Day Eight: Dinner alá Sardines

While discovering a new university earlier in the day, we also discovered what looked like a great place close by to have dinner, Au Pére Louis. We figured we would stroll in around 8pm and have a nice leisurely dinner.

Wrong. We walked in at 8pm, the place was packed with no discernible organized seating activity. After walking toward some empty tables, large vicious dogs descended upon us and blocked our way. Not only that but this 80 pound (metric measures are failing at the moment) girl jumped into our path and instructed us to back away from the tables. "They are all reserved" I hear. Oh, okay. She says there is the table of pain free if you would like that (but in French so I have no idea what she is saying). She smiles while she says this, so like stupid tourists we smile too and follow her into the pit.

Our table is under the stairs in the aisleway. Bonnie takes the Harry Potter seat under the stairs and I take the chair in the aisle. Great. Oh, and there are no printed menus they admit to (until it is an ordering fiasco and magic English menus appear). The draw of this place is that they have cassoulet, recommended, known for it. I have been waiting for a decent cassoulet since Kerrytown Bistro closed (and that was fake cassoulet anyways). So I get the cassoulet, Bonnie orders duck (not wild duck, chasing them down costs much much more). We order a bottle of wine, which comes from a cellar that might have been used to film any number of horror movies. It only had a half door for gods sake!

After all that, and being whacked by passersby every few minutes, the cassoulet is amazing! Everything I imagined authentic cassoulet would be, including the pool of grease you see to begin with but then magically is gone after you eat the whole thing. For dessert, Bonnie had their profiteroles, which got rave reviews, even though the waitress brought two instead of the one that was ordered. Somehow after tasting the first one there was no complaining about the second one!

We roll home to the hotel, fat and happy.

Day Eight: La Sorbonne

We went uphill from the hotel for the first time since the first jetlagged day and turned left. Holy cow! Nice building with a dome! Domes usually translate to interesting places and interesting places usually have food spots so we walked the couple blocks to see what we might see.



The first thing we discover is that rue Saint Michel is a happening place and there is a square right across the street from where we are. So like the square lemmings we are (and noticing there are a lot of people sitting outside in bistros eating and sucking down espresso) we go check it out. A pizza bistro, yawn, something that looks a little nicer, fine. Perhaps we can get some wine and food and coffee and review the zillion photos from Chartres.

Somehow it turns out the place we sit in is connected to the pizza place and somehow we end up with pizza. I didn't do it! At least we got some decent wine and much better un café than we got earlier in the day.

While sitting there and looking at where we were, I noticed we were ummm right next to the Sorbonne! That big dome... University of Paris IV... The Cartes School... I knew Hallmark had a lot of things going on but this is way bigger than I imagined.









This last guy seems to be giving the thumbs up to incoming students. How friendly of them!

So after being duly impressed we went back to the hotel and rested from our adventures (translation: wrote blog entries). What to do for dinner?

Day Eight: Chartres (still)

Morning eventually came and we were due down at breakfast at 10am. While getting ready, we watched the townspeople make their way to the market, shopping carts hauling back piles of baguettes and other staples like oysters and rabbits. Breakfast was surprisingly good for free, though we got stuck with "American" coffee, blech, horrible. A variety of cheeses and breads and fruit and orange juice and yucky coffee.

After confirming our breakfast really was included with the room and that the nice lady who was tending the store was not going to chase us down as we were going by the cathedral, we set out to see the market. The market had been recommended by our professor friend the night we ate at Polidor (as well as the castle down by the river in Chartres, but that was too much to ask with no makeup, you know). To find the market again, we could have invoked the power of Google Maps (the iPad had worked perfectly on 3G after the nice French Orange girl let us prepay so that the data plan auto-renewed) but we elected to use the stream of people with empty market baskets as a hint of the general direction to go. Unbelievably we found the place just by following customers (I'm sure there is a marketing or business development lesson in there somewhere).

Wow. If you thought the Ann Arbor Farmers Market was interesting, it is nothing compared to a good French Saturday morning market. Old and young hawkers of fruits, vegetables, fowl and fish, quite a show with the origin of each item clearly marked.











After wandering the market and admiring all the items (especially the pile of bunnies), we needed caffeine support. Of course there was a bistro right there willing to sell us un café in Lavazza cups with Lavazza water glasses and Lavazza sucre even. Not the best but by far the most inexpensive espresso since we got to Paris. After being fortified, we shopped a bit and then made our way back to the train station.

So a bit about trains in France and Europe too I imagine. We bought tickets to Chartres and back that were good until December 28. We did not have any particular day we had to travel. On the way out of Paris, we just took our tickets and got on the train. At that point we did not even realize the tickets were not for travel that day. While we were sitting in the Chartres train station we noticed these brightly colored things that seemed to be saying "compost your tickets here!". How ecologically correct, I thought, making sure tickets got disposed of properly. After all, there were recycling points all over the city!



Then we noticed a few people stuck their tickets in but pulled them back out again (except for one girl who seemed to have her ticket get stuck, go figure). So we started trying to translate what it said on the pillar. Google Translate fail. We puzzled over this until we noticed that the tickets themselves had a mention of this composting operation right across the top of the ticket. Finally, curiosity got the better of me and I stuck my ticket in the slot. No sirens, no whirring of a paper shredder, it just printed the date on the ticket. Yippee. How exciting was that? It didn't even know which train I was getting on, so it did not do any kind of capacity control (and WOW the train back to Paris was stuffed to the gills with people, most of whom did not follow the composting procedure I would wager).

But, composted or not, back to Paris we went.





We discover that somewhere in the alcoholic haze Bonnie's rail pass has vaporized (who knew they dissolved in alcohol vapor!) so the first order of business on arriving back in Montparnasse is buying a one trip Metro ticket. Luckily, we had no idea what to buy or how much it cost or that Saturday was a very busy day on the Metro, so purchasing this ticket took forever. However, we are now experts and will be adding this information to our forthcoming book.

Finally we arrive back at our hotel, our stuff still in our room and no investigations were launched as to the cause of our disappearance. We were hungry though and set off in one of the directions we had not explored yet.

We discovered that one block away (more or less) was the Sorbonne!