Paris Journal: Kew Gardens remembered through notes & photographs

Victoria Gate to Kew Gardens

June 20, 2017

By Moristotle

[I was, of course, remiss not to include this account here shortly after our return from Paris after June 2017. I publish it today because today a couple of my friends are visiting Kew Gardens!
    And, in case you’re wondering what a visit to Kew Gardens has to do with this Paris journal, please be reminded that Carolyn and I took a four-day side trip to the British Isles last year to visit our Welsh friend Penelope Griffiths, who writes our column “Penny for Her Thoughts.”]

For our visit to Kew Gardens today, we were out of our hotel for about seven hours, catching the 65 bus [near the Hotel Xanadu in Ealing] toward Kingston at around 9:30 a.m.

Paris Journal: The best croissants not in Paris

Interview with Chef Benjamin Messaoui

Interviewed by Moristotle

My wife’s and my absolute favorite bakery anywhere in the world outside Paris is The French Corner Bakery, in Durham, North Carolina, right around the corner from Elliotte’s Pet Spa, where we regularly take Siegfried for baths and grooming. (It seems to be Elliotte’s and James’s favorite bakery too, judging by how often one of them pops out of the spa to go around the corner.)

Correspondence: cummings & Goines, and other funs

Self-portrait by ee cummings
Public Domain

Edited by Moristotle

[Items of correspondence are not attributed; they remain anonymous. They have been chosen for their inherent interest as journalism, story, or provocative opinion, which may or may not be shared by the editor or other members of the staff of Moristotle & Co.]

There is such joy to be found in helping others, you’d think there’d be more of it.

Paris Journal: Side trip to Wales

Welcome to Caerdydd (Welsh for Cardiff)

By Moristotle

On Saturday, June 17, the Paris metro stations were relatively deserted for our 6 a.m. departure from Mark’s apartment. We were off to take a train from Gare Du Nord to the port city of Calais, to be met there by our friend Penelope Griffiths, who had driven over from Cardiff, Wales to meet us and take us back on a ferry across the English Channel so we could see the White Cliffs of Dover.

Paris Journal: Notre visite de 2016 au Musée Nissim de Camondo

Our 2016 visit to the Museum Nissim de Camondo

By Moristotle

I wrote on Thursday (“Dimanche du musée libre/Free-museum Sunday”) that, if I could find Edmund White’s book, The Flâneur: A Stroll through the Paradoxes of Paris, “I would quote from the passage that piqued our interest in the Gustave Moreau Museum,” for I assumed that “something about White’s enthusiasm for things Moreau must have decided us.”

Paris Journal: Dimanche du musée libre

Free-museum Sunday

By Moristotle

A number of websites announce that admission to Paris’s museums is “free the first Sunday of the month.” This can’t be literally true. The website My Parisian Life: Your City Guide to Life in Paris has a section titled, “List of all the free museums on 1st Sundays in Paris.” And the list distinguishes the 16 museums free “on the 1st Sunday of every month” from the one free only from March through October and the seven free only from November through March. And, somehow, the total of only 24 museums in Paris doesn’t seem like a big enough number...Maybe I should google “Paris museums that are never free on first Sunday.”

Paris Journal: Un vieux chien découvre de nouvelles astuces sur le métro

An old dog learns new tricks on the metro

By Moristotle

The Paris metro proved instructive as well as marvelously handy for getting around the city.

Paris Journal: “La vie est un miroir: vous souriez, il vous sourit”

Voltaire’s “Smile of Reason”

“Life is a mirror: you smile, it smiles back at you”

By Moristotle

The day we went back to Le Parc de Sceaux (June 15), we first went grocery shopping at Monoprix. We arrived at Monoprix a few minutes before it opened (at 9:00), which gave us a chance to observe that for at least some of the staff, opening time was also their time to report to work – perhaps, for them, more their time to start than customers’ time to expect to begin to be served!

Paris Journal: Tennis, n’importe qui?

Roland Garros (1888-1918), French aviator
and WWI fighter pilot [PD-US]

Tennis, anyone?

By Moristotle

I didn’t feel right about asking the wild-haired young man (30 to 35 years old, I guessed) if I might take a photograph of him, so I cannot share an image of the person with whom we had perhaps the most enjoyable encounter of our month in France (four nights of which were in the U.K., the subject of a subsequent entry). The young man had asked us for directions as we were boarding the metro at Boulogne-Jean-Jaures station late the afternoon of June 5, our first Monday in Paris.

Paris Journal: Paris’s “bleus” appartient à temps perdu

Paris’s “blues” belong to a lost time

By Moristotle

As I posted on February 20 (“Lost time reading Marcel Proust”), I have been reading Marcel Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu [In Search of Lost Time] – reading it, that is, in an English edition that renders the title “Remembrance of Things Past.”

Paris Journal: Bon appétit!

At Le Bistro du Maquis

Bon appétit! (adopted from French –Merriam-Webster)

By Moristotle

I suspect that many of you were hoping Monday’s entry (“‘Je vote France Insoumise’”) would be mostly about food. “Food,” after all, was its fourth word (“Remembering the Moroccan food….”). And you might have hoped that its subtitle, “‘I Vote France Unbowed’,” meant that I vote for France’s food. Indeed, I do vote for it.

Paris Journal: La rondelle de chien (un interlude léger)

The dog washer (a light interlude)

By Moristotle

Monday, the day I published “Je vote France Insoumise,” I received the envelope a part of whose address is shown here. It contained a check from our friend whose Montmartre apartment we stayed in, to reimburse us for some repair work we had paid for out of pocket in June.

Paris Journal: “Je vote France Insoumise”

“I vote France Unbowed” (or Untamed, Defiant, Rebellious, Indomitable, Unsubmissive)

By Moristotle

Remembering the Moroccan food at Ménara in my last entry (“Auvers-sur-Oise”) put me in mind of another Moroccan lunch we had in France. But I’ll write about our first Saturday in Paris (June 3) in the order of its leisurely events.

Paris Journal: Auvers-sur-Oise

Auvers on the Oise

By Moristotle

After an overnight trip to Lyon June 9-10, my wife and I were so tired during dinner, she suggested we not follow our itinerary to go to the town Auvers-sur-Oise the next day. “That suits me,” I said without hesitation. (Auvers is a “commune” that sits along the Oise River about 27 km, or 17 miles, northwest from the center of Paris. It is associated with several famous artists, the most prominent being Vincent van Gogh.)

Paris Journal: Aperçus

Spires of the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur
from the north, not far from our apartment

Sightings

By Moristotle

[Author’s Note: After our trip to Paris for three weeks last year, for our fiftieth wedding anniversary, I was going to blog extensively about the trip. But the only result was one post, and the unfulfilled announcement of a second. However, when we returned to Paris last month, I did a better job taking notes, and I am developing these notes into a series I will call “Paris Journal.” Today’s post is the first installment.]

By way of apology to the wild birds in our neighborhood

Written towards the end of May, just in case

By Moristotle

Besides missing Siegfried, who will be kenneled for the month of June, a sadness of being away from home, mostly in Paris, is the knowledge that our neighborhood’s wild birds will find no seeds in our back yard all that time. They won’t even find their favorite feeders. I took the favorite feeders down this morning to stage the photograph shown above. Though it may look inviting enough to you, I who delight in seeing & hearing birds there, find it a desolate spectacle.

Notes from Paris: Les Etoiles de Paris

By Morris Dean

When I went to bed last night, I wasn’t remembering that I had scheduled a skeleton of my second “Notes from Paris” column. Sorry about that, but even more sorry that I haven’t yet written it!
    But believe me: my embarrassment over this is great, and I now feel more highly motivated than I was to write about the star-shaped intersections of Paris, which so captured my imagination that they only make me want to return to Paris to experience them again.

Copyright © 2016 by Morris Dean

Notes from Paris: Plain kindness

By Morris Dean

Maybe we were too used to the sort of insincere Southerner who smiles big and speaks gushily in your presence and then, after you’ve left, eviscerates you, but we were gratefully surprised in Paris this April how often people there (who do not smile big or gush) came to our aid – by giving directions, helping with translations, offering physical assistance, or volunteering information.