De Ce Monde Secret de l’ Amelie Americaine

The Anniversary of the Day John Lennon Died and I was born …(metaphorically speaking)

I escaped into Le Petit Cardinal for my post dinner cafe. I sat down and prepared to write for the rest of the evening. Really I was just trying to look busy. I looked up at the room around me…there were only a couple of people eating alone like me. Other than that it was filled with friends and couples stopping in for a drink or to watch the football game on the plasma television. It was comfortable and classy at the same time.

I could live here. I found myself saying all at once. And not for the reasons I usually ran away from one city to another. Something about me was looking better as well. Despite my holiday eating and drinking habits I had managed to lose weight from all of the walking I had done. Was it true? That Parisian women don’t get fat.

Why? Americans don’t lack the drive to improve themselves. But was it as I had suspected. It wasn’t about how much I denied myself both feeling and sustenance, or how much I pushed my body on the yoga mat or in the gym. It was about being alive and present. Not tucked away, hiding myself in yet another journal with no one to connect to or share my thoughts with.

I looked out the window and watched some kind of protest or parade stop traffic on Rue Monge. The procession turned onto Cardinal Lemoine and walked up the hill. There was sound of singing and the I spotted a group of people carrying a statue of a saint up the hill. And suddenly I had the urge to follow them.

I’m spiritual but not religious. My affiliations with one religion or another is not as important as my feeling connect with ‚”something larger than myself” that can not be explained. I didn’t know why, but I suddenly wanted to find out where they were going and why.

I paid my check and exited quickly. In New York, if you blink the event is already done. Yet, as I exited the bistro, I found that there was plenty of time to inconspicuously find my place among the throng of people who had joined the procession.

I followed the parade of two hundred plus up the hill on Cardinal Lemoine. I didn’t know where we were going, but soon I found that it was further up the hill than I had been before. We past Ernest Hemingway’s former home which was marked with a commemorative plaque, and walked up the increasingly narrow cobble stone road. There was no way a regular sized car could easily drive on this street.

Rue Mouffetard

For the first time, I was transported out of the city with its major commercial stores and industrial feel into a quaint village that reminded me of a Harry Potter movie. The buildings on either side of the street were connected by a series of draping holiday lights so that the tiny cobble road was lite up with a nice yellow hue. The lights twinkled against the night.

The stores were all open for the best part of the day. The time after work, when families and singles were out after spending the day stuck indoors, getting their groceries or shopping done before they settled in the night. There were shops of all varieties; jewelry, book and clothing stores, patisseries, chocolateries, a used music store, a small movie theatre, and a variety of bistros all packed with diners. Everyone was in descent spirits. It was cold but not windy. This was the moment I fell in love with Rue Mouffetard.

Earlier that day

Rue d’ Archives in the Marais has a great independent chocolaterie with truffles at a reasonable price and boxes made out of chocolate and chocolate covered cherries that are a definite win. The shops and boutiques are accessible and well put together. But this was not my destination.

It took some time to find the Musee Picasso. After asking several slightly annoyed shop owners, I finally found the entrance to the courtyard of the converted ‚villa. To think…someone use to live in these rooms and call this home. Let‚Äôs put it this way. It was big enough to be converted into a museum.

I spent the next couple of hours walking through the galleries. I found people watching just as entertaining as the art work on the walls. I was slowly coming out of myself and engaging the world around me. There were the artists who were sketching in their tiny moleskin notebooks trying to learn from this master. And tourists with the backpacks and cameras, taking pictures with their flashes on, oblivious to the fact that they were harming the artwork by using them. And then there was Picasso, Picasso everywhere, one building onto the next, each gallery, a journey into this man’s life.

I left a couple hours later and got lost again, this time finding myself by the Arts and Metiers Musee. I didn’t know where the closest Metro train would take me. All I knew was that these triangular streets were guiding me further and further away from where I intended to be.

However, I did find another interesting section of Paris that reminded me of New York’s Chinatown, but with far less grit. The streets were lined with wholesale shops that wouldn’t admit retail customers. But if I had a resale license, I could of shopped for purses, housewares, shoes or jewelry. The most interesting street was lined with crystal and silver jewelry for twenty per cent of price I would normally pay for a similar item back home that had far less quality.

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