Paris

Viewing: Paris

Paris bites

My hands-down best meal in Paris was a real treat: a quintessentially French home-cooked meal.

On the night before the Glee Club left Paris, singer and voice teacher Florence invited Ma’am Malou to dinner at her house. Ma’am Malou, not wanting to go by herself, took myself, Mimi and the Glee Club’s soprano pint-sized powerhouse Stef with her.

We met up outside the metro station in a… shall we say, less than savory neighborhood. While we clutched our purses tighter and waited nervously for Stef, who was late, to emerge from the metro, Florence’s colleague Stefan assured us that the house we were going to have dinner in was very different from the neighborhood. “It’s very pretty,” he promised.

And indeed it was. Behind a small wooden gate on a nondescript street lay a secret garden, shared among three families, including Florence and her teenage daughter Manon. All three families are great friends and share this wonderful space. When the lady of the house locked the gate behind us, she effectively shut out all the sounds of the city. It felt as if we weren’t even in Paris anymore. They even have a cherry tree!

Then there was the food.

After starting us off with baguettes, olives in brine and saucisson (sausage) with almonds to nibble on, Florence presented us with two homemade quiches hot from the oven. One had goat’s cheese, while the other was made with spinach and mushrooms.

Salads are my favorite thing (in a long list of favorite things) to have in France. They just do them so well over there! Our hostess served the quiches with a simple salad of crisp, fresh greens with a balsamic vinaigrette.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a French meal without cheese. My new discovery was the Saint-Maure, the crinkled log-like cheese on the right. It has a straw stuck down the middle for the cheese to breathe. I guess that’s what makes it so deliciously creamy. I liked it so much, I bought my own Saint-Maure to bring home to Amsterdam.

To end the meal on a sweet note, Florence baked not one, but two pies for dessert: a rich chocolate tart and this beautifully light and crisp apple tart.

French women really have this knack for knocking out amazing food with effortless chic, and elevating home-cooked meals into an art form. I’ve got to hand it to them… and only wish that I could be capable of the same!

Speaking of sweet endings, my last few hours in Paris were spent in a most worthwhile way: in pursuit of my favorite pastry, the tarte citron. Marj, a former colleague of mine from GMA now living in Paris, had blogged about a tarte citron that I absolutely had to have. So we met up at the Place des Vosges and headed together to Le Loir, a quirky little cafe in the Marais…

… where I met the tarte citron that defeated me. I’ve never, ever given up halfway through a lemon tart, but this insolent tart wielded a knockout weapon known as meringue.

Di ko kinaya! Sa Ingles: I yield!

I’m pretty sure there are worse ways to leave Paris, than with lingering memories of a home-cooked meal under a cherry tree, and with the sour-sweetness of lemon and meringue still melting on my tongue. Sarap!

4 Comments
Posted on June 18, 2011
Category: Food & Drink, Wanderlust · Labels: Europe, food, Paris, travel

Round and round we go

One of the smaller museums that I’ve missed on my previous Paris trips was the Musee L’Orangerie in the Jardin des Tuileries. It was an oversight that I was happy to correct on this visit.

Marlon, Gutsy and I were welcomed by Rodin’s The Kiss right outside the museum door. It’s the third I’ve seen, after the ones at the Musee Rodin and the sculpture garden in Martigny.

The centerpieces of the Musee L’Orangerie are a pair of tranquil white oval-shaped rooms that house Monet’s famous paintings of water lilies, Les Nympheas.

Six of about 250 paintings by Monet on the same theme are housed here.

Something about the scale of the paintings, or maybe the peace and beauty of its subjects, made the mood in these round halls somewhat contemplative.

The visitors remind me of people watching films on a panoramic screen… except it’s not the images that change, but what you’re thinking about them.

I was just glad that the rooms were cool and quiet, making them a perfect place to hide from the hot sun. I’m learning to love it when the sun is out, but too much still annoys me. Yes, I’m still Asian.

Downstairs was a collection of mostly impressionist paintings, including works from Cezanne, Modigliani, Matisse, Monet and others. The one I liked the most was this portrait of Coco Chanel by the artist Marie Laurencin.

It was annoyingly hot outside, so we scrapped our plan to go walking around the gardens after the museum. Instead, we repaired to Laduree, which was just a few minutes away.

I’d been to Laduree once before with Gutsy and Tria, in 2006. But I couldn’t afford more than just a coffee back then. Not even one of Laduree’s famed macarons.

This time, I had a lime-vanilla sorbet… with a fleur de sel (salted caramel) macaron. Both of them were absolutely divine: so light and sweet, flavorful without being overpowering.

Marlon immortalized my first bite of Laduree’s famous macarons on camera. Each bite was definitely a mmm-mmm-mmmmoment.

In addition to the fleur de sel, Gutsy and I also shared a pistachio and an orange blossom macaron.

After the oval rooms at L’Orangerie, I guess you could say that round shapes were the theme of the day!

2 Comments
Posted on June 15, 2011
Category: Food & Drink, Wanderlust · Labels: art, Europe, food, France, museums, Paris, travel

Les Puces de St-Ouen

I’m a lucky, lucky girl: last week’s visit to Paris was my sixth. Having been there several times with my family and friends, I’ve managed to check off most of the tourist staples, such as the Eiffel Tower, Louvre, Notre Dame, Sacre Coeur and more. On my last visit five years ago, when I got engaged in Paris, I started working towards the lesser-visited sites such as Ste-Chapelle and Musee Rodin.

Still, I’ve only just touched the tip of the tip of the iceberg that is Paris. With every visit, there’s always too much that I want to do, see, taste… and buy! Having experienced the city at different ages (5, 18 and 25, for example), my tastes and interests change between visits, which always makes each time new, fun and different.

Two things that I was never really interested in on my past visits to Paris, but absolutely love now, are vintage and flea markets. So I just had to visit Paris’ biggest flea market: Les Puces de Saint-Ouen at Clignancourt. Lured by Jordan Ferney’s beguiling photos and guided by her bright, cheery and very accurate map, Marlon and I headed there our first morning in Paris.

Les Puces (The Fleas) are made up of different markets spread out over numerous city blocks. It’s reportedly the largest flea market in the world. It’s about half the size of Bangkok’s massive Chatuchak market, but filled with nothing but antique and vintage furniture, clothing, odds and ends.

Both of us have been searching for the perfect living room armchair for the last six months. Les Puces were full of gorgeous pieces that we were dying to take home. You’d think delivery overland from France to the Netherlands would be somewhat affordable, right? Wrong! Estimates of at least €400-500 for shipping alone dashed our French armchair dreams to bits. So we simply made ourselves content with roaming the narrow maze of alleyways and resolving to come back some day with a car.

If you can’t carry a piece of furniture home with you, memories and photographs are the next best thing to take home from Les Puces.

In this aspect, you will not be disappointed. At Les Puces, each alley reveals a fascinating vignette for your camera and mind’s eye to capture.

Turning a corner can spark desire by discovering an entire alley full of objects you want to take home…

… or can simply mesmerize you for a moment with eye-catching textures and colors.

Each turn can remind you of a friend…

evoke a bygone era so vividly, that you wished you were born in it…

… or even make you see yourself in a new and different way.

Wandering the alleys of Les Puces, you come upon everything from the beautiful…

to the chic…

to the oddly humorous…

… even to the faintly disturbing. That potent mix of everything and anything, carefully chosen yet haphazardly thrown together, I love.

There is magic in a place like Les Puces where, like these bits and pieces from dismantled chandeliers, the old, broken and useless come not to die, but to regain life and beauty…

and where unconventional combinations give a new power and vibrance to the ordinary.

Or maybe it’s not magic. Maybe I just really love flea markets… or maybe it’s simply Paris!

3 Comments
Posted on June 13, 2011
Category: Shopping & Finds, Wanderlust · Labels: Europe, France, market, Paris, shopping, travel, vintage

Paris, 10 years later

Do you remember?

Do you remember waking up to days, weeks, months where all you had to think about was what you loved to do most, in the company of the people you most loved to do it with?

Do you remember sound checks and rehearsals…

Churches upon churches…

More masses than you’d ever attended in a single day?

Do you remember passing the hat for money? And being so thankful for every deutschmark, franc, guilder, peseta, tolar, lira, and much later, euro, that our voices earned for us?

Do you remember the bread broken with strangers who made the meals and cared for us, so that after those meals they were strangers no more?

Do you remember taking too long to load the bus with suitcases that got heavier at each stop…

… and laughing at the most ridiculous things that only we could find funny, together?

Do you remember the applause and the cheers, how they made your heart feel all warm inside no matter how tired you were… and smile so hard you thought your face might split apart?

Do you remember singing our joys, sorrows, triumphs, exhaustion, even our goodbyes?

Do you remember what it was like to win?

And what it was like when we had to start all over again?

That was when I wish someone had told me that in spite of everything I feared, what I loved would continue, grow and flourish.

And though the songs may be new ones…

The faces may have changed…

And although now we can only be on the outside looking in…

It looks and feels as sweet as I remember. And I know they’ll always remember it this way, too.

Wiping my eyes after the Glee Club sang for the morning service at the American Church in Paris, I asked Gutsy: “Why did we have to grow up?”

I’m not sure, but I think maybe we leave some things behind to make room, to clear space for new and different things…

… things that make new selves of us, and that assure us every day that becoming an adult is worth it.

And while we leave some things behind, some things, like laughter, music and friendship…

…are simply forever.

“We’ll always have Paris,” goes the famous line from Casablanca. But I think we’ll always have much more than Paris. And for that I will always be grateful.

10 Comments
Posted on June 8, 2011
Category: Wanderlust · Labels: Ateneo College Glee Club, choir girl, music, Paris

The morning after

on my first morning as an engaged woman, i had four really wonderful things.

the wonderful experience of getting lost in paris. i’m not sarcastic when i say it was wonderful. marlon and i began our morning ramble as a search for breakfast, with no particular plan for after breakfast, and we continued to ramble as we had difficulty finding something that was open on sunday morning… EXCEPT

the most divine lemon tart ever created. okay, i’m getting ahead of myself. the tart wasn’t what we found open, but a bakery with a sign in front of it. on this sign was printed an unintelligible rush of french with only one word i recognized from my visits to market manila and dessert comes first: artisane. “marketman and lori seem to regularly rhapsodize about artisanal this and that,” i thought to myself. “there must be good reason.” so i dragged marlon inside, and soon we were aswirl in choices upon choices of delicious-looking breakfast goodies. heck, even the pizzas-on-baguettes looked heavenly.

wonder if you can guess which one i went for

a blissful breakfast in a quiet park with my fiance. since we had found ourselves a rather astounding (if you know how much i hate walking) distance from everything else except the sacre coeur, we decided to head for a small park we had located on the map, near the cadet metro.

it was a nice neighborhood park: a small pocket of green-turning-yellow-orange with no tourists or monuments, just parents with their toddlers, and little kids biking and running around, and autumn leaves littering the ground. it was here that marlon and i plunked down on a bench, too pleased to mind the cold, and unwrapped our respective artisanal breakfasts. his was a salmon quiche, i think, and mine was the aforementioned divine tarte citron.

you sinful little tart you

it was love at first bite, and pure unadulterated lust when i sank my teeth into the slice of candied lemon on top. all throughout my stay in france, i sought to regain the bliss of the first bite of this particular lemon tart, but it never happened. ahh well. it was good while it lasted.

a gorgeous view of paris from the sacre coeur. we went to grab a coffee and a hot chocolate at a nearby cafe before heading on the metro to abbesses, where we would elbow our way through hordes of tourists and sunday-morning picnickers to reach the sacre coeur.

thus begins my “ring in ________” series

we plunked ourselves on a grassy slope to try and call our parents with our big news, which proved utterly impossible. so we just enjoyed the rest of the warm, sunny morning with each other, and lit a candle inside the church for us, and for each other.

then we had to rush literally across paris for my first official acs engagement, and i was totally late and got 10 euros docked from my pocket money, but that’s another story. just know that it was a blissful morning after.

(yes, i know, i said “gorgeous view”. i’ll update with more photos when i’ve got them all sorted out. which is soon. i hope.)

–

back to the present for a bit: slowly getting out of zombie mode at work, after almost crying myself to sleep at 6am yesterday. why was i almost crying? because it was 6am and i was still awake. if i’m still a creature of the night by the end of the week, i may just be desperate enough to try sleeping pills.

i had almost forgotten what late nights at the office were like. then again, i’d also forgotten that siopao during late nights in the office make them seem soooo much better.