Friday in Paris

Posted on 2012/04/06 19:12:58 (April 2012).

[Friday 30th March 2012]
Chie and i had both taken today and Monday off work, in order to have a long weekend away in France. Chie's cousin Satochan had got married in Japan last weekend, and had come to Europe for her honeymoon. As we hadn't been able to make it to the wedding, we thought it might be nice to meet up with her while she was in Paris, so we could raise a toast to the happy couple, and also give them a wedding present. We thought it would also be good to combine this with a trip to Lyon to see our friend Junchan who is now living there. Junchan is also getting married later on this year, and given the unfortunate timing of a certain significant upcoming event it sounded like we probably wouldn't be able to attend that wedding either. So again we thought this would be a good opportunity to hand over a wedding present.

So we embarked this morning on our wedding present delivery expedition, taking a morning Eurostar to Paris, which got us there around 2. Chie had left the planning of the hotel in Paris to me, and I'd rather splashed out, and booked us in for a return visit to the Hotel Raphael, which we'd stayed at a few years ago. Again we had a rather lavish suite, full of Louis XV / XVI furniture - far more chairs than we could ever conceivably need. I counted seating space for at least 10 people.

As we weren't meeting Satochan and her husband until the evening, and we've been to Paris plenty of times before, I would have been quite happy to just wile away the afternoon lounging about in our suite, but naturally the busy Japanese tourist mentality kicked in, and we felt compelled to make at least a bit of an outing. Chie proposed the Musee d'Orsay, which I hadn't been to before, and it gave me a good opportunity to admire a few Manets, in particular the famously controversial Le_déjeuner sur l'herbe. Having thus satisfied ourselves that we'd dutifully carried out the requisite cultural activity, we returned to the hotel for a bit more lounging.

We headed out for the evening around 7 - stopping off in the lobby of the hotel to get the concierge to take a picture of us (I'm rather pleased with the result - it's nice don't you think?) and got on the Metro in the direction of the Gare de Lyon. Satochan and her husband were staying in a hotel there, which gave us a good excuse to revisit Le Train Bleu and enjoy the rather spectacular interior once again - but this time, with the benefit of experience, just for a drink, as the food had been pretty awful last time. I hope our guests were suitably impressed.

From there we headed to Al-Ajami, a Lebanese restaurant Chie and I had been to on our first trip to Paris together, over a decade ago. Having been to some really good Lebanese restaurants in London in the intervening period I wasn't quite as impressed as I had been ten years ago. Particularly disappointingly they had ran out of foul medames - my favourite! Still, I think it made for an interesting venue for dinner - you can't really get Middle Eastern food in Japan, and neither Satochan nor her husband had ever eaten Lebanese before. The wine was also really good - a Chateau Ksara Reserve du Couvent. Give me Lebanese reds over French reds any day (let us not forget they've probably been making wine for much longer in Lebanon).

We said our goodbyes after that and headed back to our respective hotels. It seemed a shame not to make use of the hotel bar at the Raphael on our return, wherein I had a couple of very competent cocktails, and managed an entire conversation in French with the barman, mostly about the apparent lack of cocktail culture in France, and the trials and tribulations of trying to survive here as a vegetarian.

Before having mentioned to him that I was a vegetarian, he asked me what my plans were for the rest of the weekend, and I told him we were headed for Lyon. Rather ominously he said "Vous allez bien manger a Lyon!". How wrong he was.

Post a comment