Weekend Part 1: Introduction to Parisian Cafés and a Journey Back to the Middle Ages

After a week of living in Paris, I finally made it to my first Parisian café. My friend and I went out Friday night in search of an inexpensive place to get dinner, but as we quickly learned, the difference between café, inexpensive restaurant, and bar is quite ambiguous. As we strolled around Saint Germain or the Latin Quarter, we found a number of places that served food, but all the people sitting at the tables were smoking, drinking, and eating peanuts. When we stumbled upon restaurants, they were often too expensive for our budget. In the end, we chose a place where some people were eating, but a large number of people were just drinking.

The café culture of Paris is very different from anything in the United States. People go to a café with friends or for romantic reasons. They order something to drink and then they just sit there for hours. There was a couple next to my friend and me and they spent the whole time we were there just snuggling. There was a group of girls at the next table over and they just sat there and smoked. The couple ordered a few rounds of drinks, but the girls didn’t order anything after their initial cups of coffe. Cafés can afford this because they charge so much for the drinks. A Coke (“coca” in French) costs 5 euros or $7. When you buy a drink, you’re buying the right to sit at the table.

My café experience was a little different. We were there to eat, so we didn’t linger like everyone else. Still, even at a place where drinks are more than half of the menu, the food was surprisingly good, but what else would you expect in France? I got a warm goat cheese salad, which turned out to be a green salad accompanied by pieces of toast with semi circles of goat cheese. I was puzzled as to why the cheese was so sweet until I realized that they had covered it with honey. At the end of the meal, my friend and I were a little puzzled as to the tipping culture, but we just assumed that the price included both tax and tip. That may be one of the reasons why French prices seem so high.

We spent the rest of the evening wandering around the Latin Quarter. In the course of the evening, we passed by some of the famous cafés like the Deux Magots and Café Flore. The French class I took last semester, Visions of Paris, is useful from time to time. Both of these are incredibly expensive and full of French people who obviously know that they’re something special if they can afford to go there. After all, the wine is over 100 euros a bottle. Being poor students, we got ice cream and went down to the side of the Seine. As I said in an earlier entry, I really enjoy going down to the Left Bank where people go to stroll or sit by the Seine. We sat by the river and watched the boats go by. Some of them had parties, which reminded me of Senior Boat. Paris is a great city to be young on a Friday night, even for a poor student like me.

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This city must have more museums than just about any city in the world. My first day here, I stumbled across a museum dedicated to the chase and nature. History major that I am, the first museum I went to here was the Musée de Cluny, the museum of the Middle Ages. As museums go, this one is rather small, but I was quite pleased with the collection. They do an excellent job of arranging the objects, so you’re not just looking at a bunch of objects from the middle ages, but instead see a tapestry with a picture of a horse and then see the harness for the horse and understand that both were important to the hunt. Most of the rooms are arranged around a theme. I particularly liked the tapestries, because they show scenes of everyday life. Even the ones with scenes of the lives of saints had peasants tending the fields in the background.


For its special exhibit, the museum had chosen to feature “the Bath and the Mirror.” Instead of focusing on the idea of beauty over time, the exhibit focused more on hygiene and the preparation of cosmetics. I particularly liked that they recreated the make up from Roman times. Apparently, blond hair was the ideal of feminine beauty during the Middle Ages. The creature above actually held Roman make up in his prime.


After the museum, my friend and I decided to go to the Panthéon, which is the burial place of a number of famous French people. The upper part is one of those breathtaking buildings with high ceilings. Along the wall are frescoes of the lives of some of the more famous French paints, but the statues in the middle celebrate orators and other famous secular figures.


Once I descended into the crypt, I found myself in the middle of the graves of the leading thinkers in French history. On either side of the first chamber, I was greeted by the graves of Voltaire and Rousseau. As I explored further, I found the final resting places of Dumas, Hugo, Zola, both Marie and Pierre Currie, and various other notables from French history. Most of them surprisingly had plain tombs. Still, I was overwhelmed when I left. In the United States, you would never find such a collection of famous people buried in one place. We’re so spread out that it would be next to impossible to bury all the famous Americans in one place.

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Yesterday morning when I was leaving the foyer, my friend and I heard music coming from over the wall of the building next door. We went to explore and found a group of children putting on a performance for their parents. It was so cute, a bunch of elementary school students doing traditional French dances.