The village within the vastness
Call me a stalker but I have a slight obsession with watching complete strangers and creating elaborate lives about them. It goes to reason then that my children would name the dog who lives across from us in his second floor apartment and occasionally sticks his head out for a good look at the comings and goings in the street.
The choice of name, however, shows they do still need some education. Of all the French dog names I could conjure - Louis, Fifi, Frederic…I certainly would not have come up with Frank. But Frank it is.
Frank is part of our hood. And what a fine hood it is. Tucked between Boulevard St Germain and the Seine our part of Paris is full of soul, everyday Parisians and a lot of night-time activity (the nightclub across the road frequently winds down at 5:30am).
Our second floor apartment is just 100m away from an intersection of five small roads that lends itself to a non-stop, interesting buzz. Our favourite time is certainly the evening when a jazz band plays on the corner - all helpful in my campaign to convince George he should learn the slide trombone on our return. We are part of a 24 hour hub of activity - before the nightclub has even died down the daily deliveries start happening.
It may be busy and it is completely packed with people but it really has felt like our own little village. Jamie has even become brave enough to pop out to Paul for our daily breakfast baguette despite having no French to communicate with. Molly, much to her immense pleasure, was even allowed to venture out alone to the little stationery shop ('le typographe’ - imagine our excitement at that one) to buy herself some special things.
What amazes us most about our little part of Paris is the speciality shops. How do these businesses survive? Within a very short radius there are approximately 20 restaurants/bistrots, 3 traiteurs (takeaway dinner food), multiple patisseries and boulangeries, a confiture shop, an eclair shop, a profiterole shop (yes, an entire shop dedicated to profiteroles no less), about 30 art galleries and a number of clothing shops. The traffic to sustain such industry must be immense. The only thing we are missing is a macaron shop. Mind you, after sampling the eclairs and the profiteroles, which of course we had to do in the name of research, I realise that the macaron is a poor cousin and we are in the midst of cutting-edge culinary action!
There are many people who have been regulars in our ten-day lives. Most of them we have not even communicated with. Some of them, like the bouncer in the nightclub across the road (let’s call him Jean-Philippe), have certainly made eye contact with me a few times as I have been caught watching down from my little window. There’s the lovely waitress at The Buci on the corner (I’m sure she’s a Sylvie); the stern woman at the traiteur who not so patiently took my orders in French and packed my takeaway dinners (Agathe seems apt); and the lovely looking man who waited at the bus stop with his very young baby in the buggy and anxiously checked her temperature in between smiling at her and playing peek-a-boo (I’m saving Lola for the baby and definitely giving him Olivier).
We will never forget Frank. He gave us reason for laughter and general amusement. We may have seen the most famous painting in the world, climbed the universal symbol for France and had a date with Disney but Frank will be as much a part of our family vernacular as any of those big-ticket items. And that’s the nice thing about a family holiday. The little and big things carry equal weighting. Both should be celebrated.
(just as a small note, as we are rather quite proud of our technological triumph, check out our video of the children sailing boats at Jardin du Luxembourg under the video tab on our site)
