Tricadero – Trocadero passing time before lunch.
Since we’d used the Métro to ride up to Montmartre and we had sufficient time, we decided to take David and Alison’s advice and ride the bus to the next place we wanted to visit – les Jardins du Trocadéro (Trocadero Gardens) – and see a bit of the city along the way. The main purpose for this visit was twofold. First, while I’d been able to take a few typical tourist pictures of the Eiffel Tower, I wanted to take an even more iconic tourist shot and one of the best places to do that is from the Trocadero. Boom!
The second reason was that it brought us within easy walking distance of the café I’d chosen for our reunion lunch date with our fellow river Performance Today cruisers Jim and Sharon.
Our bus ride took us along the Boulevard du Clichy and through the rather notorious area known as the Pigalle. Although Fodor’s online travel guide has this description,
If you think the Bohemian Belle Epoque Paris that created the Moulin Rouge is a thing of the past, look no further than Pigalle, which lies on the foot of Montmartre at the northern edge of the 9th arrondissement. Near the Place Pigalle, lodged between—and nudging out—the sex shops and dive bars, you’ll find chic cocktail lounges, barista cafés, gastro-bistros, and trend-setting hotels that make a visit to the neighborhood feel like a discovery.
The neighborhood’s naughty appeal dates back to the 1880s, when everyone from down-and-out artists to British royalty flocked to a slew of watering holes, including Moulin Rouge, for a night of champagne, dirty dancing, and the kinds of illicit pleasures that Belle-Époque Paris did best. As the city’s seedy red-light district throughout the 20th century, Pigalle earned a bad rap, but in the last few years, the quartier—now called SoPi, for South Pigalle—has been steadily gaining its hipster cred. Reclaimed by a group of trendy cosmopolites who’ve traded in absinthe for craft cocktails and microbrew, Pigalle now counts as one of Paris’s most fashionable final frontiers.
plenty of sex shops are still evident – as is the Moulin Rouge. Were I 30 or so years younger, I have little doubt I’d feel differently but at this stage of my life passing through the quarter on a public bus provided decent exposure.
Back to the task at hand. Not many tourists have the luxury, as Patricia and I did, of spending seven days visiting a city like Paris. Still, despite the apparent surfeit of time, one is constantly confronted with choices. See this and you probably won’t have time to see that. See that and you have to skip seeing this. And even an area as compact as the Trocadero can present such a challenge. The gardens are flanked by three major museums – the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine (Architecture and Heritage City) in the Palais de Chaillot, the Musée national de la Marine (National Navy Museum), and the Musée de l’homme (Museum of Man) which is an anthropological museum. The Paris Aquarium is within the garden. We skipped them all. I took my tourist photos and we set off to meet Sharon and Jim.
Sharon and Jim had also decided to spend a few extra days in Paris though they weren’t as temporally extravagant as Pat and I and were leaving Sunday. Sharon, who is a New York City transplant, and Jim live in upstate New York so I thought it would be clever to meet them for lunch at the café called Le New York (so named because its address is 48 avenue de New York not because it’s American in any way). We sat outside and had this slightly obstructed view
of the Eiffel Tower.
The traffic was a little heavier than I would have hoped but the food was fine quality. I had Suprême de poulet à l’estragon (essentially a skin on chicken breast sautéed in butter or olive oil with fresh tarragon leaves under the skin) served with the purée maison and ratatouille. I also ordered one of the beers they had on draft but our server Samuel told me sadly that they had run out. I was disappointed but ordered a cider to replace it, he disappeared for a moment and returned with a sheepish grin saying they were out of that, too. When I expressed my incredulity, his smile widened and he told me he was kidding. We shared a good laugh over it.
(Here’s a travel tip. Do you remember our friend Monsieur Parmentier who went to great lengths to get the French to eat potatoes and was so successful that he now has a dish that bears his name? Well, the French menu is another measure of his success – at least in Paris and Normandy. Every time I saw “purée maison” it meant mashed potatoes. I came to expect it and so, I think, should you.)
After lunch Pat and I planned to walk to the Pont Mirabeau because Jie’s composition now conferred upon it a different meaning – at least for me – than it had when we’d sailed beneath it on our way to Normandy. Jim and Sharon walked with us part of the way but decided the full two-and-a-half kilometers was a bit beyond their energy level. Among the notable aspects of the segment the four of us walked en route to the bridge were the street names. Of course, we started on avenue de New York but then proceeded along other streets nominally connected to the U S. They had names like avenue des Nations Unies (United Nations Avenue) and avenue du Président Kennedy.
When Sharon and Jim decided they could walk no farther, we put them on a bus back toward the city center. Unfortunately, we’d later learn that I hadn’t been clear enough in my instructions directing where and when they should exit. Thus, it was sometime around 18:00 when they sent me a text message that the trip back to their hotel became more of an adventure than any of us planned or expected. They had ridden the bus to Notre-Dame – a considerable distance past the stop I’d anticipated they’d use – and had difficulty hailing a cab because of the crowds. Nevertheless, they made it back safely if a bit later, and more bedraggled than they’d planned.
For Pat and me, the day was still young when we parted with Sharon and Jim. Coming up, our visit to the Mirabeau Bridge, the Musée de l’Orangerie, and a Saturday night concert right in the neighborhood.