The Inaccurate Tourist

40. Chilly

It's cold it's cold it's cold. It's frickin' freezing France. I get back from balmy Canada where the most we have to worry about is a bit of hoarfrost (well, in the west, anyway) and Paris has had eight centimetres of snow. It hasn't snowed in Paris for five years and all of a sudden it decides to welcome me back with a raging blizzard. Well, there was snow on the ground anyway.

Of course, Paris is no match for centrally-heated, forced-air, well-insulated Medicine Hat. On the other hand, my apartment has electric heaters that feebly pump out a bit of warmth, which promptly escapes through the mandatory vents in the windows. Despite being poorly insulated, Parisian apartments are unusually airtight, so regulations require air holes directly connected to the outside. My large glass windows might let in a lot of winter light if I ever had the chance to open the heavy curtains covering them.

The cold is a tenacious greyness that injects itself down the neck and up the sleeves of your jacket. At least that's what the weather report says for this week.

Thank goodness I purchased some glove/mittens (glittens? moves?) back in Canada. These are the woolly things that look like fingerless gloves with a convertible flap to cover your fingers if necessary -- and it's necessary. The French have never seen such a thing and are delighted to have their frozen Canada stereotype confirmed.

I used to say that Paris had the best public transit system in the world, but my chirpy cheeriness has been dimmed by their dismal cold-weather performance. To celebrate the new year, they arrange to have the high speed urban train and local buses entirely misaligned, ensuring that you have a twenty minute wait at each layover. In the cold, of course. I guess I shouldn't complain. We all know what kind of 'lines' concern the Vancouver public transit executives -- I think 'coke-addled' is a fair adjective to describe a city that constructs a skytrain that doesn't service either of the universities or the airport. I would reserve the adjective 'fast-ferry' to describe the public transit in Victoria, which placed the nearest bus stop servicing the airport about a kilometre away.

Cold cold cold. My clothes take days to air dry, especially the thick sweaters that I desperately need.

Enough complaining... let's talk Epiphany. It's celebrated on January 6th and is also known as Twelfth Day or Drummers Drumming Day. It's typically explained as being the day the magi visited the Christ child, but the date was likely chosen with respect to the winter solstice and then shuffled around thanks to the calendaring bureaucracy.

The traditional food for Epiphany is the Gallette des Rois, a thin and round flaky pastry disc filled with frangipane, with a single fève hidden inside. The gallette des rois is typically purchased with a cardboard crown wrapped around -- the finder of the fève is crowned king for the day and (depending on the house rules) either has good luck for the year, or is obligated to buy the next bottle of champagne, or is obligated to purchase next year's gallette des rois. Although fève literally translates as 'bean', it's typically a little chunk of gold-coloured metal or a little ceramic figurine -- thus, the 'king' may also unexpectedly get awarded the heimlich manoeuvre or major dental trauma.

Young children should be supervised while eating Gallette des Rois. You should watch your older children carefully as well, because sometimes they say the darndest things!

At Christmas time, the streets of Paris are frequently brightly lit with lights and decorations, provided by the merchants of the stores at street level. It's very charming. The big department stores go a couple of steps further -- their windows are filled with well-crafted automated puppet shows (usually showing plush animals in various stages of enjoying their recently purchased consumer goods) and the exterior of Galleries LaFayette is covered with a huge, Vegas rivalling facade of lights. I missed the season to take pictures, unfortunately.

After a bright and sunny (and chilly) stroll through the streets of Paris, Antonio and Anna and I ended up at the Musée Rodin. Finally. I have probably passed the museum a dozen times, but I never quite realized where it was. I knew it was near the métro stop Varennes, which has a statue of The Thinker. As it turns out, the museum is right beside Les Invalides, where I practiced roller blading. I must have passed it (back and forth) a couple dozen times. I think I've even walked right passed it looking for the métro stop Les Invalides, which is the same line 13 one stop further.

We only had about forty-five minutes to explore the museum, since it was already late in the afternoon. Although this is sufficient to see all the major works, I felt a bit pressed. Rodin's work is delicate, muscular and sensual. His large pieces are undeniably lifelike and capture passionate moments brilliantly. They want to move -- the couple in The Kiss are ready, and you can believe that their lips, like glaciers, will meet in another geologic age.

We didn't really see the gardens, but the Goldstroms assured me that they're an ideal place to spend a hot summer afternoon under the trees cooling down (the museum was about &5euro;, and the gardens are a steal at 1€). Since it was COLD and the guards were already beginning to flush out the guests, we did a quick running tour. I saw the Doors to Hell, a Dante-inspired sculpture that contains the smaller, original version of The Thinker.

I'm going to part from tradition at this point, and skip ahead to the future. I'm putting this log up well after the freezing week it describes. I told Kelaine (my first guest of the year) that she needed to bring thick, heavy sweaters, gloves, hats and scarves -- fortunately, she didn't need any of this because her week was particularly mild. But I'll let her describe that for you.

On the other hand, as soon as she left, we had snow again.

I'm cold.

Posted by The Inaccurate Tourist at January 17, 2003 12:00 PM