Vicarious Travel

When I got to my apartment in Rue Mazet, I spent the first day or so worried about where I was going to buy food. All the apartment came with was a box of tea, a box of cereal, and some ice in odd-shaped cups. I figured that was just a funny French thing. (Later it turned out that the cups were recycled containers from the frozen amuse-bouches available at the Picard.)

There was frozen goods shop across the street.

But I spent that first day or two worried and confused, and finally bought some eggs and cheese and fromage blanc at a little shop all the way up on Rue Danton, further off than I wanted, from a store that (saving the presence of the foie gras) could almost have been in New York City. It had those same small condensed aisles with packaged goods about to topple over on you. Where was the exciting Parisian food shopping I’d heard of?

I was going up the wrong street, is the thing. It took me the better part of forty-eight hours to realize this, but I was in a major food district; if I just wandered over to Rue Buci, I had at my disposal

• the Champion grocery store. Champion both is and is not like American grocery stores; in particular, the cheese counter is a wonder to behold, and one should try the Roquefort even if it looks scary; real Roquefort (I eventually learned from the internet) has bigger holes and slightly differently-colored mold from the standard American stuff, but it tastes better, too
• several patissiers, at which to obtain things such as flans with prunes embedded in
• a confiserie, from which raspberry mini-cakes came
• a small but heavily stocked wine shop
• about a dozen Salons de Thé, cafes, and the like; also nearby, in a different direction: Mariage Frères, a couple of blocks up the Rue de Saint Andre des Arts: exotic teas, and a tiny but amusing tea museum.
• the Amarino gelato shop, serving two-flavor cones for four Euros. They slather on the gelato with a flat applicator sort of thing, rather than digging them out with a scoop; there is always a line; the amaretto is particularly good
• Cacao et Chocolat, a specialty chocolate shop with an aztec theme, selling boxes of hot chocolate, books about chocolate, chocolate by the piece, chocolate for baking; flavors including jasmine-tea-infused, cayenne, and cardamom, as well as more typical citrus, raspberry, and so on. These were all good, and the jasmine ones inspired
• an entire store devoted to products of the olive, including every sort of olive oil that human civilization encompasses
• several epiceries, including da Roca (next to Champion on the Rue de Seine). Bought some very expensive salmon there, but it sure was good.
• a butcher (next to Champion on the Rue de Seine); sausages, but they have lots of other things, such as quails, chickens, veal
• Paul’s boulangerie (next to Champion), which is fancy but which generally has a longer line and higher prices than some of the more ordinary ones around
• the Cours des Halles, where one can buy fresh fruit, the ingredients of salad, and extremely tasty cherry tomatoes
• a fromagerie (next to Champion on the Rue de Seine). At this fromagerie, there is a man who walks up and down the narrow aisle of cheeses with you, giving advice about whether they are likely to be too dry or too creamy, too young or too old, and slicing off bits of the ones that need slicing. Woman bought an entire basket of cheeses. There are flies around but these don’t seem to bother anybody. Lots of varieties of chevre of different degrees of dryness, some wrapped in nuts and honey. Cheeses in pots. Variations on the themes of camembert and brie; petit Livarot, such as you can find in the Champion store. Salers, emmental, petit basque — various kinds of nutty white cheese, and the salers is perhaps the closest thing to cheddar. Roquefort, including some wrapped in puff pastry. An “artisanal” chocolate cake, presumably made with cheeses.
  St. Marcellin cheese, which is incredibly creamy, comes in a shallow brown pot, and seems to be goat cheese, though it could also be cow according to the websites I consulted.
  Items at this fromagerie were marked with little figurines. I saw the cow and the goat and the sheep and I thought I knew what the figurines meant. Then I saw a chicken.

I am a fan of sushi. It’s good for a lot of reasons, but mostly I love the raw tuna and salmon. I would eat less Japanese food if all cuisines did interesting things with naked fish. When I came to Paris a year or two ago, I was delighted to discover that the French had their own notion of sashimi: tuna tartare and salmon tartare, chopped raw fish arranged as a disk and drizzled with olive oil and lemon juice and sometimes dill or other herbs. It would perhaps be fair to say that this is my favorite French dish.

It has one competitor: magret de canard, sliced duck breast. Magret de canard still knows that it is duck; it has duck’s characteristic flavor; but it avoids the sometimes dry, tough, or greasy texture of other duck dishes and comes out tender, like a good steak. Duck in other contexts is usually brown. Magret de canard is usually pink. It travels in the company of inventive sauces. It is fantastic with a red wine from Provence. A stick-thin, avuncular French waiter once sold me a bottle of Bandol wine, mostly Mourvèdre, to go with magret de canard. A few nights later I came back and had the same dish and the same wine, and bought a third bottle of the stuff to carry home. The combination is infinitely civilized and mellow. Without the duck, the wine was still good, but not magnificent.

One night in my Paris September, I went to a restaurant with a friend. My friend made the usual hard decision for me, by choosing the magret de canard, so I naturally had the tartare de thon. I ordered; my friend ordered. He is, unfortunately, nauseated by any form of rare meat, and I had warned him that magret de canard tended toward the pink, so he tried to explain that he wanted it more cooked than usual. She wasn’t understanding a word of it. I cut in and tried my own vocabulary on her: Is it bien cuit, well-done?

“It is you who decides,” replied the waitress in French. There was in her tone a deep weariness and sadness; a resignation. I told her that he did, indeed, want the duck bien cuit. She went away sniffing, either at my abuse of her language or because she felt that, while theoretically permissible, this was really not the kindest way to treat magret de canard.

At least, I thought that was why.

Here is what happens when you order tartare de thon — a dish whose merit lies in the quality and flavor of fish fresh enough to be served completely raw — and through miscommunication tell the chef to make it bien cuit. It turns into a grey puck, springy and tasteless. There is a little browning on the outer surfaces, not the satisfying way that red meat browns, but a wrongful browning, the marks of a meat that has been abused. Through the middle run fracture planes of soggy, mushy, green-grey matter: this, I believe, is where the herb-infused oil and juices, gathered at their densest, protected the tuna somewhat from cooking. Though the delicate flavor is almost entirely gone, the softness remains. When you prod the puck with your fork, it crumbles like an incompetent meatloaf.

You eat your salad.

You reflect that it is wisest not to help other people communicate with waiters.

You wonder when the chef has ever been called upon to render tuna tartare bien cuit before; what he said when the order was given; whether your name has been entered into a record book of Most American Tourists Ever.

You speculate on whether you will come back to this (quite nice) restaurant, or whether shame forbids you.

Then your dining companion, unable to tolerate his perfectly à point magret de canard in apricot sauce, finishes your tuna puck for you.

City of Science and Industry

I met Paris in the last weeks of 1998. It was my first solo trip in Europe, and it had gotten off on the wrong foot, spectacularly: due to visa problems, I had meant to fly to Rome and wound up having to fly to London instead. By the time I reached Paris, I was off schedule and over budget. It was a dark, cold time of year. I was a woman alone — and a young one, not very streetwise. I wanted to explore. At the same time, I wanted to huddle down into some safe, warm place. My hostel definitely did not meet this description, and I could not afford hotels, or any restaurant worthy of the name. The great museums fascinated but also frightened me. The Louvre was daunting, the d’Orsay beautiful but exhausting.

So it was in this fragile state of mind that I first visited the City of Science and Industry, and the Geode. This is a vast complex in the northern part of Paris. It was built to suit a now-obsolete vision of the future; it looks a lot like the slightly creepy utopia in a movie from 1968. There is concrete everything. Broad expanses of courtyard lead to other broad expanses. The science museum itself is enormous, several stories tall, with a central atrium.

When I was first there, in the gloomy winter, I was almost the only one in the place. When I remember that visit, I do not remember much of anything about what I saw. I suppose I must have looked at exhibits; conceivably, I went to a movie inside the dome of the Geode. But I do not remember doing either of these things. I remember a desolating solitude. I remember eerieness. I remember the absence of warmth and the absence of vividness.

It was interesting to return to the City on this trip, this time with friends and in the summer, when I had enough money to eat properly, and was warm enough. But even in that vastly improved state of mind, with everything in favor of my well-being, I couldn’t entirely like the place. It is still a complex built out of scale with human beings: it seems to be waiting to be inhabited by something else, larger, perhaps robotic.

If you go out the back of the museum, past the Geode, you will come eventually to a swath of perfectly green, perfectly smooth grass. It has been cut very short and even; even though it is the real thing, it looks fake.

Exhibits

As a museum of science, I am not sure what I think of it either.

One should qualify this. The museum has a large number of exhibits. Some of them are very worn, like the “light games” area, with prisms too scratched to refract; optical illusions so shabby that they no longer deceive; a laser display that doesn’t lase; a standing-wave generator that doesn’t stand. Others are clearly the result of recent and extensive upgrades: an exhibit on steroids, perhaps temporary but obviously well-refreshed; an exhibit on sounds and speech, with up-to-the-minute computer displays, speech synthesizers, recordings of the vocalizations of babies from different countries.

As is often the case, the newest exhibits weren’t always the cleverest. Several of the fancier computerized stations worked badly or were not very well thought out as teaching programs; several of the simplest demonstrations were also the most effective. In one, the user pushed a button to evacuate the air surrounding an alarm bell, showing how the bell becomes inaudible because sound does not travel in a vacuum. A simple concept and obviously one of the older pieces in the museum, but it makes an impression. It is still difficult to wrap one’s mind around the idea of being able to see something but not hear it at all within its empty space.

Science and Art

I also tend to think of science museums as intended for children and art museums for adults. I am not sure why this is, other than perhaps a prevailing tendency in America. Culture is too dull for the young to enjoy (goes the implication), but science produces whimsical results which may amuse the sprouts; besides, the advanced stuff is too hard even for adults. Occasionally art museums will make some effort to be child-friendly, but they still seem to address themselves primarily to the adult population, while the science museums tend to be primarily for the kiddies. Maybe this is because American science education is poor enough that they figure even adults will not be ready to handle the hard stuff. Maybe it’s because science museums tend to be more specifically designed to teach and demonstrate concepts, whereas art museums just put the material out there for you to look at. (Usually.)

The Cité bucks this trend. It is not really meant for children — or at least, not primarily. The section on mathematics has an animation in which Asterix characters demonstrate Zeno’s paradox. It also has an animation in which naked male and female figures demonstrate symmetry, then go on to explanations of group theory which I found it a genuine exercise to follow. Another exhibit challenges the visitor to guess at the dimensionality of different fractals. Tucked away in a corner is a documentary movie of mathematicians talking a little wistfully and self-consciously about the human side of their profession. It might be meant to encourage young people to consider a career in math, but there was something too adult and bittersweet about it. This was not child-stuff, intellectually or psychologically.

The exhibits on the environment and ecology were similarly ambitious, though in a different way: they relied heavily on metaphor. In a display on biomedical ethics, the viewer was encouraged to insert his hand into a rubber glove on one side in order to shake hands with a person standing on the other side. It was memorable as an image of the alliance of scientists — a clumsy and sterile alliance, one felt. I very much doubt that most children would have gotten anything from it. Other displays — a plexiglass box full of baby dolls, an abstract graph of water supplies in various countries — were equally elliptical. If anything, this area was a collection of modern art on the subject of ethics and 21st century science.

I’m not sure I disapprove, actually: science affects ethics and vice-versa. And the displays here seemed — when they weren’t making some completely banal point — to be willing to engage with that fact more than most displays in American science museums I’ve visited.

filets de saumon cru et de crevettes entières déposés sur des bouchées de riz cuit

Immediately opposite my apartment in Paris is an outlet of Picard, a chain of frozen-food retailers. Go inside and you will find a strange landscape of waist-high freezer cases, clerks in scientific white coats, and shopping carts insulated with silver padding.

I reasoned initially that since I am in Paris, it is folly to buy and eat mere frozen food. But there are also times when I am too tired or too lazy for the full Parisian shopping ritual, so I did try the Picard, and realized that my reasoning had been backwards: since I am in Paris, even the frozen food is good.

I started out easy: pizzas, quiches, soups. When these went well, I experimented with more delicate items: a delicious bouillabaisse, a foursome of delicious stuffed tomatoes, a tarte tatin that survived microwaving even though it was meant to be reheated in an oven. Crab and salmon hors d’oeuvres, served in shot-glass-sized cups, that had to be thawed in the refrigerator. Colin d’Alaska in citron butter sauce. (I admit, this attracted me because of its name. Colin of Alaska! What’s a Colin? Alaskan hake, said the internet.) It all came out marvelous: subtle sauces, perfectly cooked seafood, all sorts of things you would not expect to pass unscathed through a frozen state.

Finally I was convinced that the Picard could just about perform miracles. And so I tried the frozen sushi.

A Japanese entry in Picard’s Cuisine Evasion line, the sushi was just over 7 euros; it was on special the week I bought it, but the regular price is not much higher.

When it comes out of its packet, it looks not just cold but wizened. The rice has shrunk self-protectively. The instructions on the back of the box explain that the cardboard tray in which the sushi comes has been specially designed to assist reheating in the microwave. I am not sure whether I find this encouraging or sad, but I obey the instructions: one minute thirty seconds in the microwave, followed by fifteen minutes of sitting before the sushi can be eaten. The box also contains a tiny bottle of soy sauce, packets of wasabi (frozen solid) and ginger, even a pair of chopsticks. All but the chopsticks have to be left out to warm up too, of course.

There are three salmon nigiri; two shrimp nigiri; two salmon maki (individual pieces of rolls, not whole rolls); two slices of California roll; one slice of cucumber roll. Ten pieces in all.

Here’s the damage. Even fully reconstituted, the rice is a loss. It has become gluey and lumpish, and is most grotesque on the exterior of the California rolls, where it has no wrapper of seaweed to disguise it. The individual grains have largely lost their identity and become part of a rice collective.

It’s bad news for the vegetables as well. The cucumber in the cucumber roll ought to be perky and crisp, but has a texture more like dill pickle. The avocado inside the California rolls fares even worse: it tastes as though it has actually gone off, and the texture is mushy and highly unappealing.

As for the salmon, the pieces in the nigiri are a bit small. They look as though they originally came from a good cut of fish; there’s the fatty striping that usually indicates salmon at its most flavorful for sushi. They don’t taste too bad, either, but they’re still a little cold; sushi ought to be served at room temperature. Moreover, the strips of salmon have given off water in reheating, and the lumps of rice on which they reside are therefore not merely gluey but also wet. The rolls containing salmon have too much rice and too little fish to be at all pleasant.

Finally, the wasabi is lumpy and does not mix well with the soy sauce, nor is it easy to apply to the pieces of sushi. I’m not sure what this signifies, actually: when I first opened the packet, I was surprised by how much texture the wasabi seemed to have. It looked as though it might have been grated from real wasabi, rather than being the reconstituted, green-tinted horseradish powder sold under the name of wasabi throughout the United States. If so, this strikes me as a very odd place to have indulged the eater: real wasabi is expensive, and many people don’t know the difference, and besides, the freezing has made it harder to tell what its original state was. Even so, a dab of wasabi, applied even with difficulty, did go partway to rescuing the more pathetic elements of this meal.

On the good side: the pickled ginger comes through freezing reasonably well, perhaps because it has already been fairly broken down. The shrimp, too, is not as defeated by freezing as it might be, though the strip of nori holding it to its rice has become wet and lost its structural integrity, so the nigiri is quite likely to fall apart before you get it into your mouth. It would be too much to say that any of these were more than relatively tolerable. I have had worse sushi, once, at a departure lounge of the Seattle Tacoma International Airport, where the “tuna rolls” were made with canned chunk tuna, and the rice had cooled and hardened into a form of armor.

Ah well. Frozen sushi was an insane idea, and I don’t blame Picard for failing. I do blame them for trying. This selection might have been closer to palatable if they’d skipped the rice and vegetables and gone straight for a sashimi selection, since the salmon and the shrimp were the best things about it.

But then, if raw salmon is what you want, Picard also offers tartare de saumon in dill and olive oil. No reheating required.

The garden is enjoyable for its calm. On the little pond children play with miniature boats

Perhaps my favorite place in all of Paris is the Jardin du Luxembourg.

To get to the Jardin du Luxembourg from my apartment, you walk to Rue St Germain, down a street of small book shops and stores of exotic imports. There is an autograph shop that has several letters from Napoleon. There is a mask and costume shop, outfitters for masquerades we might all dream of but never attend. There is a shop full of ridiculous bedding — raw silk comforters, pillows covered with tiny disks of metal, pillows studded with lumpy tulle flowers, all for hundreds and thousands of euros. You pass a shop that sells nothing but teapots; a shop that sells nothing but furniture in shades of brown; a shop of stupidly exotic furnishings, such as a lamp in the shape of a light bulb with wings. You pass the Horse Tavern, which tries to convince that English is exotic; you pass the Odeon, with its posters for a work by “Bert Brecht.” On the corner opposite the entry of the Jardin, the reading space of the French Senat sells various garden- and senate-related souvenirs, including an assortment of key fobs, briefcases, book covers, and bowls, all executed in stamped brown leather.

At the near end of the Jardin, as I approached it, is the Luxembourg palace, built for Marie de Medici, now used by the French senate. It is an awe-inspiring building, but not really a pretty one. It takes some time to work around to thinking about whether it is attractive or not, though. It is too commanding to question. Wherever else you are in the Jardin, you can see it, overlooking, governing.

Formal gardens are laid out beyond this: sculpted topiary, beds of flowers; fountains, grottos; tennis courts, an orangery, a boules court, a pony track; kiosks for information and kiosks selling candy. There is quite a lot of statuary as well: a large collection of the queens of France, neatly labeled and dressed in period gowns and all placid and calm. One would not guess at the troubled times they lived in. There are also poets, authors, Greek gods in a classical style, modern abstract sculptures. In the middle of a long pool, a sculpted nose and mouth rise from the water, as though a giantess with no forehead were having a bath. The ducks swim around her lips and nostrils.

And everywhere there are low green metal chairs, their backs marked with the sticker bearing the logo of the Senat. How I love the chairs. American parks never have chairs you can move around: they might be stolen. At best, there are benches. At worst, even those have been removed or divided lest some homeless person commit the offense of lying on them and sleeping there. But the chairs in the Jardin du Luxembourg can be laid out however you like, dragged into clusters if you want to sit with friends, hauled off alone if you do not. If there are spares, you can nab a second to put up your feet.

These chairs are the essence of the place. A photo of two chairs in the Jardin du Luxembourg, by one Hugh Martin, is currently on sale online for $1400. In Mr. Martin’s photo, there is one chair with arms and one chair without. One has one’s choice.

But this is what I mean: the Jardin is seriously meant for people to use, and use according to their needs. Children rent toy sailboats (or have boats rented for them), and push these around the fountains with long sticks. Artists set up easels. Lovers cuddle — yes, it is Paris, and you can see this sight in plenty of other places, but it is at its least self-conscious in the Jardin du Luxembourg. Old women soak up sunlight; families walk dogs; unattractive men sit shirtless on their chairs, alone, reading, thinking, muttering. No condition or occupation is out of place here. It is all right to be a tourist, all right to be a native; acceptable to come in a group, or alone; to be fashionable or to be sloppy, energetic or sleepy; happy, sad, busy, bored. If what you most want is to take a long nap, you may.

And yet all this is in a setting of great order. Toward the south end of the garden are lawns divided by rows of shaped trees. On one of these, sunbathing is permitted, by order of a sign. On another, it is disallowed, by order of a different sign. There is no obvious difference between the two lawns. The distinction appears to be arbitrary. It is commonplace to observe that gardens of sculpted topiary display the power of man to control nature, but what impressed me was the triumph of these two signs to control a crowd, to make dozens of people lie on one packed strip of grass and leave the adjacent one perfectly empty.

So the Jardin is both busy and peaceful, both communal and individualist. It is the structure of the garden that makes it so, I think. That, and the sense that the Senat is watching you.

If you take an apartment in Paris — and I can’t recommend it strongly enough — then you may also be interested in a series of neighborhood-by-neighborhood Paris guidebooks by Parigramme, such as the one I bought about Saint-Germain des Prés.

These are in French, beautifully illustrated with present-day and historical maps, photographs, and sketches. They present walks through various neighborhoods, and essays on local history. The information is on such a level that you will quite likely be able to find out when your street was originally built and why; who else occupied your building; where interesting architectural features may be found within a three-block radius of your house.

Figuring out a foreign subway system can be a little challenging, especially if one is rusty on the language and the ticket-dispensing machine relies on a peculiar system. I like to regard it as a puzzle.

The problem is, the puzzle has a time limit and the time limit is sometimes too short for me. Twice now — once in Berlin, once in Paris — I’ve had some helpful fellow commuter decide that it would be faster to help me than to wait for me. Which was kind of them, and it did speed me on my way. But I wasn’t ready to ask for a hint yet.