Je le dépose ici pour ne pas l'oublier et parce que je n'ai pas tout à fait confiance en la fiabilité de FB sur lequel il a été publiquement publié. Merci Aaron pour cette bouffée de jouvence par un lundi un peu gris.
Throwback Sunday: 42 years ago today I arrived with my family in Paris. November 1972. I remember a gray rainy taxi trip from the airport. And every time I come back to Paris from somewhere, I have the feeling I am re-living that taxi trip. But Paris flabbergasted me. What an adventure! The metro with strange signs about war veterans and civilian blind people and a stale electric smell in the air and wooden seats! Flaky croissants that were warm in the morning and stale at noon! Pain au chocolat where the chocolate was smooth in the morning and hard at 10:00 AM! People kissing passionately in the street! Chairs for rent for 20 centimes if you wanted to sit in the Luxembourg gardens, and policemen with capes and whistles to kick you out at closing! Women with pants so tight that got my 13-year old hormones going! Getting twice-fried French fries from the Algerian frite-man on the rue Dauphine! Going to school from a hotel we lived in for the first few weeks on rue Stanislas, with the girl at the desk wishing us a good day at school as we went out to face another 10 hours of incomprehension! The Choco-rêve dispenser in the school courtyard (choice of milk or dark chocolate)! And the stern-faced Dracula-like M. Diximus, headmaster in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower! The older students smoking pipes and drinking red wine in carafes with the teachers at lunch! Desserts in restaurants with only 3 choices: orange givrée, citron givré or mystère! Black Africans walking around in bou-bous and North Africans in chaftans. Post-68 Latin quarter insurrection every week on the Blvd St. Germain! Gypsies with ladder-climbing goats and bad drumming skills! Raving clochards who vented and ranted about having fought in the war in Algeria! The original arrogant and grumpy taxi drivers, driven to craziness by the tick-tick of the taximeter, and the squawk-squawk of their inaudible radio dispatches! The "Rat Man": a special clochard who would come up to unsuspecting couples walking romantically arm-in-arm and spring a rubber rat in the woman's face, who would scream and grab on to her lover, to the delight of watching café-goers who would give the Rat Man a few centimes! The smell of burnt croque-monsieur wafting up through our windows from the café downstairs, punctuated by the sound of the tock-tock-tock of the expresso thing knocked up the side of a wooden box full of old coffee grounds and the croiiiii-croiiiiii-croiiii of the steam expelled through the little bent tube into the café-crème!
