DAZZLED AGAIN
Processing photographs took all Tuesday morning. For breakfast Susie went out and got both sweet pastries and croissants from the bakery around the corner. I am tempted to say that we have discovered the best bakery in Paris. But I am guessing that around every corner in Paris, in France, there is a bakery whose croissants are just as crisp and buttery and flakey and that every bakery has equally sweet pastries. There is something French in the air that is very special.
The same could be said of shop windows, every shop window. Everyone in France seems to have good taste. The windows are brightly lit and the merchandise colorfully displayed. Maybe they have trained window decorators who come from shop to shop. Kathe’s brother, Volker, was a window decorator for a large department store in Celle. It was a high calling. He and the store’s owner would go off to Denmark on the owner’s boat and carouse and have a great time. So today we went again to one of these models of French good taste, the enormous Lafayette Gallarie, an easy walk downhill from Martmartre.
But on the way we stopped at a beautiful blue creperie for the lunch special of cider, salad, a ham, cheese and egg very crisp buckwheat crepe and then a sweet dessert crepe which we were too full to eat, all for $15.
We were served by a Bangladeshi girl who in ten years here had attended the university and a French boy of African descent who spoke very good English because he had been recruited by a tennis school/camp where English was spoken. He dreamed of attending college in the United States on a tennis scholarship and becoming a pro. The food was good, the conversation was good.
And then we were dazzled by Gallerie Lafayette. It is a six story store with ornate balconies opening onto a huge atrium covered with a jeweled glass covering. It had the same awe inspiring power as the huge church, San Germaine, we visited yesterday with its brilliant stained glass windows. You wanted to bow and worship, but this time not to God but mammon, to very expensive high French fashion. We weren’t quite sucked in, but almost, and finally had to flee before we were fully corrupted.
So we walked out and explored the Paris Opera area which turned out to be another enormous, ornate church, this time dedicated to music, ballet, opera and poetry with a ring of nude women holding ornate lighting.
We weren’t allowed inside except to the very posh Opera store but worshipped from outside along with crowds of tourists. And then I got on the Metro at the Opera station and came home completely overwhelmed by French beauty and opulence.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 