Birthday in Paris: Part 1

With a few hours left in London before our train departs, our goals were as follows: Fill up on a full English Breakfast, make a quick lap around for stupid tourist crap, and bag some gifts for people back home. We crossed off the first task just around the corner from the hotel at Pompidou cafe. People, you cannot beat £9 for bacon, sausages, beans, eggs, mushrooms, grilled tomato, buttered toast, and a perfect cup of cappuccino (well, except for mushrooms, which you can always shove off onto your boyfriend’s plate when he’s not looking). They also squeeze fresh orange juice by the glass, on demand. 10/10, would visit again.

With roughly 1,000 calories packed in all in one go, we set off for a long walk to Fortnum & Mason, because it’s so deliciously ostentatious and if you’re going to bring back a tin of tea or biscuits for your friends, this is the place to do it. When the zombie apocalypse occurs, this is where I’ll break in, board up the windows, and wait out the plague.

Picture an entire department store floor of tea, another of meats, cheeses, confections, and sweets, a floor of luxury home goods, two floors of clothing, jewelry, accessories, niche perfume, an ice cream parlor, a tea room, a wine bar, a liquor shop, and several restaurants. Everything is lined in velvet, covered in gold, or set in marble. Sometimes all three simultaneously. I flitted about for a few minutes before taking the elevator straight up to the perfume wing to sniff the Roja Dove and Clive Christian collections.

Glass urns filled with Caron fragrances and a chandelier of perfume bottles

After a grand tour, we left with a few tea tins and our pockets still holding money (along with a handful perfume test strips). I reminded myself to save it all for France. Which we’d be in by dinner time. Mike and I trekked back over to the hotel and collected our bags, then took a cool glass elevator down to the Eurostar.

When I was in grade school, we watched a documentary on the construction of the Channel Tunnel between England and France. I think I even wrote a paper on it. It seemed so futuristic at the time. But almost thirty years later, I was actually in it, on a bullet train speeding along on my way to Paris. The Eurostar travels at a whopping 300 kilometres per hour (186 mph) above ground and "slows down" to 160 kilometres per hour (100 mph) for the brief thirty minutes you’re inside the tunnel. It’s dizzying and wonderful and you have to hold on tightly to walk back to the lavatories. Which you should because there’s a silly grinning Mona Lisa portrait in them.

We departed London St Pancras around three in the afternoon and arrived in Paris Gare du Nord in roughly two hours (6:00pm with the time change). From there, we hopped in a taxi and I managed a shy "Merci beaucoup" before handing the hotel address to the driver on a slip of paper. I was not ready to bumble through French just yet.

Unlike some, I never took French in high school. I took Latin, a dead language not spoken for millennia. If someone were to ask me my regrets in life thus far, that would be near the top. Right under buying Phantom Menace merchandise before seeing the film. I did have a French phrase app on my phone to practice with though, and we used a bit of it when we checked into our hotel. It's nerve wracking speaking in a language you're not familiar with. I'm a very confident person by nature but all of it disappeared the moment I stepped onto the streets of Paris. The clerk sensed it immediately though and mercifully switched over to English.

We stayed at the Hôtel Bradford Elysées. It's located in the 8th Arrondissement, right off the bank of the Seine. The Champs-Élysées and the Arc de Triomphe are around the corner, but it doesn't feel too touristy. As far as we could tell, we were back a ways, in sort of a business-type area. The hotel itself is gorgeous. Simply gorgeous. There are countless modern hotels in the city, indiscernible from any other major chain hotel around the world, but we wanted something more historic. Something with character and decidedly French. Hôtel Bradford Elysées was perfection.

After checking in, the clerk brought us over to this incredible 19th century lift. We opened the metal cage door and stepped into another century. The beautiful wooden car is small but ascends slowly and smoothly. There is a discernible creak when you near the top floor and a little portrait of Marie Antoinette smiles at you from within, knowing that you are totally eating this all up.

Our room was exactly what I've always imagined when thinking of a Paris vacation. Tufted velvet chairs, floor to ceiling windows draped in silk and brocade, tall French doors that open out onto a balcony where you can look out over the rooftops of Paris. A huge chandelier and a bed like a cloud.

We dropped our bags and collapsed on the bed. We were in Paris. We were actually here and it was happening and it was all real. We took time to just let that all sink in. Then we explored our room, locating the bath and the toilet (each in totally separate, unconnected rooms) standing out on the balcony, letting our jaws drop.

When we finally had everything sorted out, it was time to step out into the city. We took the gorgeous elevator back down stairs and walked over to the main drag, the Champs-Élysées. It’s sort of a much grander, wider version of New York’s Fifth Avenue. We peered into all the glamorous shop windows, gazed up at the Arc de Triomphe at one end, and down at Le Grand Roue (200 foot tall ferris wheel) at the other.

We didn’t wander too far at first and decided to save our energy for the first proper full day. But we still needed to eat, which meant we had to find a restaurant, which meant speaking French, which we still didn’t know, and that was absolutely terrifying. But hunger will always outweigh fear and so I dialed up my French phrase app and we bumbled into a nearby brasserie.

We entered Baroche Café Brasserie and I managed to read off “Bonsoir. Avez-vous une place pour deux personnes?” from my app without too much stumbling. I could have thrown up from the anxiety but I held it together. The host graciously smiled, said something affirmative, and gave us a lovely table by the window. As we sat, he asked if we were English. We nodded, “Oui, yes, American.” He switched over to our native language (flawlessly) and described the specials. My relief was palpable and embarrassing.

The menu, in French, was quite easy to read however. Most of the language for dishes and foods is commonly used in the US, so we had no trouble ordering. First a carafe of water and basket of bread. Bread, my god how wonderful it is there. You take a bite of it and immediately get why people rave about it. Then you wonder how your country could be fucking it up so badly. It’s bread. Just bread. Simple and easy and yet there is clearly something wrong with ours. Maybe it’s fresher ingredients or local water or a beautiful French baker caressing the dough while reciting Baudelaire to it as the sun sets over the Seine. I don’t know, but it’s in a class of its own.

Next we requested the cheese plate and made another life-altering discovery. Brie in America is a soft cheese covered in a thick, hard, tasteless, sometimes powdery, waxy rind. French brie is coasted in a thin, soft, smooth, fragrant rind that melts into the cheese when you spread it onto bread and tastes wonderful. You can’t actually tell where the cheese and the rind begin or end. It’s all just one seamless, delicious experience. By comparison, American brie is a cheap facsimile that begs you to pretend you like chewing on plastic so you can appear classy at parties. An unfortunate result of US pasteurization regulations and import laws.

I think we would have been perfectly find eating just bread and cheese alone, but we ordered a proper dinner to get our first full restaurant experience. Mike ordered traditional onion soup, which he sighed audibly after the first spoonful, along with a handsome steak. I chose the braised beef cheek which sounded potentially gross but tasted phenomenal. We also poured over the wine list. Initially we picked a red based on region and price point but our waiter made an better suggestion specifically to compliment our choice of entrées. A true sommelier is rare and wonderful. He was spot on.

After an hour of gorging on traditional French fare and having our understanding of basic food items forever upended, we returned back to the hotel to crash and hopefully get an early start. Tomorrow we’d have a full day to wander the streets of Paris and chase down any fantasy we’d ever had.

Continue to Birthday in Paris: Part 2