century modern split-level style with expansive glass walls, so we could see into every room.  There was also a deck off the back and a entry stoop on the front where action took place.  The house was built on a turntable, so as different actions were happening in different parts of the house, it rotated slowly around so that we could see the main action.  At any time, though, the audience could see four or five different scenes, some of them with characters doing or saying things and some without.  

The sound management was also impressive.  There were microphones on all of the actors that were turned up when they were part of the main action and down (but not off) when they weren't.  Also they did some interesting things with the microphones when the doors were opened or closed.

We are looking forward to additional plays at the Odeon (with English surtitles, I hope), a performance of the Seven-Fingered Hand Circus next week, another two operas (La Clemence de Titus and Don Pasquale, both at the Palais Garnier), a concert in Saint Chapelle, and a Ben Folds concert in the spring.             

Cambridge UK

November 28th, 2017

Creeping vine in the courtyard of King's college

I have referred back to the year thirty years ago that Glenn and I spend in England in several different posts.  This past weekend, we went back to Cambridge.  We got to see how much the city has changed.  When we were there, we joked that it was a place stuck in time because whenever anyone would suggest a change of any kind, people would respond, "We've been doing it this way for 800 years and it's always worked."  Thirty years has made a big difference.

Moss growing in King's College

Door of St. John's (or Trinity, I forget)

First, let me say that we did not go back there primarily as a trip down memory lane.  We were visiting my sister Shannon, her partner Derek, and their son Jack.  Derek owns a house in Cambridge and splits his time between there, Newton, Massachusetts, and Pasadena, California.  (He is a biotech entrepreneur with one successful startup under his belt, working on another, Camena Bioscience.  Camena has their scientific HQ in Cambridge and their manufacturing HQ in Pasadena, and Shannon lives in Newton, which explains his time allocation.)  It was fantastic to see them, and we very much appreciated their hospitality.  We got to see two more of Derek's children while we were there, Lloyd and Adela, as a bonus!  (We missed Eleanor by a day, unfortunately.)  

St. John's Chapel

The biggest change from thirty years ago in Cambridge that I noticed in my weekend there was the food scene.  A really hoky Tex-Mex place, crummy pizza, several Indian restaurants, and a kebab stand exemplified the range of culinary offerings three decades ago.  There was one pretty fancy and high-quality French restaurant---I think it was called Restaurant Angelina---but otherwise lots of pubs.  This past weekend we passed dozens of Asian restaurants, ranging from the swanky to the hipster to the hole-in-the-wall.  There were tons of Italian places of different varieties, hamburger joints and steakhouses, cozy coffee shops with high-quality espresso and avocado toast, and plenty of African and Middle Eastern cuisine.  And still lots of pubs.  We ate extremely well.  My favorite restaurant was a hole-in-the-wall Chinese place in Mill Road south of town that still had the decor from when the space had housed an Indian restaurant a few years ago.  Everything was spectacularly good, but the best and most impressive dish was a white fish braised in chili oil.  It was not particularly spicy but had a rich and wonderful flavor infused in it, and it was served in a huge bowl with the fish filets and sprouts flouting in a sea of hot chilis and oil.

A small pathway off of St. John's Street

Glenn and I took the opportunity to walk around the center of Cambridge and show Kate around a little.  We spend most of our time at King's College, since it is so spectacular, but did walk down King's Parade to Silver Street and up to Bridge Street and checked out the Market Square, too. 

In the courtyard of King's looking out towards the gate

Glenn and Kate approaching the King's College Chapel

 A few shots in the Chapel:

Cambridge is a truly beautiful city.  I forgot how much I loved the buff-colored stone (oolitic limestone, I am told), especially with the low winter sun shining on it.