The French variety of pain, that is. Le Pain. Bread. Larry and I are quite enjoying it. If you are planning a trip to France at any time in the near future, just memorize this phrase: “Je voudrais plus de pain, s’il vous plait.” Trust me, you’ll be glad to have that bit of survival French under your hat. Everyone in France has a routine of going to the local boulangerie or epicerie to buy their daily baguette. It’s just what they do. Every day, without fail. First thing in the morning or in the evening on their way home from work. And while we Americans may wonder aloud at the daily pain that may be (pun intended), let me argue the other side of it. As Larry put up on his facebook page the other day “Fresh bread every day is what America’s missing.” We are quite enjoying buying our baguettes and other daily carbohydrate laden delights (pain au chocolate is my personal favorite, of course). This morning Larry even trudged down to the local boulangerie at 7 am for warm baguettes fresh out of the oven. I could get used to this.

If The Shoe Doesn’t Fit, Get Smaller Feet

We have also discovered the pain of shoe shopping in Paris for an American male with size 13 feet. When Larry decided to leave his old Cole Haan loafers back in the states because they were ready for that big shoe rack in the sky (they weren’t in such great shape to begin with, and then they had to survive his abuse during our entire miserable move), we thought, no problem, we’ll just buy some in Europe. Except we forgot the fact that the average French man is 5’8″ with a corresponding shoe size. We’ve spent a lot of our time over the last few days trying to find a shoe store that sold shoes that would fit Larry’s big paws. We haven’t been so successful. Every grand magasin (large department store), a Mephisto store down the street (“Mephisto ne fait pas” – “Mephisto doesn’t make them”, asserted the sales lady there), and many other shoe stores in between have all said, “45 is the largest we carry.” Size 13 US is roughly equal to a 47 -48 in Europe.

We were so close to success on Monday we very nearly thought our problem solved. Friendly sales people at one shoe store directed us to another around the corner to a store that carries grande pointures (large sizes). Sure enough, up on the sign it advertised “36 á 50” – Larry’s size with room to grow! While the selection was not large he found a couple of lukewarm possibilities, and the friendly older French woman who has probably worked there her entire life ran upstairs to retrieve our hoped for solution. Larry had requested a 48 and when she brought the two different pairs he requested, one was clearly too small and the other was “parfait” according to the sales woman. She again went upstairs to retrieve a larger size in the too small pair. However, Larry liked the first pair best but thought they were too large.

Here is where a broader French vocabulary would have been helpful. I studied it in college and in business school and was fairly conversant at one point but my days of being a lazy American and expressing myself only in English have pushed most of my French language skills into that cloudy part of my brain that I can no longer access. Professor Federico would be so disappointed in me. Thus we are left with my vocabulary of a few hundred survival words, which works just fine in grocery stores and when ordering meals and buying movie tickets, but is apparently not enough to express myself in the intricacies of shoe fit and sizing.

I asked Madame if we could try the 47’s in the shoe Larry had on and Madame informed me that “a 47 would not work, the 48 was a perfect fit”. It was not a question, or a matter of opinion, it was merely the fact. I tried again. Again, she corrected me, and told me that the sock was the problem. Larry was not wearing regular socks and just had the chausettes that the stores keep on hand for customers to use when trying on. With a regular sock, she said, it would be a perfect fit. Except Larry didn’t plan on wearing them with socks given we’re on the verge of summer and that Larry only wears socks to work and church in the summer. “But he won’t wear them with socks” I tried to explain. “It’s required that he wear socks, it’s store policy.” she informed me.

Obviously my flawed French was failing me. Madame was “the expert” at shoe size and fit and she was resolved. “The 47 will not work. The 48 is the correct fit. It is not a question.” She broke off in rapid fire French – something about the arch of his feet and the width – I have no idea what she said but can assume it had something to do with the fact that his feet were too wide and his arch too high for a 47 to work. I think she also said something about him stretching the 47’s if he tried them on because his feet were obviously too big for them. Then she put all the shoes back in their boxes and put them in the back of the store, saying (I think) something about if we didn’t like them, it was not a big deal “ce n’est pas grave“. We both sat there a little shell shocked. Apparently in Paris, the customer is not always right. At least we got to admire the beautiful Paris Opera Garnier while we were in the neighborhood.

Now I have done serious internet research to find places that sell les grande pointures and we have a few well-stocked stores in the Bastille neighborhood to try. Of course the brands they carry are all American labels, because apparently only American men have big feet. This time we’ll ask for a 47 first. Hopefully we get a sales person that speaks a little English.

Heat Wave

Saturday, Sunday, and Monday turned out to be quite the Parisian heatwave. For those of you who paid attention in the past when there have been screaming headlines about deadly heat waves in Europe, any time the mercury in the thermometer goes above 90 degrees, it’s a deadly heatwave by European standards. Continental Europe generally doesn’t get that hot in the summertime, and for that reason, many, if not most people, do not have air conditioning. Including our landlords. I think it was only in the mid-80’s but it was quite humid and that, combined with our 6th floor location, made for a pretty steamy apartment. Larry does get credit for being the ingenious inventor that he is, as he crafted our very own air conditioner by freezing water in old 1.5L Coke bottles and placing them in front of the fan. The result was a very pleasant, very cool breeze aimed directly wherever we chose.

We did our best to spend as little time as possible here (though we couldn’t escape it too much given the subways or buses didn’t have air conditioning either) and decided one night that it was the perfect time to take the Bateaux Mouches – the pleasant open-air tour boats that march up and down the Seine day and night. We decided to take the metro to Place de la Concorde and take pictures as we walked the rest of the way along the river to the Bateaux Mouches dock.

We ended up taking a 10 pm boat so it was nearly dark when we started. The full tour takes a little over an hour and goes past all the beautiful spots of the city, including Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, and the Musee D’Orsay (my personal favorite, both for the spectacularly gorgeous building (which actually used to be a train station) as well as its contents).

We walked home in the dark, across the Pont Alexandre III, by far the most beautiful bridge in Paris, and past the Invalides, enjoying the beautiful stillness of the sleeping buildings and trying to inhale every detail so that it’s permanently imprinted on our DNA.

We’ve just realized that we’ve been here nearly 2 weeks already. Nearly halfway done with the Paris portion. I knew when we got here that a month was not going to be enough time, and of course, it isn’t. Larry, asked me the other day about the dream I’ve always had of living in Paris, “One month isn’t going to count, is it?” I informed him, no, of course not. It’s just a long-ish vacation. For it to count to me we would have to be here at least a year. Of course my preference is to have a second home here that we can come to whenever we want, but that’s some time down the road. I’d settle for a houseboat on the Seine, too.

I’ll have to re-learn French if I’m ever going to be allowed to own property here.

Text © 2009 Lisa Hanson
Photographs © 2009 Larry L. Hanson, with Lisa Hanson