I already told you last week what this one was going to be about, so there’s no point in prevaricating here. Let’s get into the Paris shenanigans!
The journey to Paris started off well. Flights to Paris are fewer and pricer than to Barcelona for some reason even though it’s closer to Stockholm, but that meant I was forced to take a regular morning flight instead of a true red-eye, so I can’t be that regretful. I also stopped in a little shop in the Stockholm airport for a mini prinsesstårta, and the cashier kindly threw in a free one for my birthday. They turned out to be my favorite princesstårta I’ve had in Stockholm so far, so shout-out to the Arlanda airport café with these particular mini prinsesstårta!
I had a series of several minor misfortunes upon actually arriving in Paris—some trouble getting the metro from the airport, losing an earring, both my intended lunch options closed—but I ended up going to the Arc Du Triomphe early and getting some tasty onion soup there, so it all ended up good!
My first big sight-seeing stop was the Palais Garnier after-hours “Mystery Tour”, which turned out to be more like the “Phantom of the Opera Fact vs. Fiction Tour”. I wouldn’t call that a bad thing, though, and the building itself was gorgeous! If I were ever in Paris for long enough that 3–4 hours of opera wouldn’t feel like a big sightseeing opportunity cost, I’d love to actually see a performance there.
After the Palais, I had to hurry over to my entrance time-slot at the Louvre, but I had enough time to grab a fancy rose-shaped gelato cone outside the Palais. Pear-hibiscus gelato on the outside and amarena cherry cream swirl on the inside!
The Louvre itself was gorgeous, as expected. I hardly had time to do any of it justice, since I was entering at 7pm and had to leave by 8:30 to make my dinner reservation, but I had a nice lightning-speed ramble through the Greek and Egyptian areas. The Egyptian section felt a little silly after having actually been to museums in Egypt, but that’s a whole other conversation, so have the photo reel:
There was an exhibit on in the last wing I wandered into where they’d paired historically-inspired designer clothes with the pieces of art that inspired them, and while I didn’t have time to explore everything, I thought it was a fun concept.
Weirdly, the number one category of well-rated restaurant in Paris is Italian restaurants, by a notable margin? I felt a little strange not going to…you know, a French restaurant, but the pizza was good, and the pistachio dessert was great—there were layers of crunchy pastry layered with pistachio cream and chopped pistachios, which made for a nice contrast in textures. Also, they gave me a free birthday limoncello shot with a bit of raspberry syrup, so I’m obligated to hold goodwill towards them.
I made my requisite Eiffel Tower visit that evening just after sunset. I didn’t go up it, because the crowds were still kind of terrible and I’ve already done the climb before, but I would have felt silly not at least going briefly while I was in Paris.
After seeing the tower, I had a truly terrible time trying to get a bus to the metro station so I could go back to my Airbnb and rest. Anyone who says Paris has a great public transit system is a dirty, dirty liar. Barcelona’s was solid even if I walked most places, Stockholm’s is good, but Paris? Hard pass. The metro was alright but for occasionally malfunctioning ticket turnstiles, but the buses were kind of comically bad. I gave up on them after less than 24 hours in the city.
ANYWAY, I digress. The next morning, I had my second ‘got up early to visit a cathedral only to fail at getting in’ experience of the summer. Apparently they don’t like to mention it on their website or ticket reservation page when they’re going to close the building all day to ordain new priests. I swear, when I go to Amsterdam I’m just going to plan to visit any and all religious architectural sites in the evening or something…
I ended up people-watching outside for a bit until Saint-Chapelle was about to open about a block away, then walked over there to get in line. I wasn’t sure how wowed I would be, but it was gorgeous!
I’d sort of thought I was going to be ruined for stained-glass heavy architecture after seeing the Palau de la Música Catalana in Barcelona…Saint-Chapelle was a totally different experience, though! These photos don’t even do it full justice.
After Saint-Chapelle, I had a nice brunch at a little café about half an hour away with some nice pastries, a slightly soggy beetroot-feta toast concoction, and—most notably to me—a chicory latte.
If I’d ever had chicory before this brunch, I can’t remember it, so I was surprised by how much I liked it there! I tried to find some in a grocery store before I flew home, but all I could get my hands on was aggressively mediocre-to-subpar Nestle instant coffee-with-chicory powder. I’m still trying to figure out the ideal way to concoct that powder into something tasty with what I have access to in the lunchroom coffee bar at work, and it’s not undrinkable, but definitely nowhere near as nice as either of the chicory drinks I had in Paris. I’ll have to keep an eye out for the good stuff on the rest of my travels in Europe and when I come back to Claremont.
My early afternoon was occupied with a trip out to less-central Paris to try to find the Saint-Ouen flea market. I was never able to find anything I could confidently call the official Saint-Ouen market, but I did find a flea market with this big spaceship-looking art installation in the middle! I didn’t end up buying anything—there was one woman selling these cool old keys, and I thought it would be fun to get one to add to Sparrow’s garb, but she would only accept euros, and I wasn’t about to take out like $35 minimum in euros from an ATM only to spend 2€ on a key.
On my way back from the flea market, I stumbled completely accidentally into Paris’s pride parade, which was a fun surprise! I didn’t even think to check when Paris Pride was, but I ended up catching about an hour and a half of the parade before I had to run out to make it to the library before closing.
I was trying to see the famous Oval Room at the national library, but ultimately, I did not in fact make it to the library before it closed. In my defense, I made it to the library before it was supposed to close; I just found out when I arrived that apparently they secretly stop letting people in a nebulous twenty-ish minutes before the official closing time (read: whenever security feels like it), so I couldn’t see the oval room after all. I did pop into one of the other reading rooms, though!
Anyway, between pride parade and Oval Room, I’m not really sorry about the one I inadvertently chose. The Oval Room will still be there any time of year I might go back to Paris, after all!
My final stop of the day was a Lebanese restaurant. (Weirdly: the second most popular category of restaurant in Paris. French food is only third place.) They did the thing where you can only pay a flat rate and you get whatever they want to feed you, which was a bit of a gamble, but I didn’t regret it! The tomato-spiced chicken skillet with garlic paste was my favorite.
The next morning, I went to Bastille Market for breakfast. I knew it was going to be big, but it was even larger than I expected—it made for a fun little morning walk! There was mainly fresh produce, meats, and the like, but there were also a few stalls selling prepared pastries and food. So, my breakfast a pretty good spinach-cheese sandwich, four very nice nectarines, and a disappointing caramel-apple kouign-amann.
I was glad of the four nectarines once I headed to my next stop, the Dior museum, and found out I’d have to wait outside for at least an hour to get in. They gave us nice little parasols, though, and I had a water bottle and my nectarines, so I didn’t have a bad time waiting.
Once I got in, the thing that impressed me most was less the actual contents of the museum and more the design of the museum itself. They’d clearly put a lot of thought into the layout and flow of the museum experience, which I appreciated. You can’t always tell that a museum has an artistic director, but it was definitely clear at this one.
One neat element: the staircase between floors. Although if you look closely, not everything in the display is unique…this isn’t even every occurrence of this dress I saw, and I wasn’t looking particularly hard for repeats.
My favorite part was probably the mockups room where they were showing off a bunch of toiles.
On my way to the Luxembourg gardens, I stopped for a crepe with lemon and sugar, because it’s not a visit to Paris if you don’t have any street crepes!
I had an early dinner on Sunday since I’d need to get up a bit early to get breakfast before my flight the next day. So, instead of reservations somewhere that would only start dinner service at 7pm, I went to a random Szechuan restaurant. My soup was great—the noodles were nice and chewy, and the broth was well-flavoured, but I could have been a little more adventurous on the spice. I’d seen reviewers saying they regretted how spicy they’d ordered, so I only asked for a 6/8 on the spice scale, and I was a bit disappointed. It had some heat, sure, but I might have liked a 7 or 8. I guess the reviewers were just weak—French food isn’t very spicy, they’re probably not well-acclimated.
The next morning, I had a quick pass through the Tuileries garden and my final crepe of Paris for breakfast, then headed off to Orly airport to fly home.
Not too much else of note happened this week, besides more slow preparations for LARP and me making a giant pot of risotto. You can’t really tell in this picture how much risotto this is, but trust me, it’s a deep pot and a LOT of risotto!
I’m also maybe giving an Italian somewhere a heart attack by calling this risotto since it’s technically jasmine rice, not the proper arborio or whatever, but it’s a Tasty Rice Dinner (or ten), and that’s all I need.
Aaaaand now that you’ve sat through all the less important filler, we’re finally back with the blanket updates you came for! This is all the hexagons I have so far, not just this week’s, to be clear.
In terms of numbers, I’m a little under halfway done, but I’ve finished all of the more complicated patterns where I only need to make 6 or 12 of a particular kind with a different-coloured star in the middle—now I just have single-colored hexes left in simple patterns, so I should be moving a good bit faster. Once you factor in blocking and sewing the whole blanket together, who’s to say where I am in the whole process, but I’ll conservatively say I’m no less than 1/3 of the way through.
So you know what to expect for the future: next (this) week, I’ll be attending Gimle larp from Wednesday until Sunday. So, since that would awkwardly overlap parts of Week 5 and 6 according to my new definition of a week, and it’ll definitely be the defining feature of both weeks no matter how I define them, I’m planning to merge Weeks 5 and 6 into a single update here. If I manage to hang onto my newly kind-of-caught-up-to-real-time status, you can probably expect to see that sometime around Jul 17 or 18. On the other hand, if (when) sleeping on the ground for four nights crumples my spine like a soda can, all bets are off.
On that encouraging note, I’ll see you post-larp! 😀
Lyra Cromwell 