Paris, Day 3

I woke up tired this morning and realized that I had only delayed rather than avoided the effects of jet lag. Normally I adjust really quickly, but I guess this is yet another thing that gets harder with age... I had a fairly lazy morning just puttering around my room.

Dany and I left around 1:00 to go across the river to the Marais, which is the old Jewish district and a very happening place now. (If it weren’t prohibitively expensive, that’s absolutely a place I’d like to live.) I went to the Marais during my weekend here last year and was glad to go back (and to find that I remembered where certain things were!). To get there, we took a bus that drove by Notre Dame and the Palais de Justice, and we got off not too far onto the other side of the river.

Our first stop on the way to the Marais was in a department store, BHV. I just googled it, and apparently this is the only location – kind of like the former Marshall Fields in Chicago. It is really awesome, and I want to go back! We only visited two of the seven or eight floors – Dany had two prints she wanted to get framed – but they have everything from clothing to cosmetics to school supplies to art. If I had lots of money (and I don’t even think the stuff was particularly expensive), I would definitely want to furnish my house with some of the stuff I saw in there today. I also saw a few more examples of typically fashionable Parisian women. The woman who helped us in the framing department was wearing a black leather jacket with the collar pulled up over her neck and the sleeves pushed up, allowing her to accessorize her wrists with two very large bracelets.

After BHV we entered the heart of the Marais, where the streets are very narrow. I think cars are allowed on most streets, but there are so many pedestrian shoppers that I imagine many people are deterred from driving because it would be a real pain! There are lots of Jewish stores, bakeries, and butcheries along with fashionable clothing shops and cool other stores. (I want to go back to one called Tudo Bom, which is a boutique themed around Rio de Janeiro – my favorite city.) Retracing my steps from my visit last year, I got falafel from the most famous of the several falafel places, and Dany and I walked a few blocks away to eat it in a little park situated in the courtyard of a massive building. She told me that there are several “hotels privés” – buildings like this one that are technically houses owned by incredibly wealthy families (many of whom are apparently from somewhere in the Middle East). After eating we wandered over to the Place des Vosges, which is a lovely plaza/park. Victor Hugo lived in a house on one corner of it.

I was still dragging from my delayed-onset jet lag, so we returned home around 4. I had my first phone conversation with my mom thanks to an app, and then I took a refreshing 20-minute nap.

Fast-forwarding to 8:00 (I didn’t do much in between), Dany had a young friend of hers come over for dinner, and the three of us had a great time talking about international and domestic (French and US) politics. My favorite take-away was the friend’s comment about American eating habits: she studied abroad for a bit in Chicago and lived with a family; on the first day she came down to breakfast, she saw so much food laid out that she thought the family had put out all the food for the entire day! She tried a bit of everything and ended up being sick at school later that morning. Sounds about right! She also talked about how confusing it was to live in a suburb (this sounded like a gated community) where all the houses looked exactly alike – she couldn’t tell which house was hers without the usual unique markers that exist in this city.

I’m hoping I’ll have more energy tomorrow – my goal is to get up and go for a run through a park that’s nearby and then to make an appointment to open a bank account. I also want to find a good spot to view the sparkling Eiffel Tower at night and figure out how to get there. Sorry for the lack of pictures today!