Girls From the North Country

“Please, let’s get out of this place,” a man in khaki shorts insists to his family just off Paris’s anthill, the Place du Tertre in Montmartre. Now that summer is in full swing, I can hardly blame him. The deserted streets of January, the cool air flowing freely through the Louvre and spoken French have been replaced by sunshine, long lines and iPad “photography.” The tourists have claimed Paris for themselves and we can either beat them or join them…so I’m joining them.

Before I get ahead of myself by declaring that there’s sunshine in Paris, we need to backtrack to when my friend Amanda arrived on May 23. Following a week or two of post-finals life (who’s counting at this point?), Amanda flew in from Minneapolis to join me in my shameless pseudo-vacation lifestyle for a week. It reliably rained on and off the entire week and I think she got to see about two hours total of sunshine. That’s Paris.

It being Amanda’s first time in Paris, I did my duty of showing her the best of what I know Paris can offer. I tried my hardest to fight my new nocturnal tendencies and get us started each day at a reasonable hour (in my post-grad life, it means anything considered A.M.) with leisurely cappuccinos and croissants every morning at Le News Café (78 rue d’Assas). Some highlights: a show by local Minneapolitan Jeremy Messersmith at Les Trois Baudets (64 boulevard de Clichy) where we bizarrely ran into other Augsburg students, window-shopping and Berthillon ice cream on the Ile Saint-Louis, playing the old untuned piano in Shakespeare and Co., winning the weekly pub quiz and a pitcher of cocktails at The Highlander (8 rue de Nevers), watching people play pétanque in the Jardin du Luxembourg, warming up with a coffee at the classically-Parisian Le Consulat (18 rue Norvins), strolling the gardens at Versailles, graduating from the American University of Paris at the Théâtre du Châtelet, having a pizza party in my tiny apartment with my friends, an unexpectedly non-touristy boat ride on the Bateaux Parisiens at night, and to-die-for steak dinners at both my new favorite, À Bout de Souffle (17 bis rue Campagne Première) and my old favorite, La Bastide d’Opio (9 rue Guisarde).

Amanda is one of those friends with whom you could maintain the same friendship even if you only saw her once every ten years. I was so grateful she shelled out the big bucks and vacation time to flâner les rues (We once got to 26,000 steps in a day), laugh, eat, stay out too late and remind me of home. My friends here in Paris started noticing my Minnesotan accent (“Root beer”) and it was so fun to have two of us for a change.

You betcha. 

Rachel

Eglise Saint-Sulpice

Jeremy Messersmith

Musée Rodin

At the top of the Eiffel Tower

Jardin du Luxembourg

Admiring my lovely view

Le Consulat

Versailles

A visit to the Palais Garnier with Matt

Before our boat cruise on the Seine

Berthillon ice cream- quite simply, the best!