Ana and I just got back from spending four or so days in Paris. We stayed at my friend's studio apartment in the 11th arrondisement right off Rue De Charonne. It's strange returning to a city where one has lived before but where one has no friends to entertain you. There's no need to do all the tourist-y things so all that remains is to revisit your old haunts and feel simultaneously old and young again. Oh yeah, visiting Paris on Sunday and Monday is a horrible idea especially for eating. What follows is the bourgeois equivalent of cocaine rap. One of my favorite restaurants, L'Ourcine, was closed both days. But there were plenty of other great places. I'm writing a post from Gridskipper so I'll link to that. In the meantime, the rest of the day was taken up shopping for really truly mundane things like socks. But Jesus Christ, BHV has these socks made by a German company which purports to be English called Burlington that are extremely toothsome and commodious! (Ha! Words! I don't even think Commodious is appropriate in this context!). They have a little brass button thing on the side that says Burlington. I find looking at it endlessly fulfilling. The socks (of which I bouth 5 pairs) are argyle and look like this.
Then we got some blank notebooks (also boring but undeniably beautiful) on Notebook Road (Rue de Ponte Louis Philippe) some Holocaust books. I got L'Affaire Dreyfus by Vincent Duclert (interested because Leonard Woolf writes about the trial as a formative experience in The Journey Not the Arrival Matters, his kind of annoying autobiography) and Dépostion: Journal de guerre 1940-1945 by Léon Worth; Ana got a Robert Paxton book on the Vichy and the Jews who didn't seem to like each other.) Not yet sated, we went to Repetto to buy some ballet slippers. They have these tremendous slippers for men with elastic in the arch of the foot that allow for better articulation of one's foot. The shoes are used in the nearby Paris Ballet and I don't think available anywhere else. The shop has changed quite a bit since I was last there. As ballet flats have become trendy, their line has expanded. There are still pointe shoes lining the walls, just their little boxes sticking out but tables and tables of hard soled shoes fill the floor of the shop. It was there that I found these amazingly sparkly dance shoes. I can't lie. I love sparkly things. I feel like Poe-the-Crow in Rascal by Sterling North. Anyway, I didn't get them (I couldn't justify spending 160 Euro on a pair of shoes that were both for women and not in my size.) But they shall forevermore remain my ideal form of shoe.
