Paris
Paris, 2010
Paris, city of love, bridge & buttery baking. Every other shop is a patisserie or café, touting croissants & strong black coffee. The smell of freshly baked bread drifts through the crooked streets of Montemartre & anyone who avoids meat & dairy is viewed with some suspicion.
I stayed in the Vintage Hostel, which had the advantage of being just up the road from the Gare du Nord & the disadvantage of having no kitchen. Since I only planned to be there a couple of nights & had a friend whi was living in a flat nearby, this wasn’t too much of a problem – until the ‘end’ of my stay – but usually a kitchen would be top priority, well, below bed and above hot water, when choosing a hostel.
Breakfast was included, though I never took advantage of this, preferring to sleep in & buy a fresh baguette in the morning from the nearest patisserie and wander around the town crunching the crust & pulling out the soft centre with my fingers. Bread which costs over a pound in England is around 80 cents in France, & is delicious, fragrant, fresh & soft enough to eat alone. A double plus since I didn’t find any hummus without fromage frais in it until I returned to Paris from Spain to take the Eurostar home. Then I popped into a FrancoPrix, across the Petit Pont from Notre Dame, which had the most giant tub of hummus I have ever seen & as well as not having fromage frais in (Seriously, sacrilege) also had salted cucumber on top. They also sold Bio apple juice, cloudy & tasty in a glass bottle for less than two euro. However, the bread was fairly solid & not great quality. Win some, lose some.
Being more used to London, where a couple of underground stops can be quite a distance above ground, I took the metro a lot in the first couple of days. One night after dinner at Ed’s, I missed the last train from Jules Joffrin to the Gare Du Nord (3 or 4 stops) & decided to walk it. I headed back to their flat to borrow a map & promised that I would be safe. Seven minutes later I informed them of my well-being & the lack of muggers en route. The metro in Paris is a bit of a joke. One journey costs €1.20. They do have a Navigo system which is around €50 for a month & is very useful if you plan to be there for a while, but probably, you can walk. Central Paris also happens to be tiny & beautiful.
On this trip, my third time there, I finally saw the catacombs & Pere-Lachaise (the cemetary), as well as visiting the Espace DALI behind the Sacre Couer, so it was quite a surreal, death-themed couple of days! The catacombs are incredible, with bones of all hues piled together; white thigh bones & browning craniums stacked high, shadows hiding in the darkened eye sockets…Quotes about death & the fleeting nature of life in French & Latin are placed at intervals among the unarticulated skeletons, just in case you need any more reminding about your own mortality. The lighting is quite low in there, which adds to the haunting atmosphere, but also meant a lot of my pictures came out orange-y as I didn’t want to use the flash, even though it would’ve chased away the ghostly shadows!
Pere-Lachaise was the next day’s outing & is the final resting place of a few great people. We found Jim Morrison – where a girl all in black smoked a cigarette as she laid a single red rose on his headstone – Edith Piaf & Oscar Wilde, whose grave I did not kiss, but did lay a flower which I’d found. As if to keep up with the beautiful & haunting nature of my visit, it began to snow incredibly heavily as we wandered in awe between giant mausoleums, angel statues & pyramids (& ibises!) so we headed to Le Dome in Monteparnasse (on the metro) to meed Ed’s girlfriend & classmates for some strong dark coffee. They give you a little square of dark chocolate too, so I instantly attempted to make a mocha, which turned into a mockery when the chocolate didn’t melt. Le Dome, Le Select & La Closerie de Lilas are all cafés which were haunted by the literary select of the 1920′s, Hemingway, Stein, Sartre…in La Closerie De Lilas there are golden plaques on each table with the names of the authors who frequented that spot. We sat with Gidé, who wrote The Immoralist and they brought us, what looked like hand-fried, crisps with our drinks. I prefered La Closerie to Le Dome as it had a darker, more intimate atmosphere, but Le Dome is good for people watching if you sit facing the street through the huge glass windows. Both, however, are a little pricey for food & barely have a veggie option between them.
That evening we all went back to Ed’s for dinner & made my favourite – Morrocan tagine. I use the same base everytime I cook this (from VWAV) but always throw in my own preferred mix of veg. Plent of sweet potato to soak up the flavours, courgette &/or aubergine. We also threw in apricot instead of raisons to sweeten it up. So good & so filling. There was enough left over for me to eat the next day as well, always a plus. I had taken a tupperware box with me for that very reason.
(heh, bottom. You can have that for free.)
While I finished up my stew, the rest had beef wellington and the conversation ran into ‘why vegan’ territory after I commented on the delicious smell of the meat. (It was the first time meat has smelt good to me since going vegan, weirdly). We ended up in a debate (or, rant) about climate change and how everybody who is able to make a difference ought to be doing so. I hate coming across as ‘militant’ but when eating meat is one of the easiest ways you can generate change, it pisses me off when people refuse to even consider the idea & assume that ‘somebody else’ i.e. the government will ‘do something about it’. Sorry guys, it’s up to us. Government policy isn’t going to change on meat & the production thereof until there’s some evidence in the market for it that there is no market for it. The government have access to all the information (and more) concerning the detrimental effects of meat production on the environment, and they’re still not doing anything about it. What can they even do when demand is as high as ever?
The next day I was due to leave Paris, but my ticket to Madrid evaporated & the next available train was two days later. I spent my extra time wandering Montemartre after changing my hostel for one with a small kitchen and free bread, Caulaincourt Square, which I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend for good location, friendly staff & free internet, & found a small healthfood shop on the Rue Des Abesses where I excitedly bought hummus & tofu. Both were overpriced compared to the U.K & I couldn’t do anything with the tofu anyway as I hadn’t bought anything to eat it with. So despite finding vegan-friendly food, I still survived on dark chocolate & apples that day. Oh, and cheap cloudy cider which was authentically French & rather good. I had had no idea that the French were famed for their cider.
The train to Madrid was an over-night, so I made a little picnic up of chocolate, apples & bread, having nothing more substantial to put in my tupperware. Water was available, but I still filled up my Sigg and awoke in Madrid with twenty minutes before the start of my language lessons with snow falling in the station.
