Day Five – New Years in Paris

Paris Christmas 2009
December 27th 2009 - January 3rd 2010

Day Five – New Years in Paris

We only managed to sleep in until 9:30 this morning before Jamie was up and ready to go. I wasn’t, after a long night listening to someone in our flat snore (here’s a hint, it wasn’t me), the girl in the flat next door talking on what I assume was a webcam, and the noise from outside. I was especially unenthusiastic as I’d accidently broken the coffee pot the evening before while washing the dishes, and would therefore have to McGuyver some sort of method of pouring hot water through coffee grounds and into a mug.

We packed up after an unsatisfying and slightly gritty cup of coffee and walked down to Republic, looking in all the bric a brak stores we could see looking for a replacement coffee machine – unsuccessfully.

We ended up taking the bus, rather than the metro as planned – it’s so much more interesting than the metro and generally as convenient, if not as fast. It dropped us off at Hotel de Ville, where we made one last attempt at coffee machine replacement at Darty (we saw a few on the way, but they were all too big – the one in the flat is a little 4-cup jobbie rather than a full 10 cup system – down to counter space).

We were both quite hungry and thirsty, and it was starting to drizzle, so we decided to find a cafe to sit and have some lunch and watch people walk past. What better place to watch people than in the Latin Quarter, so we had a really atrocious pichet of white wine and some quite good onion soup at one of the cafes in Place St Michel, being entertained by the Americans at one table and the Venezuelans at another attempt French.

By the time we’d finished the wine and soup, the drizzle had cleared, so we walked up to Luxembourg Gardens looking for interesting photo opportunities. Somehow the temperature had dropped from 14 degrees the prior day to just above freezing, and neither of us had really dressed for it – I froze in my t-shirt and jacket, and wished I’d worn the sweater I’d considered that morning. Jamie was much more stoic, as is often the case.

There weren’t many people in the gardens, not surprising I guess given the time of year and the weather. Plan B was the Musee D’Orsay, which we’ve never managed to get around to visiting on our previous five trips to Paris. When we got to the entrance we found all the people that should have been in the gardens – they had all chosen to stand in the largest queue I’ve ever seen in Paris (with the possible exception of the Eiffel Tower in summer). We quickly decided that just about the last thing we wanted to do was stand in a queue in the freezing cold when there were any number of conveniently located cafes which in addition to having wine, also had heat.

We found one on Blvd St Germain and enjoyed another pichet of wine. This time we found entertainment watching the endless stream of people walk past our little spot (Jamie taking endless random photos). While sitting the cafe, we couldn’t help but notice a busy patisserie right across the road, and the thought of a tasty éclair was enough to get us moving when the last of the wine disappeared. The éclair was bloody tasty.

The temperature had dropped even further, so we abandoned our plan of walking across Pont Alexandre III and went straight for the metro at Place de la Concorde instead. A brief stop at an Italian food store, and another at a wine shop, and our New Year’s day food prep was done (as well as my winter supply of quality Calvados). We dropped off the bags in the garret, I had a quick nap while Jamie cleaned up her photos.

Dinner plans for New Year’s Eve were based on recommendations from Fodors – a meal at Le Tastevin on Isle St Louis. We arrived for 8:30 and were greeted by an enthusiastic Annick and a slightly off-pitch singer warbling French classics with gusto, even if not generally in the same neighbourhood as the key (it all went pear-shaped when she tried to hit the high notes in My Heart Will Go On from Titanic – I think even Celine Dion has trouble with some of those). We sat down and checked out the menu, although both of us knew what we were going to have before we’d even arrived.

The Chateau Neuf de Pape was an excellent compliment to the meal – Coquilles St Jaques followed by Fillet de Beouf with foie gras and a truffle sauce for Jamie, and foie gras with truffle sauce followed by roasted venison with mashed chestnuts for me. We both then had a very tasty pear gratinee by Berthillion, then a very odd apple and camembert gratin – both ingredients individually are quite tasty, but don’t really go well together as it turns out.

The New Year’s countdown was extraordinarily odd – the music stopped a few minutes before midnight, someone counted down from five, a waiter popped one of the two giant balloons suspended from the ceiling filled with confetti, then the lights went out the other balloon was popped, then the lights came back on. Small glasses of champagne were handed out, then midnight passed. Overall, dinner was very good –the food was very well done and the atmosphere was really nice for a festive evening.

We headed out into the Parisian night, full to bursting with mostly wine and foie gras, extremely pleased with the year past (for the most part) and looking forward to a happy and prosperous 2010. Most of Paris seemed to be out and about having a good time. We made our way up our 101 steps (as tiring on day 5 as they were on day 1, although the volume we ate and drank may have had something to do with that) and had a final toast.