Paris Travel Log 2006-12-31

We began the morning with the Rue Mouffetard market just a stone’s throw from the hotel. On each morning except Monday, the entire street gives way to vendors hawking fruit, bread, cheese, seafood, and most other things you could imagine. It looked like a supercharged Whole Foods had been turned inside-out and dropped onto a narrow street in the heart of Paris. Lauren picked up some fruit and we all ate some pain chocolat to tide us over.We then looped back to the hotel to pick up Anna, who’d been feeling under the weather earlier, and it was officially time for Second Breakfast. We walked to the nearby La Contrescarpe café, where I had an omelet and the others stuck to pastries of various kinds.

From there, we walked to the day’s main stop, the Pompidou Centre. This is to modern art (post-1905) what the Louvre is to classical and renaissance art. The museum itself had a controversial design where all the ductwork and such are on the outside. Looked just like a Borg cube to me. Inside, we found that the Pompidou is much like the Louvre in another important way: it’s just too big to take in one gulp. Anna and Nathan, getting hungry, put on the jets and ended up speeding through the museum faster than Lauren and me. So we planned to meet up afterward at a certain bridge on the Seine, which made me feel like a Cold War spy. Which was awesome.

Anyway, the museum contained some art that disturbed, some that intrigued, and much that just confused. I was partial to the Robert Rauschenberg collection that we saw first. We each had our favorites, but all agreed that the massive Yves Klein exhibition was our least favorite (big, blank, blue canvasses; nude women spraypainted as a string orchestra played a single, sustained note; a self-absorbed and self-aggrandizing artist … really, it was like a spoof of modern art).We left the museum around 4pm, and after meeting on the bridge we headed to a nearby creperie for some food to tide us over until our late dinner. We were trying to pace ourselves so that we’d be awake and excited for midnight. The crepes were tasty and wonderfully soporific. We all headed back to the hotel afterward to nap and gather our strength.

After waking up, we drank one of Dad’s going-away bottles of wine in Anna and Nathan’s room (a bit of New Year’s Eve pre-partying; thanks, Dad!). And then we took to the streets to find a late dinner around 8pm. We ended up going back to the Rue Mouffetard that had been so lively in the morning, and found that our top choices from Lonely Planet Paris were sadly ferme. Undaunted, we looked at all the lively activity around us and decided to choose a place at random. So we walked into Sushiko, and I can honestly say that there could have been no better choice in the world.

Sushiko served cheap, plentiful, and absolutely delicious Japanese food. And they had plenty of vegetarian options for the seafood-impaired (me). And they let us crack open the bottle of wine that Anna had brought along, with no corkage fee. And they had the best desserts we’d tasted so far. And they gave us some free sake as we ended the meal well after 11pm, just to say merci and bon annee (“Happy New Year”). They left loyalty cards with our check (“buy 9 meals, get one free”), and we all bemoaned our Tuesday departure. Otherwise, we’d certainly be making some trips back to Sushiko.

Leaving the restaurant, we had only minutes to spare before 2007. We hustled to the small roundabout at the Place de la Contrescarpe, which Hemingway once overlooked from his Paris apartment. We caught our breath, grabbed café tables, and got hold of some beer just in time to toast the new year.I’m not usually one to assume that everything will “just work out,” but honestly, I couldn’t have planned this night better if I’d tried.

Hello, 2007. Bonne année.