Dublin :: Ireland
In search of those elusive French bastards.
Places: Paris and Reims.
Coolest thing I did: Saw lots of Champagne in chalk caves.
Coolest thing I didn´t know: Oscar Wilde died of Acute Menegitis.
After my last mid-winter visit to France about 5 years ago I promised that my next trip would come at a time more congenial to sitting around in cafes and making things like parks generally more visitable. However, when Mark, Dee and I were trying to work where to go away for our last family gathering in Europe together none of the usual Ryanair stag-do venues were really appealing. Without a general idea of what we wanted to do (except for one request to go to the Champagne region) we booked ourselves in for a cheap flight and split hotel room and were away.
With one of the wildest spates of winter weather on record hitting Europe on the same day as we were to depart we spent most of a Thursday night at a pub in the airport in Dublin waiting for our plane to come and get us from Paris. This turned out to be not too bad a night out and probably helped calm the nerves a bit when it came time to fly into what should have been a pretty choppy flight. By the time we got into the hotel at around 1am we all pretty much had moved from drunk into hangover and a night out was off the cards. Mark and I did discover that food wasn't too hard to come by, wolfing down something called a King Sandwich each before bed.
While the hotel itself had some issues with hot water the location between Place Republique and Rue Oberkampf was pretty much unbeatable for everything we wanted to do. With a fresh morning to work with it was a brisk walk to Gare L'est just up the road and onto a train bound for Reims. The goal was home of Verve Clicquot but Reims itself turned out to be a nice old town as well. There's a staggeringly large Cathedral there, which I've since found out is pretty famous which we took a look at, even though we weren't supposed to be too touristy on this trip. I know I've seen about a million churches, but the scale of this one is just something to behold.
Our tour of Verve started a little late, but I don't think Mark would have held out through the whole thing. A rather serious bunch of people were standing around being told of the history of numbers of bottles shipped to St Petersburg in the time of Catherine the Great when we walked in. By the time the map of the Champagne region was lighting up to tell us where they got most of their Pinot Noir from I could see lots of eyes glazing over. It wasn't until they took us down into the ground that the whole thing became worth it.
Verve own 24km of caves that have been tunneled out of the soft chalk that lies under the entire region and apparently these have the perfect conditions to store industrial scale quantities of sparkling wine in all states of completion. Apparently some of these caves go back as far as the Romans and each House has it's own set down there somewhere to do all the blending and aging that goes into making every rapper and teen heiresses favorite tipple. You walk past pallets of unlabeled bottles in each cave and when each individual cave is numbered in the hundreds (we started the tour at cave 251) you get some idea of how big an operation it is. We were shown a video (projected onto one of the walls, making an interesting impromptu cinema) of the 10 people whose job it is to taste every single batch to work out what gets blended together to make the finished product. The staff seem pretty loyal, if you stay longer than 10 years you get a cave named after you and there were a lot of plaques commemorating past employees. I guess I'd be a far more loyal employee if that was my job too.
After the standard tasting in the gift shop (ah, winery tours...) we decided we'd take our time getting back to the station and visit a few more places for some tastings, but when some young Americans coming out of the Tattinger House told us we'd have to do the cave tour again we decided against it. We were, however, aghast when the same young Americans told us they'd done the tour but not bothered with the tasting. I still don't get it.
We started off in one of those smoke filled tabac/cafe things for a beer but pretty soon descended into the madness of going into bars and buying champagne from the bottle. At an average of about a bottle every 20 odd minutes between three the result was rather predictable. Apparently tourists are out of season at the moment, as we got some rather funny looks from all the French speakers in the bars, but we didn't care too much. It was much better than being at work on a Friday afternoon.
The train back to Paris was sometime around commuter o'clock so we seemed to stand out a bit by being the only ones drinking champagne out of the bottle and who had obviously been through several previous bottles. I attempted to teach Dee and Mark how to play the card game Arsehole properly, but at that stage I was pretty much having to make the rules up as I went along. It showed.
Here's a tip, don't just go into a Parisian restaurant at random and order stuff off the menu at random. While my pre-chewed looking omelette did taste alright, Mark somehow ended up with a liver sitting in a plate of brown gravy. He seemed to take it rather well.
After the day we'd already had we decided it was better to just go directly out, so we set off in the direction of Rue Oberkampf, which I'd been informed was a good place to go out. With much wandering it became clear navigation had gone out the window. We wandered towards the bottom of Canal St Martin and it was only once we were heckled by bunches of dudes sitting in the middle of the park and witnessed someone kicking the utter crap out of a bus stop that we realised we might have gone the wrong way. Thank God there is a map about every 5 metres in Paris so we could have a few more attempts at getting to the right place.
After this Friday night on the Oberkampf I can endorse Paris as a primo nightlife destination, but not a cheap one. At somewhere in the order of 6.50 EUR for a half pint of beer it was never going to be a cheap night out, but man, was it a good one. We went to a handful of bars at different points down the street and any one of them would have sufficed for a night out. Despite what you keep hearing about the rudeness of the French everyone was beyond friendly. The bars are also the kinds of places you long for in Dublin and could never exist anymore in Sydney, usually intimate in size and experimental in decor and music choice. Table service is the norm and you actually feel rather cool just for being in them. After a while you also start forgetting you couldn't see the roof through the smoke and you're passively putting away about a million cigarettes a night. Someone told us they were cutting out indoor smoking in 2007 but I'd daresay it's going to have a much harder time getting through France than it has elsewhere. Smoking just seems to be something they do. All of them.
Once Dee had enough (this can be forgiven with the day we'd already had) somewhere in the order of 1am Mark and I found ourselves holding court at a long table in the heart of the Oberkampf. In the preceding 4 hours we befriended Frenchmen (and Frenchwomen), Moroccan drug dealers and Ivory Coastian bouncers. Very good atmosphere and a cracking night out. So good, in fact that despite being about 2 mins walk from our hotel we managed to almost get into an altercation in a taxi queue outside the Pere Lachaise cemetery, which was so obviously in the opposite direction in hindsight that it's hard to figure out how we got there on foot. Bien!
So while Mark suffered through a whole day of the sweats and KFC, Dee and I went back to Pere Lachaise (well, first time for her...) to go look at where they stuck Jim Morrison. Jimmy's grave is yet another example of the Mona Lisa Syndrome (ie. everyone standing around saying "I thought it would be bigger...") but it's still cool enough to go and see. I've seen pictures of the graffiti from the olden days when it was on every American's must do list and even though it's now less impressive, it's still probably a good thing they cleaned it up. I thought the final resting place of Oscar Wilde, which has been marked by the kisses of many lips, was much better to look at.
That was one of two seriously touristy things we did. The other involved dragging out very hung over selves up all those stairs leading to the top of Montmartre and the Sacre Coeur sitting on top of it. Sitting up there at night was possibly one of the best things I did the first time in Paris and it was just as good during the day. I think Dee was impressed too. We then spent the afternoon nominally walking towards Notre Dame, but really just meandering around the winding streets. We probably would have made it all the way to the river if the heavens hadn't opened and we didn't need to go and rescue Mark from his three piece feed.
Having heard Canal St Martin was the new Oberkampf, and in light of what it looked like the night before we decided to have a bit of a look around during the daylight hours. What we did see was something like a refugee camp, with rows and rows of tents lining each side of the canal. I'm not sure if it was a policies statement or proper homelessness. After a bit more lazing around a smart looking cafe up there we decided that we'd go back to Oberkampf for round two.
Our second night involved less lunacy that the first, but it was still a hell of a night out. We went to three bars, again, none of which you would expect to find in Dublin. The first was a cozy affair with lots of people around 10 years our junior sitting around what had to be the worlds lowest tables drinking cocktails, smoking their little hearts out, and occasionally yelling at a game of yhatzee that was spiraling dangerously towards rowdiness. It does seem that the French think nothing weird of card games and the like being played in ultra cool bars on a Saturday night. The second place we went, a sort of bar/art sales room with painted skateboard decks on the wall for sale, we were sitting across from another bunch playing cards. Try that in Bungalow 8.
The last place we went was probably the most eventful. We saw a bloke that looked like Ryan Girdler (formerly of the Penrith Rugby League team) probably knew nothing of this 'Rugby League' of which we spoke. There were two girls dancing on the bar whom we later found out were Americans. We should have figured this out by the stripper moves they were putting in, or probably more likely when one of them reached up, stumbled and pulled a fair part of the air conditioner out of the roof. I'm sure the bar tender would have cared had he not been so obviously on something that he couldn't focus on you to get the money once he'd reached down to get your beers and looked back up, despite you being a) right in front of him and b) exactly where you were when he looked down 15 seconds previously. Said American girl also made quite a river of vomit in the toilets (which seemed to be unisex in every bar and restaurant in Paris) according to Mark, who also got to see the spectacle of the French people all going nuts at her.
All in all, a great three day weekend away, and very little serious tourism done. For all the attention going to the ultra cheap destinations that were once on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, some of the old gems like Paris and Berlin are getting forgotten. It's a pity, as these places are famous for a reason.