For lunch: gaufre and frites

A couple posts ago I wrote about fresh, healthy food in London. My eating took a turn for the mediocre when I went back to Paris and met up with other Americans (and a Canadian). What did we choose to eat on our three-hour walking tour but McD’s — Zac and Jessica springing for Pulp Fiction’s “Royal with Cheese.”

It only got worse in Belgium. I’m more or less stuffing my face with Belgian waffles and fries every day. (Belgians claim they were the ones who invented French fries.) On my first day in the city, I went for the famous fries at Fritland, smothered in a sort of cocktail sauce that could have made them the best fries I’ve ever had in my life. Today: a waffle on Grasmarkt, insanely dense and sweet and covered in whipped cream and nuts, then a few hours later, fries with curry ketchup at the famous Maison Antoine by the European Parliament.

And tonight as I contemplated taking steps to reform my food intake in Belgium, Lieke, whom I’m CouchSurfing with, piped up with: “I made waffles!” And there they were, stacked neatly on the kitchen counter. OK, one (or two) more won’t kill me.

Redemption on my last day in Paris

At 7 in the morning today, I was gently — well, as gently as possible — roused by Eliza, the Taiwanese girl from Kaohsiung who was sleeping in the bunk above me. The night before, a nice Australian in our apartment/hostel had volunteered to help her lug her heavy suitcase across the city to her tour bus, which was to depart at 8:30 a.m.

Eliza apparently had decided that I was more trustworthy and woke me up instead of the Australian. (I had made the naive mistake of striking up a conversation with her in Chinese the day before.) So I was more or less drafted into helping her, though knowing her despair, I was happy to help.

I dragged the monster across the city to her departure point on the Champs-Élysées. It turns out I have Eliza to thank for a perfect Paris morning.

The day before, taking the three-hour New Sandeman walking tour of Paris with Kate, Zac, and our new Canadian friend Jessica, it seemed like I had returned to a dystopic Paris. Whereas a couple months before the streets were lit by the autumn sun, it was now gray, soggy, raining. The trees were bare, the grand Jardin des Tuileries abandoned.

But today, on the Champs-Élysées as the city began to wake, the sky was blue and I could see a glimmer of the Paris I saw last time. Yesterday was just one of those days, I realized; even the most beautiful city in the world has its bad days.

Then, walking along the street away from the Louvre, I realized I had to do one thing today that I was sure I was completely uninterested in last time: climb the Arc de Triomphe. Today it was beckoning. How could I not now? Paris had, in the last couple days, acquired that feeling of familiar stomping ground, and I wanted now to look down upon the Champs-Élysées.

Rendezvous in Paris

Remember when the Flintstones met the Jetsons? It was appropriate, it was historic, and it was right.

Yesterday was kind of like that day. It was the day that Read of Zac met When in Roam in Paris. I met up with Zac and Kate, from my Daily Bruin days, on Île de la Cité, the very center and beginning of Paris, and then we made our way out into the City of Light from there. (But not before absorbing two random people into our group — a Kiwi I met in Scotland, and a fellow Eiffel tourist from Toronto.)

We climbed the Eiffel Tower, drank at a Canadian bar, and made dinner of sandwiches and lots of red wine. It seems to me that a city doesn’t really become yours, even if in a transient sense, until you go home a little drunk at least once.