I remember Paris ...

I have a rather fraught relationship with Paris. Or rather, I have no relationship with Paris at all. I have the kind of relationship with Paris that I have with David Bowie: I am rather smitten with it, but it doesn't know I exist.

Paris thinks (and yes, I do think cities are sentient, in their own funny way) I am a rather annoying colonial bumpkin from so far away that it barely matters. A badly dressed one who can't speak French, at that. In fact, the only person I really spoke to was a chap from a French Ministry who turned out to be Argentinian born and raised. We bonded over being from The South.

We stayed in Trocadero. A rather chic suburb replete with elegant looking apartments interspersed by Embassies and such. The Eiffel Tower looms up at you from unexpected angles when you walk the streets. Purty.The hotel was small but good and it had, as Paris tends to, an open air market with very good looking food. We may well have stopped to shop if my tallish Beloved hadn't nearly impaled his brain on a low-lying scaffold. The supermarket was nearly as good. As for restaurants, we would have been fine if we wanted to sit outdoors drinking, eating oysters and being seen in tourist-traps where everything cost way too much. Apart from that, we were pretty much confined to Italian. Also good, but not exactly what I head to Paris to eat. At the high end of the scale, they managed to squeeze us in to Sgabetti, where the food, like the prices, were top-notch. It was a far-cry from my previous visit staying in the Marias, where we ate good provincial French food nearly every night of our brief stay.

The Trocadero, mind you, has a damn fine line in museums, including the Musee du quai Branly, which is an architectural wonder and had a fantastic exhibition of new artists incorporating folk/traditional practice into their work. The highlight for me, though, was an installation by Charles Sanderson. It was a  light show set up so that the long, swirling ramp that led to the upper gallery spaces was flowing with words that twisted and tumpled over eachother on the floor. Earthy, geographical words and place names, they were. It was, literally, a babbling brook, and really quite beautiful.

If you are having a flying visit to France and don't get a chance to venture forth from the capital, Cite du l'architecture & du Patrimoine, is also well worth a visit. Here you can walk around faithfully rendered models of various architechural glories, including full sized medieval arches and doorways, spires and other assorted fiddly bits, as well as some subterranean frescoes. Modern architechture also gets a look in, with models illustrating key trends and changes in design.

Ah, yes. I remember Paris. It will never remember me.