Maya and I spent a week in Paris in March. It was my third time there and Maya's first. My first time, in junior year of college, was spent mostly shuttling between museums and churches in the cold of winter, and it was still pretty great. I didn't eat any French food, but we were there during the transition from the Franc to the Euro, causing us to accidentally order a 60 Euro bottle of champagne on new year's eve. The second time was with my friend Jordan (previously known as Mr. Extreme Sloth), who had no interest in museums or other tourist attractions. We ate a lot of French food and I did a lot of preparatory research for the first time. This trip was something of a mix of the previous two, activity-wise.
The travel itself was a trial; in both directions, our initial flight was delayed, while our connecting flight was not as delayed, forcing us to sprint through Heathrow and delaying our checked luggage. Then some things happened that we won't mention, like going to wrong airports and booking hotel rooms for wrong days. Moving on!
The Rodin museum was one of my favorite places. The Hôtel Biron, where Rodin lived for quite a while, is a great building, the grounds are pleasant and immaculately manicured, and the sculpture is just amazing. At first I had trouble understanding why he was such a controversial figure in his time, but a biography that Maya picked out from the gift shop has helped. More on that in a future post, I hope.
We hit up Pierre Hermé, one of the foremost patissiers in town, on Macaroon Day, which I had been lucky enough to hear about. They had a vast selection of flavors, many of them quite unusual, as well as the ones that have made them famous, such as the sublime Ispahan. The deal was 3 free macaroons of your choice, plus an extra one of a flavor specially made for the day, for a donation to a charity. I chose white truffle hazelnut, vanilla & olive oil, and Campari & grapefruit. The first and third were interesting but not perfect, while the vanilla and olive oil was revelatory. Maya chose Ispahan (rose, lychee and raspberry), Mogador (chocolate and passion fruit), and caramel and sea salt. We ate them on a bench in the adjacent Place St. Sulpice.
This was a stupendously inspiring experience for me. I felt lifted by the evident passion and perfectionism that had gone into crafting these cookies. Their colors and decorations were vibrant and unique, and the way such disparate ingredients had been incorporated and combined was masterful. I wanted nothing more than to return home and start baking and experimenting on my own, if nothing else to try to replicate what I had eaten so that I could have it more than once every several years. Of course I didn't do that, because I have seventeen other obsessions piling up in addition to my full-time job, but I will get to it when the time is right. We went back the next day and bought two dozen more macaroons which we painstakingly brought back for our friends (they are exceedingly fragile).
On our last day in town, we decided to make an attempt at visiting the boutique of Rick Owens, a fashion designer whom we had just read about in The New Yorker (abstract only). The store was located in the Palais Royale, a huge rectangular frame of buildings lined with stores, with a park in the middle. There was a map where we entered, but much of it was helpfully obscured by some paste-up. A fence made it all but impossible to identify the stores unless walking right alongside them, meaning that we might have had to take the whole circuit to find it. We did not have the energy to do this, and how sure could I be that I would recognize his clothes? After some amount of wandering, I found a security guard's office and he pointed us in the right direction.
The boutique's door was locked, but there were some clerks inside. It took about five minutes of ambivalently peering in and trying the door before someone finally let us in. I couldn't really blame them; I'm sure we didn't look like anyone about to drop twelve hundred Euros on a leather jacket. But I'm glad we braved a place of haute couture. We saw the anatomically correct wax statue that Owens had commissioned of himself, now wearing a black curtain for at least one type of modesty. We saw his "mega turbo boots"; I'm impressed that any independent designer can make his own sneakers, as they seem like a definitively mass-produced object. And we saw many amazing creations, in feathery and exotic fabrics, that showed the immense skill the New Yorker had described in sewing to manipulate shape. Some of the features reminded me of the minimal surfaces seen in the science of topology. We contemplated buying something, but in the end, the minimum expenditure of a hundred and sixty dollars for a distressed tank top that looked like it could fall to pieces at any moment was too hard to justify. Maybe when I'm a rockstar.
