We kind of forgot about the Fourth of July this year. I had a vague notion that I might stop by one of the American grocery stores and pick up…something…or at least try to track down some tiny American flags and stick them into whatever we had for dinner. Nick mentioned at one point that it would probably be fun to go to an expat bar.
But in the end, it was a day like any other; in fact, we only remembered toward evening that it even was the Fourth. Fortunately, we only had a little over a week to wait for the French version, and yesterday we conscientiously celebrated Bastille Day.
It’s a little different, of course. For one thing, nearly every business was closed all day, and we have it on good authority that many of them will stay that way for the rest of the summer. People getting an early start on the usual August vacation created a massive wall of traffic leaving the city on Friday afternoon, and most of them won’t be back until the first weekend in September–another terrible day to be on the roads. Our neighborhood will get quieter and quieter, especially since there’s not much here to draw the tourists that pour in to replace the Parisians, kind of like the saliva that a mosquito injects into your arm to replace the blood that it has taken.
We wandered around the empty streets for an hour or so with Jolie, finally coming to a halt at a restaurant I’ve always been curious about, which has its outdoor seating in the shadow of the charming church whose bells we hear every Sunday. It was one of the longer lunches on record–the place obviously goes in for old-fashioned French pacing, which we first suspected when I ordered our half-bottle of wine and the waitress replied, “Wonderful–and after that?”
And after that we wound our way home, where we passed a lazy few hours during which Nick uttered the following remarkable sentence: “Honey, why don’t you go ahead and tap the box of wine?”
It’s true. There is a five-liter box of rosé in our fridge. Apparently, that’s a “done” thing here; it’s the same as the cheap table wine that we’d been buying in bottles, and Nick’s coworkers assured him that it was perfectly fine. But it took some mental deprogramming to actually lift the box onto the counter in the wine store. Fortunately, by then Nick had rushed outside with the vomiting Jolie, so he didn’t actually have to be a part of the transaction–I don’t think his pride could’ve taken it.
It just so happened that Bastille Day fell on a Saturday this year, which I found especially fitting given that we have just recently instituted “fondue Saturdays.” So while we waited for dark, we deep-fried veal and lamb, mushrooms, potatoes, and baby corn, which worked remarkably well. And it all went wonderfully with the rosé.
After dinner the three of us headed out into the carnival atmosphere by the Seine to see the fireworks over Trocadéro, which were suitably stupendous. When we returned, the cafés were packed with cheerful celebrants, including Kristina and her boyfriend. While Jolie jumped all over them, Nick invented a dinner party out of thin air–apparently it’s next Saturday, and they are, of course, both invited.
And today, the ambitiously massive bicycle program goes into effect: 10,000 or so bikes all over the city (there are at least two stations within a two-block radius of us) that can be rented (the first half-hour is free) and returned to any station in the city. We have to figure out how to get a membership (I hear that a deposit is required for the first year), and then it’s just a matter of surviving the absurd traffic, but the idea is that they are yet another type of independence, and I suspect that it will be true.