Paris Thoughts

I’m a bit out of order here as I am actually in Monaco yet publishing some more thoughts on Paris. I also acknowledge these thoughts are not fully polished, but I wanted to get the ideas down while fresh, then clean them up in the future.

Overall, I was very pleased with Paris and had a far better time than I thought I would. I knew, of course, that Europe at this time of year would be chilly, and the weather did indeed provide a bone-chilling cold. It warmed up a bit on day four in Paris (though it was raining) Unlike Berlin there was never any snow or ice on the ground, yet the weather was cold enough that it limited the time you could spend outside. Even with my thermal long-johns, and skull cap, and gloves, after eight or nine hours outside I would come back to the hotel room with a bone-chilling, painful ache that made me very tired. Unfortunately, I couldn’t really find any way to beat it: Walking around was painful, but sitting on the tour bus (even downstairs in the enclosed part) literally hurt. In short, the cold severely limited the time you could spend outside site-seeing to about eight hours at most; after that, you want to spend time in the hotel room and take a nap or stay close by in a local restaurant/brasserie. It really was too bad in that I truly enjoyed seeing the city, and I would specifically have liked to spend more time on the Left Bank. One advantage to the weather: I could buy meats or other refrigerated products and keep them outside on the window sill without any concern they would spoil!


The hotel was very warm, which given its budget price of just over $100 per night was a pleasant surprise, though in many other ways it lived up to its budget promise:

• No cable TV, aerial only, and they are still showing Michael Jackson tributes!!

• Pathetically dinky elevator, the type that I have only seen before in France. I could literally rest my back against the wall and easily reach across the longest span with my arm.

• Metal window shutters: What are they for? I don’t think it is for hurricanes, but am guessing it it perhaps to lock heat in?

• Rude hotel attendant: When asking for my key (they do make you post), I offered to show him my passport, and he snapped “Why are you doing that?” I guess I'm getting better handling snobs, in that I retorted that the better hotels required ID in such cases. This seemed to have worked in that he is a bit nicer to me from that point on. Unfortunately, it was one of those cases in which it was better to meet the rudeness with rudeness.


Though very much a tourist area, many of the shops in the Anvers area sell dirt cheap clothes, stacked in bundles, with people literally diving through them to find what they want. I’m not sure if this is a local, regional market or not, but it is odd to see so many Parisians – literally – doing headstands to dig through the clothing.

As for the language, I have never studied French and cannot understand any of the spoken word (even when looking at what is written, such as station announcements on the Metro), but I have remarkably good luck figuring out written French: Its roots must be close enough to English that I can quite often translate what is written, and I have verified this in more than one case with side-by-side translations.

Paris restaurants were better than what I experienced many years ago, perhaps because I have a better idea what to look for. Unfortunately, as is well known bread is a staple in French food, and I am definitely not a dough-head. Nonetheless, I did try real fondue (which was not as great as I expected---it’s definitely something that has a better appeal than is justified in reality), and I was surprised and pleased to see that most Paris restaurants will give you a chilled bottle of tapwater rather than making you pay for bottled.

I did find what I believe to be the perfect Paris restaurant; and it was literally right next-door to my hotel: L Table d'Anvers, http://www.latabledanvers.com/ . It was very clean and had an earth-tone modern feel to it. The food was excellent, and it was very moderately priced, especially for the region. I also splurged my last day and tried $65 glass of Cognac: You could tell the superior difference and quality, though admittedly it will only be a once or twice in a lifetime event for me.

Much to my surprise, there were only a handful of Starbucks in Paris, certainly not the one on every corner situation you expect to see in the rest of the world. While I hate to admit it, I can only drink cappuccinos for so long, and was pleased to stumble across Caffee Americano.


As in Germany, the meal “doner” (shaved lamb) is also very big in Paris. I personally don’t care for it so did not try it, but it appears to be the exact same as the German version.

Wireless Internet access was very spotty in both Paris and in Berlin, something that I found extremely surprising in this day and age. In both hotels, the throughput was very slow (as confirmed by the “very low” wireless signal level), and even after cold boots and ipconfig tweaks, login attempts usually required half a dozen or more efforts. I even tried restoring my system to a week earlier just in case something changed, but to no avail.