On Boxing Day, we all took the train to Paris, where we spent two and half days mainly eating drinking and walking around. We stayed in an OK hotel next to the Gare de Lyons. I’m still amazed and kind of entranced by the fact that I can hop on a train and in the amount of time it takes to get from New York to New Haven, I can be in Paris.

Eating: We had a few great meals in Paris, which, of course, isn’t hard and is one of the great reasons to go there. The first night we went to Monsieur Bleu, a newish, sleek and elegant restaurant across the river from the Eiffel Tower. (Unfortunately, our main memory of that evening will probably be the misguided decision to walk to the restaurant from the hotel, not realizing just how far that was.) It was a wonderful experience and Hannah’s foie gras slider appetizer was probably the most memorable dish. The next night, we went to Bofinger. It had been recommended to us by the owner of our favorite Italian restaurant in London, Super Tuscan, where we’d had a great meal with the kids earlier in the week. Bofinger is a classic old brasserie near the Bastille. In addition to the classics (like incredible onion soup), they specialize in Alsatian dishes based on sauerkraut (see photo below). To make it even better, it had a relatively reasonably priced wine list, which allowed me to order an Aloxe Corton burgundy. (Alex is named after that wine. We actually considered naming him Aloxe, but cooler heads prevailed.)

  

We also had nice food while walking around. We had delicious savory crepes on the Ile Saint Louis and stunningly good bruschetta during our long stroll to Monsieur Bleu. We stopped at Brasserie called George V for lunch on our final day. And we also had coffee and croissants, etc. It was a good thing we didn’t stay there longer. I might have exploded.

Museums: Alex and Lucy decided that they really wanted to go to the Musee d’Orsay and Hannah and James decided to go too. It is a spectacular place and they had a special exhibit, so it was hard to argue with them. But Judie and I had been to that museum on my birthday trip a month earlier, so I left them there and walked over to the Jeu de Paume. (Judie had some work she needed to get done, so she stayed in the hotel.) I saw a retrospective of the photography of Philip Halsman. He had an amazing career. He took countless iconic portraits of various celebrities and for the covers of magazines like Life. He worked over decades with Salvador Dali on some very weird photos, most of which had Dali in them. He was assigned to shoot some starlets around 1950 and decided that one of them, named Marilyn Monroe, was going to be the one. That began a long relationship in which he took countless pictures of her, doing everything from posing to jumping to lifting weights. But my favorite series was one in which he asked his subjects to jump in the air while he shot them. He believed that one would be thinking about jumping, thereby lowering one’s guard and exposing one’s true self. He published a whole book of these. All kinds of people did it. Nixon, Marilyn, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Ray Bolger and Martin and Lewis. Some examples of his stuff are below.

      

  

Sightseeing, etc.: Paris is so impossibly beautiful that the best thing to do is just walk around the neighborhoods. I imagine that Paris can be as ugly as any city when you get out of the old center. But there has clearly been a real effort in urban planning to maintain the look and feel of the city. This actually goes back to the 1850s and 60s, when Haussmann redesigned the city, knocking down the old medieval buildings to create the boulevards and squares and fountains that we associate with Paris today. It helped that Paris was largely untouched during World War II, unlike most of the rest of Europe. So we marched up the Champs Elysees, checked out Notre Dame and the Ile de la Cite and took pictures by the Arc de Triomphe. (Napoleon almost built it where the Bastille had been. An obelisk is in the Bastille square instead.) We tried togo the Eiffel Tower on our last day. But the lines were just horrendous and when we determined that it would take more than two hours to reach the top, we gave up. The Metro was a bit confusing, especially the big stations where multiple lines met. But we gradually figured it out and, after the first night fiasco of a trek to Monsieur Bleu, we were glad to be able to speed from one part of the city to the other. I am also convinced that you get to know more about a city by taking its mass transit witht real people who live there. Some family photos follow: