Une semaine de vacances

Today is my birthday. I'm turning 70 years old — can you believe it? I can't. To mark my arrival at such an advanced age, I'm taking a week off from blogging. I'm programming some posts containing just an old photo or two. Enjoy your week.

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In January 2000, Walt and I flew from San Francisco to Paris for the weekend. It was the third time we had done so (1988, 1996, and 2000). The main reason for the quick trip in 2000 was to attend a concert that a French singer we liked was giving at the Olympia theater in Paris.

Why fly to Paris for just a weekend? It's a funny story. In October 1999, we had wanted to go to Las Vegas to see another French singer we liked, Liane Foly. She was giving a concert at the Paris-Las Vegas casino on a big U.S. holiday called Presidents Day.

Notice that the Olympia ticket cost me 310 French francs, about $60. The tickets for the concert in Las Vegas were selling for $300 apiece.

At about the same time, I learned that Véronique Sanson would be appearing at l'Olympia in a few month's time. It turned out that the eleven-hour January flight from SF to Paris cost less than the 90 minute flight from SF to Las Vegas in October. And the hotel room in Las Vegas cost as much for one night as we ended up paying in total for three or four nights in the Paris apartment. So we booked the flight and concert in Paris instead of going to Las Vegas. We were more interested in Sanson's concert than Foly's anyway, and more interested in spending time in the real Paris instead of the Las Vegas facsimile.

We stayed in that same apartment near the Eiffel Tower where we stayed in 1997 for the concert weekend. We were lucky — the Chez Vous rental agency in California was offering the apartment at a special low price — half the normal rate — because it was January and there wasn't much demand for Paris apartments from American tourists in wintertime. The photo above shows a winter sunset from the apartment balcony. Obviously, there were several construction projects going on in the neighborhood.

Since we were only going to be in Paris for three or four nights, we didn't make any effort to get over jet lag. We just let nature take its course and pretty much stayed on California time all weekend (French time minus nine hours).  In other words, noon in San Francisco was nine p.m. in Paris — our lunchtime. The night of the concert at the Olympia theater, we went and had dinner at midnight in the restaurant above, Le Vaudeville on the place de la Bourse. The place was packed, noisy, and fun, and the food was good. It was a memorable experience.

As you can see from the restaurant check on the right, the meal cost us about $100. On the check, the terms claires and spéciales refer to two categories of oysters, served on the half-shell. Morue is salt cod. With the seafood, we had a bottle of Sancerre Blanc wine, which is a Sauvignon Blanc from the Loire Valley.

We also enjoyed meals in several other cafés and restaurants over the weekend. As I said, this was in January. I remember that the weather was damp but very mild for the season. We could enjoy walking around the city all day and even in the middle of the night, after the Métro had stopped running. That was fun too.