where to stay in Paris?

If you have been reading our previous posts, you may be wondering why we have called this a travel blog when we are still at home in Adelaide, South Australia.

“They haven’t gone anywhere yet”, I hear you say.

I could go into a discussion about travelling in the broader sense; travelling into the past through memories; travelling into the future through imagination; travelling into the worlds of others through reading or watching films; travelling into our own inner worlds through dreaming and thinking and writing. We are time travellers as well as travellers through space.

“Bah! Humbug!” I hear you say.

O.K. I will stop my musings and tell you about our plans to travel to other places. We are leaving Adelaide on 19^th May, flying to Madrid via Dubai. The plan is for a month in Spain, two months in France and a month in Eastern Europe, probably Croatia.

Just as a good cook enjoys sourcing the best ingredients, and creating the meal as well as eating it, I like the researching and planning for a trip as well as the journeying.

Last night we were trying to find somewhere to stay in Paris in September. I trawled through websites, looking at hundreds of apartments and hotels. Then I thought “Why stay in an apartment in Paris?” We won’t want to cook. We will want to walk all day, play at night, and eat out. There is plenty of opportunity to cook when we come home. So why pay for a kitchen we wouldn’t use?”

As for washing clothes, we are travelling so light that it will be one set on, another hand-washed in the bathroom. 

Henri IV - March 1996

Then I remembered the Henri IV Hotel in Paris, the place we stayed in 1996, arriving in the morning of David’s 50^th birthday, with a bottle of Pol Roger in hand. Unfortunately the combination of champagne and jetlag meant we slept right through David’s birthday. But we loved the location of the hotel in the centre of Paris and we have happy memories of our stay there, so we decided book it again. It is a small hotel which doesn’t allow on-line bookings. We found the telephone number on a web site and rang.

Our French language skills are pretty rusty. I heard Dave say, “Bonjour. Je m’appelle David Ward. Je suis Australien. Je parle très, très peu le français. Parlez-vous anglais? “

Clearly, the person at the other end of the line did not speak English.  Dave bravely continued…

“Je voudrais réserver une chambre pour deux personnes en Septembre. Nous voudrons une chambre avec une salle de bains et w.c., s'il vous plaît.’ He was launching into the dates we required when I heard him falter, look embarrassed and stop. “Pardon, je suis très désolé. Au revoir.” He hung up.

Then he burst out laughing. Apparently he had rung a publishing house. At least it would have given the mademoiselle an amusing dinner anecdote.

We checked the phone number and found that he had dialled one incorrect digit. He rang again. This time he was successful. It was the hotel. He was in luck, the receptionist did speak English. Yaaay! there was one room left.

View from hotel window - March 1996

On the same night I booked the fast Eurorail train (with speeds of up to 300 km/h) from Madrid to Cordoba and immediately printed out our tickets. How different everything is since the development of the www, shrinking time and space on planet earth.

reading by moonlight

It was book club last night.
When I arrive at my friend's house, two starkly black and white magpies are perched on a wire fence, staring at the pale face of a rising moon. It is a blurred face. The birds look like clerics mesmerised by a pagan goddess. I smile at the incongruity of this image.

The moon tonight reminds me of that ghostly galleon in the poem we recited in primary school. The moon tugs at the tides as it rides them. Our book club, our “gang of four", reminisces about how we rode the waves of feminism in the seventies and reclaimed the night, we reached for the stars in our careers, we experienced loneliness and dark nights of the soul when relationships waxed and waned. 

 Now we are all nanas [or about to be] and we encircle grandchildren in our arms and sing "twinkle twinkle little star" and "the cow jumped over the moon."

Tonight we are discussing Brenda Walker’s book, Reading by Moonlight, a powerful narrative of her breast cancer journey and the books which sustain her. It is a book about loss and grief and fear and death and hope, and how we endure all of this because "the mind turns everything into a story." It is particularly relevant to us. Three of us have had breast cancer within the last five years. We too are readers. Some of us write.

 I like the way Walker compares reading with travelling. She writes that some of us "read as we hope to travel, flying away, losing our bearings just enough to be shown some strangeness, some wonder. Knowing we might not be comfortable for the whole journey but that we'll have something to talk about when we touch down."

Once when my grandson, Cameron, was three we were driving home in the dark after a day at the beach. He cried out with excitement. "Look grandad, the moon is following us." We looked. It was following us.
 It followed us all the way home.