August. Isn’t this the very time that people don’t go to Paris?
August, or “Aout,” “the annual French vacation,” is sacred to Parisians, who leave the city for cooler climes and other vistas. Is it true that a majority of Parisians leave? Does the city become as quiet as a cemetery?
Perhaps a bit of exaggeration is at work in those claims. It is true that some of the vacuum created by the exodus of the natives is filled by tourists. It’s also true, however, that much of the city is blissfully empty of the traffic and crowds so typical of the rest of the year.
The opportunity to find out fell into our laps. “A friend of a friend” was looking for someone to apartment-sit in Paris for the month of August. Our spouses and children couldn’t go because of their work schedules, but my sister and I could. And we did.
With a month in Paris, how did we pass our time? We decided not to revisit the usual tourist haunts — the Louvre, the Notre Dame, the Georges Pompidou — but rather to seek out some less touristy areas. We also decided, as a way to expand our Parisian vistas, to explore each of the city’s 20 “arrondissements” (districts). We wanted, as much as possible, to live like Parisians, to eat like Parisians, to talk like Parisians and — dare we dream? — to be mistaken for Parisians.
The apartment we “sat” was an elegant, spacious, high-ceilinged set of rooms on the top floor of a beautiful old building on Avenue Foch, in the 16th arrondissement, not far from the 2,100-acre Bois de Bologne. In the western part of the city, the 16th arrondissement is where the nobility fled after the Revolution robbed them of their playgrounds in the central city. We learned that five buildings down from us had been the Gestapo headquarters during World War II and that screams in the night kept the neighborhood awake and on edge. Along the avenue today, a number of embassies are tucked back behind dense shrubbery and secure, sophisticated fences, with bodyguard-types hanging out at the entrances.
In a country where the word French is synonymous with food, where butter is considered to be a flavoring, where the restaurant menu gives the age of the “poulet” (chicken) when it met its demise for your culinary pleasure, we ate out most of the time. Finding an open restaurant in August was no problem. In the touristy areas, all restaurants were open in August. In the quieter neighborhoods, some restaurants were closed, but more than enough were open. After all, Paris boasts 15,000 eateries, with 4,000 offering outdoor seating.
Restaurants throughout the city opened our eyes to the experience of French toilets, which are usually coed, have lights on timers and can range from the opulent to little more than a hole in the floor. We learned to be ready for anything.
We expected that eating out would give us a chance to practice our French. The problem was that the French wanted to practice their English, so when we offered our halting phrases or queries in French, more often than not we got answers in English. Nevertheless, we became quite proficient at asking for “l’addition” (the check). And by the way, a French waiter will not bring you the check until you ask for it, and you can sit in a cafe all night — long after you’ve finished your meal — and never be looked at askance. The French do it all the time.
August is hot in Paris, but many streets are tree-lined and shaded, and at a walking pace, much can be seen. Following our plan to explore each of the arrondissements, we walked to many of them or took the Metro and then walked through each one. We climbed thousands of stairs and walked hundreds of miles, all in our comfortable shoes.
Walking in Paris has its hazards, however. Despite laws requiring that dog owners clean up after their pets, we saw nary an instance of this.
Armed with our monthly Metro passes, we set out to blend into the crowds of French straphangers. We learned that in crowded areas such as the Metro, the French are careful to respect each other’s privacy by remaining silent and stony-faced. But for the French, staring has become a competitive art form. At first we were unnerved, but as the month wore on, we became nervier. By the end of August, we were right up there with the best of them. Were all the French silent on the Metro? No, teenagers everywhere whoop it up, even the French. And of course, the silence was frequently broken by tourists, who believe the rest of the world wants to know their every thought. Am I sounding like a Parisienne?
Not surprisingly, parks were a highly desirable destination for us in August. In parks, we were reminded that French parents are strict with their young children. Children play only in designated areas in parks. The training carries over into adulthood. Frenchmen do not walk on or lounge on the grass in parks unless signs specifically designate an area for such behavior. (And Frenchmen don’t jaywalk. And they don’t snack between meals. Becoming a Parisian is no easy matter.)
The Metro was not the only underground attraction offering to cool us in August. In the 14th arrondissement, visitors lined up on a hot August day to go down into the Catacombs. The site was originally carved out of the earth when granite was quarried there. Later, it came to be an ossuary, a repository for bones. Later still, the Catacombs were used by the French Resistance as its headquarters. Who would ever think of looking for them down there among the bones? For its modern-day visitors, the Catacombs are air-conditioned, dehumidified and well-lit.
As the August heat bore down, we continued to seek the cool of the underground. Hence our visit to Le Musee des Egoutes, or the Sewer Museum. This might be on the very bottom of most lists of things to see and do in Paris, but we were intrigued, and it was underground. Paris is proud, and rightly so, of its intricate and efficient sewer system.
The adventurous are in for an unforgettable experience standing on a grate beneath which a river of sewerage rushes on its way out of the city.
(The Paris sewers collect 1.2 million cubic meters of wastewater daily.) Museum guides boast that the Paris sewers have fewer rats than London’s. Well, maybe August isn’t the best time to visit the Sewer Museum.
It’s no surprise that the lines are shorter in August. A visit to the magnificent L’Opera Garnier required a wait of only 15 minutes for a group led by an English-speaking guide. And indeed, there is a lake — really a pond — under the building, which is home to and inspiration for “Phantom of the Opera.”
“Cinema au clair de lune,” another August attraction, shows movies outdoors in parks near where scenes in the movie had been shot. At the Trocadero, Woody Allen’s “Everybody Says I Love You” was shown one evening. “Midnight,” with Claudette Colbert and Don Ameche, was shown in Parc Monceau, where we joined hundreds of other movie-goers sitting on the grass, watching a black-and-white movie with French subtitles. Cool.
(By the way, in the entire month we were there, we saw not a single mosquito. The French don’t even use screens on their windows.)
As August drew to a close, we found that not only had we been mistaken for Parisians, and not only were we being asked for directions, but we were giving the directions in French.
Then we discovered one Sunday that the city had changed. The sidewalks and thoroughfares were close to gridlock with rushing Frenchmen, in a hurry to get back to their city and their lives. We knew it was time to leave, that we had lost a big part of what had made the month so pleasurable: the absence of crowds of Parisians.
Having had an entire month to settle in, spread out, experiment and explore the “City of Light” was a gift. We’re hoping that we’ll be invited back and that our month in Paris was not a once-in-a-lifetime experience. And after spending August in Paris, I now believe that August is the best time to go.
A Market for Everything
PARIS — Although we ate out most of the time during our August in Paris, we still needed — in our quest to cultivate the true French experience — to go shopping for food. Like any self-respecting French matron, we headed off in the morning to select the very best the city had to offer. (Unlike the French matrons, however, my sister and I wore comfortable shoes, for which we received more than a few scornful looks.) The true French shopping experience is highly compartmentalized, with a store for each item on one’s shopping list: the “poissonnerie” for fish; the “fromagerie” for cheese; the “boulangerie” for bread; the “patisserie” for pastry; the “boucherie” for meat and poultry; the “triperie” for cow’s stomach! Shopping can be a full-time, daily undertaking.
We did see signs of the emergence of the “supermarche,” which is not typically Paris but which, for modern convenience, has everything one needs in one place. The French supermarche, unlike its American cousin, carries a plethora of dairy products. The aisles of the supermarche feature hundreds of yogurts, creams and cheeses to die for, and none of the products are reduced-fat.
The very best part of food shopping, however, was the open-air market, and I’ve got to believe that August is a superb time to enjoy the bounty of French agriculture. Standing behind tables piled high with produce harvested as recently as that morning, farmers reel in their customers with cajoling and with samples: slices of plump white peaches, juicy melons and perfect avocado.
- Arab News Features 28 August 2003