Paris, France

We arrived at Berlin’s Tegel Airport a week ago to discover that our Air France flight to Paris was cancelled due to a computer malfunction.  We joined the long, glacial queue to get a replacement flight and got to the service desk five hours later!  By this time all direct flights to Paris were full, but thankfully two tickets on Lufthansa via Dusseldorf were found for us.  In the event we arrived in Paris a few minutes before midnight, much later than planned, but at least on the same day.

We had a fairly lazy week in Paris but made good use of the subway, and our feet, to wander around the city centre and along the banks of the Seine to see the sights and feel the atmosphere.  As I did nine years ago, then with our kids in tow, I climbed to the top of the Arc de Triomphe for the great view down Champs Elysees and across to the Eiffel Tower.

We spent Saturday in hilly Montmartre in north Paris.  After a look through the imposing Sacre Coeur Basilica we walked up and down the cafe-lined streets, nipping in and out of patisseries to check the offerings.  We finally settled on the crunchy bread rolls, hams and tarts from Le Grenier a Pain, and along with a bottle of French wine and a paper bag of Provence apricots from Le Verger Saint Denis (“A Votre Service Depuis 1947”) near our hotel on Bonne Nouvelle Boulevard, we had the makings of a divine picnic lunch / siesta combo.  Not much work was done that afternoon.               

We saw two very different concerts in Paris.  The first was a violin recital in 13th century Sainte-Chapelle built by Louis IX, a beautiful building with walls almost entirely of stained glass.  The second was a Cyndi Lauper concert at Olympia Theatre on Boulevard des Capucines.  We wouldn’t ordinarily have gone to a Cyndi Lauper concert but we were intrigued to read that Charlie Musselwhite was in her band, and that she had recently won Billboard’s Blues Album of the Year Award for 2010.  It seems that zany Cyndi has made one of the more surprising personal reinventions. The concert was great, the crowd was wild for Cyndi, and as always, Charlie’s harmonica was smokin’. 

When the curtain fell, it fell not just on the concert, but on our trip too, for this was our last night in Paris and the last night of our trip generally before heading for home.  We stopped en route in Singapore for a day to visit Lee Tuan’s relatives, and had dinner outside by the beach in warm, balmy air overlooking the harbour twinkling with the lights from more large freight ships than you could imagine could be anchored in the one harbour at the same time.  Singapore food is the best – we had the mixed satays with peanut sauce, grilled stingray, Singapore noodles, Hainan chicken with rice, and fresh whole coconuts.  After saying our goodbyes we headed for the airport, flying out at midnight and arriving in Adelaide at 8am, happy to be home after four months away but less so at crossing paths with Winter.