“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spoken French have been replaced by sunshine, long lines and iPad “photography.”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
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| Eglise Saint-Sulpice |
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| Jeremy Messersmith |
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| Musée Rodin |
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| At the top of the Eiffel Tower |
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| Jardin du Luxembourg |
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| Admiring my lovely view |
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| Le Consulat |
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| Versailles |
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| A visit to the Palais Garnier with Matt |
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| Before our boat cruise on the Seine |
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| Berthillon ice cream- quite simply, the best! |
