Henry and Friends

Henry's made some fast friends here in Paris. They come from a range of locales: the States, England, Paris. Here for a year, some of them; others live here full time. It's a lovely mixed group.

A few days prior to la rentrée following Toussaint, I took Henry and a friend to Cité des Enfants, out at Parc de Villette. It's an enormous museum, with a section filled with things just for kids. Freddy and Glenda, our nanny, went to the area for 2-5 year olds; the older boys and I went to the 5-12 year old area. These huge areas are so well thought out. All of the exhibits are interactive and showcase things like water, and how it flows, and how it's been used; wind and how windmills provide power; and much more. It's suprisingly not dogmatic at all, just experiential. And fun.

The boys ran and ran and ran. The first thing they did was to head to the TV Studio section. You could be a meteorologist giving a forecast, a rock star filming a music video, or you could ride a flying carpet in fromt of a green screen.They chose to rock out. Fully.

Then they bounced from thing to thing. Best 6€ you can spend on kids in the city, I'd say. And on a rainy day, priceless.

Thanks for reading.

Differences between Parisians and New Yorkers

There I was with a flat tire on my rather massive Dutch bike. (This was the day after the ill-fated visit to the pediatrician.) It's on the rear wheel, which takes a degree and a workshop the size of a battleship to remove from the bike. But, you can pull little parts of the tube out and patch the elusive hole.

For whatever reason — exhaustion, incompetence, that beer at lunch — I fumbled a bit with the execution. I had to deflate and reinflate the tire a few times. The final filling I guess I forgot to check whether the tire was fully sealed. It wasn't, and as I looked down, I saw this black thing growing out the side of the tire, like pumpernickel bread dough rising on wicked fast forward. "Wow," I thought, "I wonder if I can let the air out before the tube..." BANG!!!

Three women walked by immediately following the shockingly loud explosion — and here's the Parisian v. New Yorker part — and looked down at me with a cuttingly disdainful scowl. "Cool," I replied, thinking that a New Yorker would at least ask if I'd blown off a finger or something.

C'est la vie.

Fortunately / Unfortunately

A common question it seems amongst ex-pats is that which we seek from the homeland. I find it somewhat demeaning that the local stores catering to the American set seem to think all we want are Oreos and Pop Tarts. I mean, I like those but I don't crave them. I crave great markets with fresh food and plentiful variety. Voilà.

But I've not been able to find corn meal. Corn meal mush cooked in milk with a dash of truffle oil and poached eggs - breakfast of champions. I crave that.

Well, the day started off okay. (Thursday, the 5th of November.) It was the first day back after the long Toussaint break - 2 weeks. We all were ready for school to begin again. Sarah, unfortunately, had to be in London the day before so I had la rentrée all to myself. I got the kids back to school with, dare I say, élan. All was good until the afternoon when Fred started to complain about his tummy, which has been an ongoing issue. I scheduled a 6pm visit with our pediatrician.

I'd planned to take a cab, but after seeing the traffic on the way home from picking up Henry from school, on the bike, I realised we'd never make it. So I piled both boys onto the bike, and we headed to the Marais to visit the good doctor.

The office was crowded, we had to wait a bit, no big deal. Fred's still in a phase where when he's anxious, angry, and the like, he says "shut up. Mostly, it's to get a reaction. He shouts this twice during the visit, but only twice. The last time he was in that office, he'd been given two or three shots, so I guess I can't really blame him.

At the end of the appointment, the Dr suggested that it was inappropriate to let him talk to me that way. (No kidding.) I wish I'd had the presence of mind to ask what she'd have me do, but instead I mumbled something and left, feeling stressed, judged, etc. (But, it only cost 65€! Go France!)

I have a flat tire when I go out. It's raining. The boys are bonky after being cooped up for 90 minutes. They're doing laps in the courtyard, yelling. I repair the flat, but there were two punctures, so it goes flat again, quickly. About a mile from home. Fred, who'd peed in his pants because in the rush to get to the appointment, I'd forgotten to bring spare diapers, was going commando and walking like a bowlegged cowboy. (I'd accidentally zipped up his penis when putting back on his pants after the checkup. Maybe that's why he yelled shutup.) It's raining. I'm standing at an intersection waiting for the light. My bike, hardly nimble with two good tires, is quite unwieldy with only one. I look to my right into a small bio, or organic grocery, and there on the shelf, I see it. Corn meal. I'm sure it's corn meal. I leave Henry with the bike. Freddy and I run in. Or waddle.

The next day: breakfast of champions.

Thanks for reading.

PS Photo from Halloween posing.

List of things stolen from our bikes in Paris

Herewith

• Bungee cords x 4 or more
• Sarah's saddle
• Sarah's front wheel
• Henry's bike
• Freddy's bike

Stay tuned for future posts

Parisian cycling

Riding home today, after dropping off boys. Feeling sluggish, as though I had a slow leak in the rear tire. No such luck, just tired.

Hugh Hefner, smoking a pipe, passes me on the bike path. Okay, maybe it wasn't Hugh Hefner, but he was an old guy. Who passed me. While smoking a pipe.

Quelle humiliation.

Scavenger Hunt

Today was the opening, no, the Grand Opening of the first Apple Store in Paris! I've not quite figured out why it's exciting, I mean, you can get all their products in any numbers of stores, but it is. The first 5000, that's right, 5000, people in the doors get a t-shirt, so that's something. Beside, we like Apple things, so we'd been talking about it for a while.

Henry wakes me up at 7:30. Late for me, but I'd been up late the night before. "Let's go to the Apple Store opening, Dad!" Having listened to Harry Chapin's "Cat's in the Cradle" more than once, I struggled out of bed, got dressed, and turned to see... Henry back in my bed. "I'm not going; no questions asked," he said.

(And the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon
Little boy blue and the man on the moon
When you comin' home dad?
I don't know when, but we'll get together then son
You know we'll have a good time then)

Sarah rose to the challenge and designed a scavenger hunt. This got the family, somewhat, motivated to get it together and head out. Henry and I were to attempt to get one of those coveted t-shirts, first, then continue on in search of what we consider the world's best hamburgers.

This line for the opening was somewhat prohibitive. A 1-2 hours wait said somebody. Uh-huh. Looks like we wouldn't even get a t-shirt. We rode on.

Riding bicycles is a big part of my life: I read about it, I think about it, I talk about it, I do it. All the time. I'm excited to have my boys interested in riding, as a result. Having a flat tire on the Workcycles FR8, I had to ride another bike, so Henry had to ride his. He's too young to ride his bike on Paris streets during the week, but weekend mornings are okay. We made our way down to the Louvre, and seeing the line, headed across the river to seek out the great burgers. We made our way to Blvd St. Germain, and rode west to the market. This route goes over quite major roads, and is a big deal for a 7-year old to ride. I'm positioning my bike so as to protect him, but it's still one of the major thoroughfares in the city. His sense of the road and pedestrians is quite advanced.

We found the triperie. (A butcher who specializes in the less-popular cuts of meat: brains, innards, and the like. Maybe that's why the burgers are so good. Best not to ask, but they sure are good burgers.) Henry got to see his first brains. I'm not sure he knew what they were, really.

But then we heard this squawking. Another butcher, this time of poultry, was cleaning chickens. Here he's burning off the remnants of its feathers. Next he chopped the legs and head clean off. Clearly this guy was skilled: it took him less time to fully prep this bird than it would me to put some butter in a pan. Henry looked on, but did ask why the butcher didn't wear gloves. And when it came time to clean the innards, he put his fingers over his mouth, and puffed out his cheeks, drawing a laugh from his fellow on-lookers.

I think it good for him to see where his food actually comes from. Certainly not from shrink-wrapped packages at Gristedes or Big-Y. But when he covets some such toy or another, and we discuss how he doesn't have enough saved up for that particular item, he suggests we could just go to the ATM. So we're learning about these processes.

Thanks for reading.

Then London...

Turns out Sarah's the first relocation for her company. What this means to us is that we've been in France w/o a long-stay visa, health insurance, and other official and necessary documentation, which we should have had. But didn't. Anyway, we managed to get them, for all of us.

And the way we got them was to go to London. Apparently, you can't get a work visa for France in France. So we go out of the country to London. All cool things happened: we took the Eurostar through the Chunnel, we stayed in a lovely hotel we ate lots and lots of room service — really good fish and chips; we met up with a former neighbor from NYC and ate at an impossibly hip, loud, and only slightly dated Indian-inflected restaurant; we had a night out to ourselves. All good things.

But at the end, as nice as room service and the nightly turn-down are, we were pleased to get home to Paris. Yep. Home.

Here are some shots of London. (Please see http://gallery.me.com/eustist#100205 for more photos.)

• Fred hiking up Primrose Hill, and the aftermath. Then, Henry in front of Imperial War Museum.

thanks for reading