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Monday, April 04, 2005
Another Day In Paris
In reverse order, ( as is the way in many award cereomnies), let me tell you about my day from the last few hours, and work backwards...
Ce Soir - it has been raining chats & chiens here. Unlike last night when I arrived when the weather was warm & sunny, and the night was hot & sticky - and I hardly got any sleep. (It would have been okay to open the window, except for the noise of the Dominoes Pizza's mopeds howling away through the night... oh yes, and the freight trains trundling by on the suburban railway line just below my window - not quite as bad as Elwood Blues apartment, but regularly noisy enough).
Anyway, it's wet out tonight. So I wasn't going to travel very far from the hotel. Interestingly enough, in a strange twist in eating out fate, several of the restaurants which were open last night, (Sunday), were now not open tonight. But this is France. They must fast on a Monday, or something. And I ended up walking down a long road, past the Kashmiri restautant of last night, and further into a rainstorm. The rain was getting harder. The weather got so bad, I decided to head for the first habitable looking place to eat...
Remember the Woody Allen movie Broadway Danny Rose? It's basically a flash back movie where all these old comedians are sitting in a New York restaurant talking about Danny Rose. Well, this place looked exactly like that on the outside. But liked a Southend fish & chip shop on the inside with cheap looking full length wall murals of a lake view over a parapet. It also had a huge fishtank with angel fish in it as well. Altogether tasteful in a lets-hope-the-food-tastes-good kind of way!
Once inside the door, dripping wet, looking like a fish out of water, (quite apt for the decor actually!), I was "bonjoured" over to a table. The manager then approached. I could tell he was the manager - everybody else seemed afraid of him, he was dressed in black, and, most importantly, he looked like a Mafia Godfather!The menu was, quite naturally, in French. Well, I'd learnt that it's not always insulting to ask for an English menu... except when it is. This was one such occasion. In a voice which was probably the last living voice on earth a lot of much more hardened axe men than me had heard, the manager boomed out - "No - it is only in French!".
He then proceeded to rattle off what I should eat that evening - "You want garlic bread?!" was the first demand/question. Sure - I mean what would have happened if I'd refused?! Then he made me an offer I couldn't refuse on the main course - a three pasta cheese dish - which turend out to be quite nice after all. Ice cream & coffee later I paid the man and apologised to him for coming to his restaurant on the day of his daughter's wedding ;)
Le Jour - Earlier today I got to see a few different aspects of Paris life. One of them revolves around dogs. I have written about the French obscene devotion to their canine friends before - the fact that some places allow them into restaurants, and even charge a separate tariff for each etc etc. Today I saw a hippie looking guy- who looked like a taller version of the actor Richard Dreyfuss, (Jaws), who had an outrageusly shaggy looking poodle on a lead with him. if that wasn't enough, the dog's snout was taped together with, what looked like duct tape. This, of course, was sending mixed messages out to all those social observers, (me included), who saw him... so I won't try to explain what it meant.
As he passed me, there was a young French woman, (with one of those haircuts that made her look like the stowaway boy/girl on Cliff Richard's Summer Holiday movie); who was about to break into a packet of very large, and fattening(!) chips, (crisps to us in England). But, as she saw me catch her eye, she stopped. And only when she was just about past me, I heard the sound of the packet being ripped open. Now - it made me think - "Why was she concerned, (if she was concerned), that I had seen her breaking into a packet of crisps?" Is this a French thing.... a girlie thing.... a French girlie thing... or am I talking total bollocks?
Not more than ten paces past the crisp munching French woman, with a splash of a poster on a window, I found myself looking at another twist of culture that was about to take Paris by storm. Marilyn Manson is playing Paris on June 14th...
I expect to see the crisp eating French woman, Richard Dreyfuss & his dog, and the Mafia restaurant owner there. After all - it's Paris, right- the city of art & culture? ;)
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