New year in Paris!

My trip to Paris from Helsinki was naturally not “smooth flying”. This time I didn’t have to spend the night at an airport though – but a delay of three hours did mean I arrived rather late at our hotel, which was located at Porte d’Orleans, near Montparnasse. After my happy reunion with Mathilde, and a good night’s sleep, we started our exploration of Paris.

We started off by walking to the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris. I have to say it was quite nice to see the sun again – it was nice to experience a few hours of real winter in Helsinki, but the problem this time of the year is that it’s sort of dark all the time (even day-time). The Cité is quite an interesting place – it’s a large collection of residences for students, with each house or collection of houses representing one country. The buildings are quite interesting, being in quite a variety of architectural styles. All in all, a very nice place to spend walking around on a sunny winter day.

From the Cité, we carried on to the nearby Parc de Montsouris. It’s a public park, styled upon public parks from London, apparently (it’s true that I probably prefer the parks in London to those in Paris). One of the famous chaps who lived around here was Coluche, a comedian.

Having checked out the parc we carried on to the Butte-Aux-Cailles (“Quail hill”), which is one of my favourite areas in Paris for eating out. It’s kind of like a small village in the middle of Paris, with lots of cozy little eateries, serving no-nonsense food for reasonable prices. And we were indeed here to eat – lunch with CoCo was the order of the day. The restaurant we kind of picked at random turned out to be a good choice – I had pig’s cheek followed by a café gourmand – yummie all the way. Good fun as always to catch up with CoCo as well.

After some post-lunch deliberation, we decided to head down to Bercy to check out an exposition the Cinemateque de Paris - “Brune et Blonde”. A very nice subject indeed – Blondes and Brunettes in cinema ;-). It was all pretty cool, with photos of pretty movie starts, movie clips and even a collection of short stories about women’s hair! Very French, I suppose, but I liked it a lot. I suppose another visit is called for to check out the permanent collection – I am after all a bit of a cinephile. But that’s for another time, we had other places to go to…

We headed down to Montparnasse, where we walked about for a bit, before heading back to the hotel. After a brief rest (it had, after all, been a rather busy day), we headed out to dinner. We had selected a real Paris institution for the occasion – Le Coupole. The place opened in 1927 and quickly became the preferred eatery and drinking hole for the Parisian Bohemians (Jean Cocteau, Man Ray, Josephine Baker, Jean-Paul Sartre, Edith Piaf among others). It’s actually a very large restaurant – one of the largest ones in Paris, able to seat about 500 people. So not your chic, cozy little eatery, but very much a slice of Paris, nonetheless. I, naturally, went for the local speciality – lamb curry (kind of surprising). All in all, it was a great experience, even if the food wasn’t haute cuisine or anything. And apparently it’s still very much the real thing – at least that’s what the old couple at the next table told us (they’ve been coming for 30 years and say the quality hasn’t deteriorated over the years).

After a good night’s sleep, we continued our exploration of Paris. We had the ambitious plan to check out an exhibition at the Louvre in the morning. After a quick look at the queues, snaking there way across the Louvre courtyard, we dismissed the idea. Instead, we decided to head down to the Champs Elysee – it was new year’s eve, after all. Nothing much happening yet, though. But walking around Paris is just great, pretty much no matter where you are. There’s definitely something special about the place…

After a quick coffee, it was time to head down to Chatelet for our next rendez-vous, lunch with Philippe and Aniko, as well as a friend of Aniko’s from Hungary. The place we had originally planned to go to was closed, unfortunately, but thankfully there are a lot of typical Parisian bistros around Les Halles/Chatelet. All in all, it's another great part of Paris to just stroll around, soak in the Parisian atmosphere, and pop into a brasserie for some good, unpretentious food. We picked one of them, and weren’t disappointed. Good to catch up with them too, unfortunately it was all too quick, as usual…

The next stop was in Montparnasse, where we were had a rendez-vous with Muriel and her band of youngsters. We were glad to discover that the young lads, Paul and Lucas, have lost none of their energy (in fact, I get the impression the development is rather in the opposite direction). Alix is growing up to be quite the young lady, and I finally got to meet the youngest member of the family, Syhem, as well. After a couple of very energy-filled, one could nearly say tiring, hours (the activities included magic exhibition, trying to keep Paul and Lucas from sitting on my head and even a bit of board game playing) we had to head off, to start our new year’s eve’s celebrations.

Raphaelle and OIivier had kindly invited them over to their place, which was conveniently located just down the road from our hotel (in Montrouge), for the occasion. Nathalie, Patrick and their tribe, as well as Isabelle were also present – so quite a good part of the old “French expat tribe from the UK” was present (pity Aniko and Philippe didn’t make it). A mate of Ollie’s, Damien, also joined up for the fun. What followed was a very jolly night indeed – I especially warmed to the part where we prepared and consumed cocktails. I did a lot of the preparation actually – that’s probably why the taste was occasionally a wee bit dodgy. (I even managed to mess up a Mojito – not very easy to fail with those…). But hey, the main thing is, everybody had fun, everybody got pissed to some degree, and everybody was standing by the time the New Year started! Thanks to Ollie and Rafa for a great party!

We were feeling rather unenergetic the next day – our last in Paris before heading back to Nice. We did manage to summon enough energy to check out of the hotel, take our luggage to Gare de Lyon, have lunch at a brasserie, and even make our way to Bagnolet for a quick visit at Milene and Kamel’s. Good to see them too, it’s been a while… (there’s not been any Perugia meetup for a while, unfortunately). That brought and end to a very nice weekend indeed in Paris!