How I Spent MSV #2

I ended up traveling, techwise, with only an iPad and a tiny pocket camera. I have to admit, there were times when I wanted to pull an iPhone out of my pocket and figure out A) where the hell I was and B) where the hell the nearest metro station was, but other then that, there was something of an accumulating sense of freedom from not having the phone at hand. My need to read emails as they come in, especially when I’m on vacation, pretty much hovers between nil and not at all. There was the tiniest bit of debate business that needed to be attended to, but I was able to address that in the evenings or mornings when I had the iPad and wifi. The rest of the time, well, people could wait a few minutes. Of course, in addition to GPS duty, the iPhone can double as a camera, but I became quite enamored of the one I bought for the trip, a 16 megapixel Canon with a 5X optical zoom. It was so much better than doing heavyweight Sherpa duty lugging the SLR, which it cannot match in terms of control, balanced against exactly what sort of photos are being taken. If you’re going serious pix, then you need the SLR (or that new mirrorless generation of cameras that I gather remains pretty expensive). But I wasn’t expecting much more than souvenir snapshots. The Canon did the job.

I’ve been posting the full edited pix on Flickr (thanks for the memory, Yahoo: I had abandoned Flickr early on when I reached the limit), and selected shorts on Facebook, if you want to see the results. On Flickr, set 1, set 2, set 3.

On top of that, we used TripIt and TripAdvisor and of course Google Maps, and that was pretty much it for travel software. What else does one need?

We rented an apartment in Montmartre, which is up the hill around Sacre Coeur.

Like a lot of Paris, it’s all tiny streets, many of them going one way, and when we were arriving, our driver found that most of them went the wrong way. The apartment belongs to one of my wife’s colleagues, and they rent it out when they aren’t there. Considering the price of Paris hotels, it was a steal, and it had a fully equipped kitchen, a living room, two bedrooms, and an enormous bathroom with a separate w.c. If you know Europe, you know that the phrase enormous bathroom sounds suspiciously bogus, but it was true. There were actually two showers, one in a stall and one in the tub, plus two sinks, if your whole group found itself so dirty it couldn’t wait and had to wash up as a team. The apartment itself was accessed past, first, a bland street entrance, then a hallway with the concierge’s apartment (like in the movies), then a sunny open courtyard, then into the next building, past the cat and up the stairs. It was absolutely perfect, and with the two bedrooms, perfect for families. And as I said, reasonable, another word you don’t hear much in Paris.

That’s the thing. Paris is the most ridiculously expensive city in the world, I’m sure. Everything is expensive. All the meals, all the shopping, the museums. The metro is reasonable enough, but if you want to go to the bathroom, that too will often cost you a euro or so. An ice cream cone? Okay, Berthillon on Ile St. Louis is allegedly the best ice cream in the world, but it’s about a buck a lick! On the other hand, that reasonable metro is also one of the best in the universe. Trains just keep on coming, they’re seldom overpacked, and if you don’t mind buskers, you’re golden. By the way, buskers nowadays are very twenty-first century, with portable backup systems over which they perform. It’s more like karaoke than street performing. The last time I was in Paris, if a guy was playing the concertina on your metro car, he was playing the concertina. Now he’s playing it with a hundred and one strings behind him, plus the vocal artistry of his cousin from Marseilles who also wants to get into the act. Jeesh. You can’t hear yourself think. Fortunately, you’re in the subway, and what’s there to think about in the subway other than not getting pickpocketed?

After we settled our stuff on the first day, we grabbed our book of walks and headed out to the neighborhood. We moseyed up to the top of the hill and the church, then threaded our way back down through the neighborhood. This is a hell of a crowded tourist area, but they tend to stick to the main thoroughfares, and the minute you hit a side street, you’re on your own. While going up the hill in front of the church is easy enough, there are some straight-on stairs that ascend without a break, and I don’t recommend those. You can also take a funicular, always fun, for the cost of a metro ticket.

Or you can take this trolley pictured at the right, which will carry you around the neighborhood while at the same time making you look like such a total dork that if you are caught doing it no one cool will ever talk to you again.

After stretching our first day as long as we could, having a simple café dinner nearby, we hit the hay. Sunset was about 10:00 every night, meaning it’s just day most of the time during June. Gorgeous. And overall our weather, while cool, was seldom inclement. We lucked out.