We were there for an anniversary trip – Paris in the springtime. It’s a beautiful city, but it has its quirks. The museum workers were staging wildcat strikes to protest government pension changes. The government didn’t care. The tourists did. The Louvre and other cultural institutions might or might not be open, and they might suddenly close when they were open (this happened to Versailles the day after we visited). Our hotel concierge did his best to keep guests informed, but there was no way to tell for sure until you arrived.
What the wildcat strikes taught us to do was to be flexible in the extreme. We discovered the Museum of the Middle Ages (“the Cluny”), with its famous “lady and the unicorn” tapestry. The Rue des Martyrs was three blocks from our hotel, and it was like a miniature of every Paris stereotype – the bakery, the coffee shop, the flower shop, the wine shop, people doing their shopping with baguettes in their arms. The Au Petite Riche restaurant with its surly French waiters quarantined us in a side room with two other couples – an elderly couple from Salisbury in England and a honeymooning pair from Australia. They probably thought they were isolating their French diners from the boorish Anglos; instead, they turned our meal into a party and a treasured memory.
Poet Michelle Ortega has had a different Paris experience, or at least what she writes about in When You Ask Me, Why Paris? reflects a different experience.
Some Thursday Readings
The Things We Leave Unsaid – poem by Andrew Calis at Rabbit Room Poetry.
“The Soote Season,” poem by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.
Poems on Solitude and Aloneness – D.H. Lawrence via Poetic Outlaws.
“Straws in the Wind,” poem by Gerald Dawe – Andrew Roycroft at New Grub Street.
Crystal Downing’s Subversive Sayers and 21st Century Society – Seth Myers at An Unexpected Journal.
No comments:
Post a Comment