It's a new city.

Paris has become a new city-- at least for me. Some of it is for the good, and some of it leaves me nostalgic for the old.

I read in the travel guides that Paris had succumbed to blue jeans, but I did not believe it. It's true--the Parisians in the neighborhood between Museé Rodin and St Germain des Pres ar still so stylish that I want to crawl under a rock, but everywhere else I am finding that I cannot tell who is French and who is not. Several times I have decided, oh, definitely American! and I've then heard perfect French. On the other hand I have not spotted someone and thought gorgeous! and then heard English. But there has evolved a huge grey area--most people are not obviously one or the other.

There has been one exception. Dan and I took the train to Chartres, and while waiting on the bench for the return train I spotted Seattleites, and told Dan immediately!: She: the glasses, severe, thin red wire on the top, clear below. The militantly practical clothing. The husband, in a bad shirt, skinny tie tied much too short, absolutely horrific French on the telephone. The backpacks (one was namebranded "BombPack"--what were they thinking?). And the Seattle coolness! When I spoke to her, she just brushed me off like mud on a shoe. Then, the overheard conversation about the travails of the high-tech life: "you have to be pretty bold to take two weeks vacation at a time." And then, vindication: they started talking about Seattle. Yegads.

The disturbingly new Museé Rodin kind of tarnished things for me. I am glad that I can remember the old. There is a new entrance building with gift shop, security check, and offices, which I assume are quite necessary and inoffensive. The Hotel Biron that houses the smaller pieces is still the same, charming, many pieces displayed on the old sculptor's Lazy Susan pedestals, and I love that you can turn a corner in the house and see three Van Goghs. Surprise! However, The Gates of Hell is now embedded in a huge wall that dwarfs the sculpture, and damages its effect. The formal garden leading to it is, too, off-scale. Its conical evergreens will soon outstrip the Gates in height, and the tall hybrid roses are pretty for a garden, but have absolutely no scent. Le Penseur (the Thinker) is on a very tall pedestal--what I liked most about him was that he looked so oversized, but set at a distance, now, he looks proportional to, say, me. The Burghers of Calais are on a little square of marble with a foot-wide moat--they look trapped on an island, and very unhappy--more bourgeois than they ever expected to be. I really love Rodin's huge, expressive feet and hands, but the current displays obscure those things. And I tried not to blow a gasket when I found that Camille Claudel had been whisked away. Evn though I suspected the worst--that she'd been tucked away in an asylum in death as in life (because I think she was better than Rodin anyway)--I found that her sculptures are on a world tour. Whew!

The good here is that les gourmands have invaded the museum. We had a wonderful lunch of mixed cold salads: julienned carrots, tuna niçoise, a pasta salad with genuine flavor, and couscous.

The old in some cases is still the same. Our plumbing, for instance. Today I cheered the draining of the kitchen sink. It is capricious at best. But I think we can begin to count on the daily draining, and will probably create a ceremony to honor it, much as the citizens once gathered for the Reveille, i.e. to watch Louis XIV use the Kingly toilet in the morning.

The new can be spectacular. We arrived on Sunday at the Pantheon (I am making a point to visit all the old buildings I've missed) to find a brand new installation of--don't know what to call it, so I will try to describe it--an art piece by Ernesto Neto called 'Leviathan Thon'. Suspended from this ancient domed space are white nylon shapes filled with sand, and lighter materials to create a maze of playful tubes and pendules. People cannot resist touching them, and they are white, artificial and organic all at the same time. There are a range of fabrics with holes, like big nets, stretched around the space in the center where an old Foucault Pendulum still slowly tocks. It is great fun, and a great surprise.

And I am sure that the patisserie Gerard Mulot is not traditional. It is the Crown Jewels of the patisserie world. And I am doubly sorry that I still haven't the skill to show you a picture, because you would not believe your eyes. And the Coeur Volant (flaming heart, I believe) is the best assemblage of choclate mousses and ganache that looks like banded onyx that I have ever tasted.

Once again, I am running out of time. Eqch dqy is so rich in experience thqt I cannot begin to tell you all. The busker on the Métro playing folk fiddle who makes a joke by sliding into Jingle Bells. The Brillat Savarin that tastes like nothing I have ever had before, that ruins my entire plan of trying only things I cannot get at home. Even when I CAN get it at home it is not the same thing at all...

Again, apologies about the technical things. The Ipod is trying to crash, the battery charger already did, but ze are figuring out the camera, and Dan has some great pictures. Next step, I promise, is that we will leqrn how to share them.

And why should they?

It seems that Parisians are far less eager than Londoners to communicate with the rest of the world: And why should they? Even though my Gourmet Magazine from 2003 or 2004 says that Parisians are calling for takeout just like the rest of the world, not making a daily course of shopping-- fromager, charcuterie, boulangerie--it seems to me that that way of life is quite possible, and still common. And when there are no less than four cheese shops within four blocks of a little apartment in the Latin Quarter, who would ever want to venture out or even call home?

But I have tried--Mitch is in the process of buying a small aparment himself (stateside, of course) and so he has been trying to call me, but my apartment phone has been out of service because its batteries leaked. And I spent a good hour trying to figure out the rented cell phone, but still only know how to make a local call. Finally getting through last night (they replaced the phone), Mitch sent me on a chase to send a fax to free up some money. Well, the Poste here will send a fax, but the first attempt failed. Not knowing whether it failed because of a wrong number, I sent myself off to track down an internet cafe to check numbers. Finding one after following a dated guide to an empty address, and asking directions from a seller of antique books--I like that he knew without hesitation where to send me--then tracking down new numbers, and a new Poste, I achieved success just three minutes before the post office closed for the weekend! And I enjoyed the challenge of making my way in the city--

So, what have we been up to? We had a great time in London, though I was surprisingly much more jet-lagged than Dan. It might have been the English coffee. It smelled like toasted grains, and was very dark, but had absolutely no flavor. So I didn't wake up until I'd found espresso, and that meant getting dressed frist. So you understand.

The British, at least in Central London, are soooo friendly. All we had to do was pull out a map, and someone on the street tried to help. And when we were in Leicester Square--tourist central--looking at a bus tour and trying to decide, a couple from Suffolk walked up to us, asked if we were tourists, and pressed 24-hour hop-on, hop-off double-decker bus tour tickets into my hands. I was starting to tell them the little bit we'd figured out so far, thinking they were deciding like we were, but, no, they wanted to give away just-purchased (and very expensive) tickets they had decided not to use. So we took a full tour, and a small boat ride up the Thames to boot, and it was a great orientation to a city I don't know much about.

We saw one play--Donkey's Years by Michael Frayn. The lead was played by David Haig, who would look very familiar to you if you've seen Four Weddings and a Funeral (Bernard). It was a silly farce, and we loved it, in the old Comedy Theatre, founded 1881.

I have to say the food was pretty unremarkable, so when we return, I plan to be more diligent about looking for the exact places listed in my recent magazines. I was just too muzzy-headed to decide, and so I left our dining to chance, which is still a bad idea in London. And I am ashamed to say that I ran out of time before I made it to Neal's Yard Cheese. I was torn--the famous books in the British Library vs. cheese--what would you have done? Magna Carta--Montgomery Cheddar--what to do?

The Chunnel was pleasant but pretty unremarkable. There's not much to see out the windows, and you go underground before you have any sight of the sea. But our seatmates! Two cousins, one 82 and the other not saying, were just delightful. The 82-year-old, the 13th of 13, had been in London after The War and spoke a little very polite English, and my French was passable enough to communicate with this lovely Parisian. The other cousine d'une certaine age was from near Lyon, and lived in one of the pretty hill towns pressed up next to the Alps. Dan, of course, made them both laugh--he may not speak a lot of French, but somehow he can still pull off a joke!

We also shared our coach with an Australian family who had taken several weeks to make a trip back to British home cities that they had not seen in 33 years, to take their three children to see relatives and every sight along the way. Jeanette was a travel agent, and she had everything planned down to the minute.

Tragedy has, however, struck. I left my sock on the train! At least I still have one ball of the Cherry Tree Hill red-brown-apricot variegated yarn that Melinda gave me, but one set of needles, a half-made sock and a ball of gorgeous yarn probably was blown up by border agents finding it unattended. What a picture. French border guards carry machine guns. For real.

Some cultural notes: When you see q's where a's should be on e-documents, somebody must have been using a French keyboard. You also have to shift to get numbers and the period.

And for those of us who have seen Black Cat, White Cat (movie): if my memory is correct, the coke-snorting comic "rapper" star in the film is Ali-G, right? Well, every little grocery here, run by non-parisians (the movie is Serbian or something near that) is called Alimentation Generale, or abbreviated Ali G. I think they are trying to make a funny in the movie that we never would understand if we're not from here.

I must run off. I'll tell you all more qbout Pqris soon, but it is bequtiful, comfortqble, qnd still full of surprises. See, what did I tell you about the q's?

Tim's back yard

I'm in Williamsburg, which is Brooklyn north-ish of the BQE (Brooklyn-Queens Expressway), and about 10 short blocks north of Tim's place on Broadway. I can tell already that I didn't buy enough time on this computer--this may be a little rough.

There is so much to relate, and there are so many fine details. Williamsburgh is much quieter than Manhattan, but still far from quiet. There is a height limit on buildings for the most part, here, so three stories is about the average. Tim's place is in an old-school loft building with wood floors and beams and warehouse wall-sized windows. The decor in his second floor loft is original photography, art shipping cases, and bicycles. The elevator to the roof is an experience. I have decided that the primary aroma of the city is old machine oil. I'd expected to be a little more aware of diesel, piss and garbage scents--watched too much tv in my life, I suppose--but the predominant one is machine oil. Tim's building has a spectacular view from the roof, with gardens and barbecues and satellite dishes vining up the chimney--It really is, as Tim says "the best clubhouse a boy could ever have."

So what have we done here? We've had a Bad Cabbie, pretending not to know the area. Our loft host came down to the street and chewed him out. Our digs are perfect, close and comfortable. Tim met us there and we walked the Williamsburgh Bridge at midnight after some $3 felafel. The bridge is a beautiful old thing, with lots of pedestrian traffic and bikes on it all through the night.

We wore Tim out on Tuesday going into Manhattan. Turned the wrong way on foot out of the subway and ended up at Ground Zero. I am surprised at how it really looks like nothing more than a constuction site, but a very large one. I wanted very much to see the scale of it, and to look at the heights of buildings that are there and compare them to what is gone is some help, but it is still very difficult to imagine.

Our big success in the City was walking into Central Park, in the rain, to see the angel in the fountain. She really is the loveliest sight in the city, mid-stride, carrying lilies.

Evening took us to Park Slope to a talk. Crushed into an alleyside gallery near the Gouamas Canal, we listened to two people who have started the Prelinger Library in San Francisco, gathering printed ephemera: magazines, industry publications, old municipal reports. It is all organized around the concept of landscape, and they are trying to keep a lot of discarded public domain materials available and in the public domain so that, for one, the stream of information about land use and ecological issues is preserved. Heather Rogers invited us; She's written the book Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage.

Forgive my slim descriptions. Here is an example of why I cannot communicate it all to you: just recently, they discovered an abandoned fallout shelter inside the Brooklyn Bridege. Full of carrots and peas in cans. There is so much here to take in that even a fallout shelter can be lost for half a century.

Yesterday we met Tim for a vegetarian brunch at Bliss; then Dan and I struck out for Ellis Island. The exhibits seem a little whitewashed to me--no mention of everybody's name being changed, for example. They could also use a few Seattle Ferry captains. We decided that the ferry drivers might be summer help.

The voice of the National Park Service Ferry to Ellis Island is Ned Flanders. Honest.

Dinner, back with Tim, Aztec Mexican under the elevated trains on Broadway. Tiny place, delicious food. Then on for coffee, we found that late at night the coffee shop where I've gone every morning, Marlowe and Sons, turns into table service only. They seem to be known for oysters, all East Coast types, and we see a lot of half-shell plates pass by. Dan retired his charms early, and Tim and I talked about His Future in Bicycles until we, too, tucked in.

Now, I'm steps away from the Bedford Cheese Shop, where I was offered a taste of their favorite and mine, Pleasant Ridge Reserve. They have many cheeses I've never seen or heard of before, and prices, unlike the astonishingly low prices at Marlowe's (where I bought a 4 oz Caprini with a little shaved truffle on top for breakfast for $3.75), are pretty near Seattle prices. I think rent must figure in heavily. Marlowe's is Southside; Bedford is Northside and trendier.

I tried to hit the Brooklyn Public Library this morning, but it was closed. It's hot and sunny today, and Tim's working. I'm going to go retrieve Dan and I think we'll try to see the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. We'll meet Tim and Molly for dinner tonight.

I'm going to leave you now--must find some bus or train routes and Garden information before my time is up. Ciao!

Cheese mites live with greatness.

You set a lovely, crusty cylinder of Stilton on the counter. It warms gently. You lightly brush the bits of brown dust that have fallen from it into a tiny pile, and you go about your work. Some minutes later, you notice that the small pile of brown dust has begun to creep. It is alive! You have discovered cheese mites.

I have looked closely at them with a magnifying glass, and, well, I prefer not to. I prefer to imagine them with hardworking, earnest faces, laboring to create the pitted rind that tells you, the cheese lover, that this is an old and elegant cheese. For their labors, they are not much rewarded. Some people eat them--I have. But, do they ever get to travel!

And, now, so do I. Soon, I will be off to see many great things, and to be part of the great creeping dust of travelers who are brushed aside or--let's hope not--eaten alive by the great things we are drawn to see. I'll be traveling sort of low to the ground, hoping to find the people who do old things in old ways, and to talk my way into barns and kitchens, while never missing a chance to see the things I've only seen in pictures before. Hey, I think the cheese mites were peeking out from beneath their bandages when they sailed past the Statue of Liberty.

Cheese mites travel light. Food is everywhere, and clothes are barely necessary.