Day 2 – Soupe a L’oignon

Slept like corpses and were surprised to find it was 8am. Di had bought ‘Paris City Walks – 50 Adventures on foot’. It has cards for each adventure. Today we chose adventure ‘St Germain 1’, a nice way to avoid jet lagged decisions.

It was really nice. More than anything, great to rug up against the cold (5 deg) after the Brisbane heat. After an hour or so’s wandering and soaking up the cobbled pathed – stone walled ambience we stopped at a nice little cafe on Rue Mazarine for a hot coffee. The owner, whose English equaled our French, had a collection of antique toys made by the British in India; a two seater dinky, a toy moped and a tricycle. It was nice to sit and watch the world go by and in particular to watch the locals check themselves out in the mirrored wall across the street – the blokes were worst.

For better or for worse we’d decided to courier our ski gear to the resort ahead of us to save lugging their 20kg bulk around, and had brought a cardboard tea chest-flat pack with us for that purpose.

Once back from our St Germain sojourn we assembled the box, packed it, taped it and wrapped it in plastic bags to ward off the now steady rain. We’d prepaid the courier and arranged to drop off our goods at one of the ‘5000+’ relay points – one we’d located only 500m from our lodgings.

As we found out, ‘5000+’ includes 4999 prior (now defunct) relay points and one operational one manned by a rather large, french only speaking petrol station hand who, were it not for the French accent, could have covered as con the fruiterer (doused in petrol).

But we learnt this afterwards. In happier times, I set out optimistically on foot with the 20kg tea chest, in the direction of the drop off place. “We haven’t been a DHL drop off point for two years! but there’s another only 500m from here. Don’t you have a trolley for that?”

With arms some three inches longer I headed off towards Rue Gay Lusac (it was worth it just for the name). “Non, we do drop offs but not for DHL…but there’s another not 500m from here.””

So I picked up our box and staggered on, finally, to meet Con. Con gesticulated wildly that it couldn’t be done, that I had to call – someone – and that this wasn’t the right place for funny English men with overly long arms. After some moments pacing around my tardis sized box and ripping the makeshift plastic bag raincoat off, he scanned the label, received a promising ‘beep’ and proclaimed, ‘c’est bon’ (it’s good), and walked off to fill a customer’s tank.

That’s all I could get from Con then and his smelly, run-down little shop filled with worn tyres and empty oil cans did little to secure my confidence in our goods final delivery. We wait patiently now for the tracking app to shift to “in transit”.

Di had shopped successfully and we decided to head off for a late lunch, more like linner at 4pm, to Le Compass at Rue Montorgueil for their classic Soup a l’oignon. The soup was superb, rich beef broth, onions sufficient to stand your spoon in, inches of fromage and piping hot, and we watched the passers by as the rain grew heavier and heavier. Electric scooters, segways, umbrellas, dogs, hoods and thick woolen coats. People rushing home from work, people going up the hill empty handed and retuning heavy laden from the briocherie, fromagerie, boulangerie, poissonnerie etc. (all on Rue Montorgueil), au pairs with prams full babies and old ladies invariably in dresses with long overcoats, hats and no umbrellas with a “that’s what I do and blast the weather” look.

Eventually, Le Compass turned their outside heaters up so high that we were in serious danger of heat stroke – honestly, the table was too hot to touch – and we headed off. First to Gallery Lafayette, actually to their champaign bar, to check out their Christmas windows and stuff and then the long walk home. By then the traffic had died down from the gridlocked, horn honking, flooded chaos enjoyed earlier (trains on strike so more cars, buses, bikes, scooter etc.), and it was a beautiful evening walk, the city lights shining off the wet roads.

I think we’d done some 3 hours walking today, excluding the 1.5km DHL sponsored 20kg tea chest carrying iron man competition, so we discussed tomorrows adventures over a wee drop and a bar of chocolate and called it quits.