Saturday, August 12

Herself and myself went for a wander around town. We went to the Galeries Lafayette. We went to Printemps. We went to H&M. We had a cup of tea on the quays and went to the bouquinistes where we had a great time poking around for hours and bought many pictures. She’s hung hers up but mine are still stacked up on the mantelpiece.

I’d left my phone back at the house so I was slightly worried that the others would be wondering what had become of us. I need not have worried. They seemed to think that we were well able to look after ourselves.

Sunday, August 13

We contemplated going to mass in Notre Dame but we were just too scared that we might have to queue to get in so we went to Saint Eustache in Les Halles instead. It’s an odd church. It is described as gothic and it is kind of gothic but it’s the first gothic church I have seen with Corinthian columns. Stand out sight was undoubtedly Louis XIV’s Minister for Finance’s monument. He was so successful at raising taxes for Louis XIV that his funeral had to be held at night so there wouldn’t be riots. The locals appeared to have noticed that he lived pretty high on the hog himself.

We went for lunch in Les Halles and then wandered down to the Pompidou centre which could be seen from the outside without queuing. While we had a cup of tea, Daniel befriended a young French child with a ball and he and Michael played happily in the square with him.

I decided we would round out our day by taking in the view from the Arc de Triomphe. Not a super spectacular view but, presumably, less in demand for that very reason. No, that is not the case. It turns out that there is a grand big queue to get up the Arc de Triomphe as well. We wandered around the bottom instead. To be honest it’s not really quite the same.

When we got home, Mr. Waffle suggested that he and I could go out for a cycle on the French people’s bikes. He offered me the electric bike. I loved it. I always thought that I would get an electric bike for my 50th birthday but now I know that I can’t as if I did I would get no exercise whatsoever. I sailed around the suburbs taking any inclines in my stride. It was just delightful. Mr. Waffle took us to the Cité Universitaire which was nearby (on my super electric bike anyway). I’d never heard of it before but basically all sorts of countries built residences there for their students studying in Paris. Lots of countries represented with a bit of an emphasis on former French colonies. The whole area was green and pleasant with lots of paths for me to test the full power of my electric bicycle.

I was so pleased with my bicycle ride that I insisted on prolonging it to inspect Leon the lamp post which is, you know, fine but still a lamp post. As the lamp post in Narnia, it burns day and night but you really can’t see that very well in day time.

Monday, August 14

To their great relief, Mr. Waffle and I left the children at home alone and went into town together for a wander. We had a nice breakfast and then went to the Orangerie where put off by the queues for the gallery we sat, instead, under the shade of the trees on those nice green municipal chairs and looked out over the Place de la Concorde [fountains to wash away the blood and all that] and chatted.

It was peaceful, it was sunny. We reminisced on the last time we had been in Paris together which was when I was pregnant with the boys and, daringly, we left herself with our lovely Polish cleaner for the weekend. It all went very well and when we came home, she could recite a number of Polish nursery rhymes (we were assured they were nursery rhymes, we weren’t really in a position to know).

It was as well that we had had an enjoyable morning. That afternoon we went to Aquaboulevard. Herself had been there before when she was in Paris and recommended it. It turns out that it is much more enjoyable during term time than on Monday 14 August when everyone left in Paris is on holidays (the 15th being a bank holiday and everyone “making the bridge”. If you are unfamiliar with this French term, you haven’t lived.) We pre-booked our tickets. As requested by management the gentlemen of the party bought speedo type togs, as shorts are not allowed. We were ready. In a daring move, we took the tram (public transport abroad other than metros is..exciting). When we arrived, the man at the door asked to see the boys’ swimsuits. They were wearing them so opened their trousers and showed him. We moved on. “Hey,” he said to Mr. Waffle, what about yours?” Hilariously, he too had to show his swimsuit which he was wearing. An auspicious beginning. When we reached the top of the stairs, the man guarding the entrance yelled down to his colleague “Have you checked the English people’s togs?” We ignored the error on nationality. Clearly they had been stung previously by hordes of English people descending in their Hawaiian shorts.

The pool itself was heaving. It was barely possible to stand in it, let alone swim in any direction. There were long, long queues for each of the slides. The pools were generally up to my shoulders so too deep for the children to stand in in comfort. Every time I lost sight of one of them (extremely easy to do in the mass of humanity wedged together in the pools notwithstanding the fact that they were several shades whiter than the whitest French people), I was terrified that they had drowned. There was a big sandy outdoor area and an outdoor pool as well as the indoor ones and it was a bit warm outside – this was one of the warmest days we were there which was why we had selected it for our pool day; clearly half of Paris had the same idea. It was pretty hideous. Alas.

We returned home and to cheer myself up after our swimming trips, I took another cycle on the electric bike around the mean streets of the suburbs. I amused myself by looking at the price of houses in Paris. Unsurprising: Paris is dear. Even Malakoff is dear; well over a million euros for a medium sized 3 bedroom house.

That night, I discovered that the Princess was obeying the letter if not the spirit of the ban on electronic devices in the bedroom. I noticed that the light in the basement (storage spot for spare pasta, pulses, water, milk and various other essentials) was on and, when I turned it off, there was a shriek of indignation from the bottom of the stairs. Herself was on the phone to her friend. At regular intervals for the remainder of the holiday, I would see her haring down the stairs to talk to some friend or other. The washing machine was there as well and Mr. Waffle frequently ran into her while rescuing the laundry.

Wednesday, August 9

I got a message from my sister about an incident in west Paris to which I forgot to reply. By the end of the day she was worried we were all dead and buried.

We were not. We were wet and, to varying degrees, bored. It lashed again. We went to the Musée des Arts et Metiers which I dimly remembered visiting years ago. I remembered that I liked Foucault’s pendulum. Our guidebook (treacherous Routard) recommended it for children.

Things began positively enough. The reception staff were charming (all of the people left in Paris in August seem to be delightful, I cannot imagine why, as working when almost everyone else is on holidays is, surely, very distressing). The lady who gave us our tickets asked where we were from and when we said Ireland she said that of course we must be as we were wearing green. Coincidentally, we were, and I couldn’t be bothered disabusing her from the notion that all Irish people wear green abroad for identifying purposes. “What’s your favourite episode of Father Ted?” she asked. After some consideration, Michael suggested that it was the one where Mrs. Doyle fell in love with the milkman. “I love Fr. Ted, “ she said and, pointing at her fellow ticket desk operative, she added, “I’ve got him into it too.”

We started off by visiting the pendulum. It’s housed in an old church and there are also various interesting old airplanes and cars. That’s the most exciting bit. Don’t start there. The museum is really a hymn to the cog and, if engineering is not your thing, possibly best avoided. I was mildly impressed by the recreation of Lavoisier’s laboratory but the children were not. Many of the interactive displays which, in and of themselves were not exactly fascinating, were broken which didn’t help.

Here are some of my children enjoying their visit.

The highpoint was meeting a charming French toddler whose parents were also looking for something to do in rainy Paris in August. Frankly, not a success. The Metro station was pretty cool though.

Thursday, August 10

We awoke to further torrential rain and, leaks everywhere. We were veterans at managing the various buckets required at this point and worked like a well oiled machine to catch drips. It reminded me of primary school when the pre-fabs leaked.

We decided to go to the Louvre. To avoid queuing, Mr. Waffle booked tickets online. Sadly, we couldn’t find a printer in the French people’s house and he had to comb the mean streets of Paris in August to find someone willing to print out the tickets.

The pre-booked tickets did the job. Although there were millions of people and we did have to queue for ages for the toilets we sailed into the gallery itself. We did a highlights only tour:

– the Mona Lisa

-the winged victory of Samothrace (for some reason, no picture, maybe she was submerged beneath the hordes)

– the Venus de Milo

I always feel that art is wasted a bit on galleries like the Louvre. If the National Gallery in Dublin had David’s “The Oath of the Horatii”, Vigée-Lebrun’s self-portrait with her daughter or Ingre’s “Grande Odalisque” all of which we noted in passing, you can bet they would get a lot more avid attention from the visitors than they do in the Louvre.

There was active interest in looking at the ancient Greek, Roman and Egyptian stuff and these rooms were a bit quieter.

We were exhausted at this stage and found ourselves near an exit so I suggested we might go out and come back in for our coats. Mr. Waffle was dubious but he was right. Once out, they weren’t letting people back in whether it was a suspicious parcel or overcrowding, we weren’t getting in for a while. Happily the rain had stopped.

I said that I would take them all to Café Marly, my treat. It’s a lovely café with a view over the pyramid of the Louvre and quite eye-wateringly expensive. I have been there before only in circumstances where all parties paid for their own fun. It enjoys a special place in our relationship also as it is there that I discovered from Mr. Waffle and the French waiter that I had been pronouncing mille feuille wrongly for years (ah, happy memories, it is particularly hard to pronounce, Cork people have got around this by saying milly filly, my variant on this was entirely unintelligible to the waiter and Mr. Waffle had to leap in and help me out with his smooth knowledge of the pronunciation of French vowels – particularly challenging).

Here are some of my children enjoying the exquisite setting of the Café Mary.

Our bill for three slices of cake and a drink for everyone in the audience was €76. Even the waiter was slightly appalled. Frankly, for €7.50 for a pot of tea I would have hoped for more than one cup in the pot. I hoped in vain.

Herself and myself went back into the Louvre for the coats. “Let’s look at one thing before we go,” I said, “whatever we see will be amazing.” We found ourselves wandering among priceless Gobelin tapestries but, it takes a certain kind of person to be amazed at tapestries and we were not that kind of person. We did some damage in the gift shop though.

We then went to join Mr. Waffle and the boys in the Tuileries funfair which was a great success and not shockingly expensive given its location. Mr. Waffle tells me that the Canard (French satirical magazine) is much preoccupied by the tendering process and how one person has a stranglehold but, to be honest, it’s not really much dearer than any other of these things.

We enjoyed it. The view from the Ferris wheel was great and there was no queue for anything. A big plus for any attraction in Paris in August we were rapidly discovering.

The sun was out for most of our trip to the fairground and once it started to rain, we decided to pack up and head home. As we were tramping along the Rue de Rivoli we passed the English language bookshop and picked up a copy of a book that day published by a family member. The glamour, the excitement.

Friday, August 11

Having consulted with the children, they said they would like to go to the aquarium. We went. It was grand as aquariums go.

We were adjacent to the Eiffel Tower so we decided to go up without booking tickets in advance. Can I emphasise how unutterably stupid this was? At least it wasn’t raining or too warm. We waited 2 hours to get through security. We waited a further good hour at the foot of the Eiffel Tower to get the lift up as we decided that we couldn’t face walking up. We had ample opportunity to regret this decision. We eventually got up to the second floor but the top was closed, due to numbers, I think. Although it re-opened while we were on the second floor there was zero appetite from my queue weary family to queue further for tickets to the top. We went back down by the stairs and Mr. Waffle bought me an overpriced cup of tea and we sat and looked at the view on the first floor while the children explored which was mildly pleasant but, overall, frankly, not a success.

By this time it was late and we were all starving. We decided to go to Leon which is a Belgian chain specialising in mussels and chips. Using the amazing free roaming (heartfelt thanks, European Commission, heartfelt thanks) we looked up the handiest branch and I rang them to book a table. “No need,” they said cheerily, “there are always tables available”.

We marched to Pont d’Alma, which is further than you might think from the Eiffel Tower (everywhere looks close when you are up high), only to discover that the RER was closed and a replacement bus service was laid on. We gloomily took the replacement bus service and eventually arrived at our mussels and chips destination after 9 to find a queue out the door. We were down hearted. No need to book, indeed. Mr. Waffle went off to inspect some neighbouring brasseries and the children and I dolefully joined the queue. It moved fast and in 5 minutes we were sitting at a table with menus in our hands. When we needed Belgium to feed us, it did not let us down. Quite honestly, it was, I think, the most successful dining out experience of the holiday.

Still more to come. Oh yes.

Monday August 7

In view of the positively apocalyptic warnings about airport waiting times, we followed Aer Lingus’s advice and arrived at the airport two and a half hours early. It was not necessary. In fact, everything was extremely smooth and we could easily have been at the gate within half an hour of our arrival at the airport. When we arrived in France, we took a taxi our destination in the southern suburbs of Paris. Mr. Waffle had been going to make us and our luggage take the RER and then change to the metro but happily this would have cost nearly €50 and the taxi set fare was €55 so he relented.

As we drove at great speed into our suburb I noticed a sign saying it was twinned with Ballymun (one of Dublin’s more exciting suburbs) and my heart sank, however, Mr. Waffle who has better eyesight than me reassured me that it was Ballymoney in Northern Ireland which, I am sure has its own problems, but I did find that reassuring. The house was down an alarming lane. I was a bit alarmed. When we got in it was very bohemian but not bad with a small yard.

Mr. Waffle’s phone pinged as we arrived. They had found my wallet on the airplane (thank you Aer Lingus). On the plus side, it was found before I knew it was lost. On the minus side, it was a €55 one hour taxi ride away. A problem for the following day we decided. The more pressing problem was where everyone would sleep. Michael has the smallest room at home and last summer he was promised that this holiday he would get his choice of bedrooms. Despite the French people saying there were four bedrooms, there appeared to be only three. For quite a while the prospect loomed that Daniel and herself would have to share. It’s hard to say which of them was more horrified. Happily it turned out that the couch in the television room could be turned into a bed and Daniel holed up there.

The house was two small artisan houses knocked together and it had more staircases than would be normal in a small house and the layout was a bit baffling.

The lighting was confusing – we feel they may have done the wiring themselves. Each room boasted a lamp which was turned on in its own unusual and slightly perplexing fashion. In true bohemian fashion most of the rooms did not have doors. Call me bourgeois all you like but I don’t think it’s too much to ask for a bathroom with a door. There were three bathrooms. Two did have doors, to be fair but I feel that they could have gone the whole hog and put in a door to the third one and to the bedrooms as well. There, I’ve said it.

They had a jukebox and an anxious note that we were not to use it as to do so would cause the electrical difficulties. We all internalised this message so when we heard noise coming from the jukebox each of us said anxiously to Mr. Waffle, in turn, “You’re not supposed to use the jukebox.” It turns out that the speaker for the stereo was right beside the jukebox. He had read the instructions. Of course he had.

We looked for places to put our clothes but every cupboard was filled to the brim with books and all sorts of things. We eventually found some room but not very much. It was a very full house though, I have to say, rather charming and filled with interesting things. I think they may have found our house in Dublin a bit bland. On the other hand, we have cupboard space.

Tuesday, August 8

When we woke up it was lashing. The glass extension roof in the kitchen leaked in three places.

The window in the roof over the sofa leaked also in particularly wet weather. It was particularly wet weather.

In fairness, I assume the French people were not expecting torrential rain in Paris in August.

Notwithstanding the awful weather, Mr. Waffle went out to inspect Malakoff (name of our suburb, named after something in the Crimean War, I think). It’s most famous sight is Paris’s only remaining gas lamp. The lamp is called Léon and it has its own society (Les Amis de Léon) who drop by to check that all is well every morning. I was inclined to scoff at Léon the lamppost, philistine that I am.

If all France voted like Malakoff, France would be communist. The commune has always been pretty left wing. The French people had a book on the Colonies de Vacances owned by the commune. These are basically houses in the nicer parts of France where the commune would ship poorer children from the commune (I think that was traditionally most of them) to enjoy summer holidays. This is one of the things I really love about France; the acknowledgement of the huge importance of holidays for everyone.

Anyway, my rainy day task was to get myself across Paris to pick up my wallet from the airport. It took forever. I had to change in the Montparnasse-Bienvenüe Metro station and I was charmed by a huge advertisement about couples who had met on Erasmus programmes and married. The poster featured couples who were half French (obviously) and half-something else (including Irish) and their beautiful young children. I thought it was lovely and if only the British had done similar kinds of things maybe more people would have seen the advantages of the EU. However, I did not then know that every day for the next fortnight pretty much I would be changing metros in Montparnasse-Bienvenüe and I have to say the advertisement began to pall over time. Also, I am willing to bet that the Franco-Hiberno couple’s daughter is not actually called Aoiffe.

When I got to CDG, I could have kicked myself. I had left my passport back in Malakoff. I persuaded the official guarding the entrance that all my papers were in my lost wallet. At the desk that had my wallet, I asked them to pull out my photo id from my wallet and confirm it was me. They did, it was. I took my wallet and ran. All the money was gone (maybe €100), sadly but cards in situ (thanks slightly less Aer Lingus).

I went for a wander round the ÃŽle Saint Louis on the way back. The rain had stopped and it was pleasantly cool.

I noticed that faithful to the fermeture annuelle programme even Berthillon on the Île Saint Louis, possibly the world’s most touristy ice cream shop, was closed for August.

Ø

In fairness, they were in good company. Here’s a little montage I put together. A homage to the French love of holidays.

Mr. Waffle and the children came in to join me and we had dinner in a pizza place on the Île Saint Louis and saw a barge called Titantic [no hubris, thanks, we’re French]

I was keen to do further sightseeing but both herself and Michael were feeling a bit unwell so it seemed a bit inopportune. We cut our losses and headed back to the suburbs.

More to follow. Hold your breath out there.