Huh? Wha..? Where am I? Oh!… I just woke up after our first night’s sleep in our Paris apartment. We landed yesterday around noon, got situated in the apartment, took naps, went out for awhile, had dinner, came back here and conked out.
We tried to stay up late enough so that we wouldn’t wake up at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning and be wide awake. It seems to have worked, because we both slept the whole night through, and I feel pretty good this morning. Certainly good enough to go out and do some early morning foraging.
Let’s see… I need to take the key with me. Lock the door behind me. Walk down two flights of a narrow little spiral staircase. (There’s an elevator, but I can probably walk down in the time it takes for the elevator to come up. Besides, the stairs are wooden and very well-worn and kind of neat).
I go out through the little courtyard and into the next little lobby area where the front door is. This lobby and our lobby look the same. Last night when we came in, we walked up the stairs so my beautiful, demure, and somewhat claustrophobic Better Half wouldn’t have to deal with the teeny-tiny elevator.
When we got to the door, the key wouldn’t work. Dang thing! Just then we remembered that we had to go through the first lobby to get to our lobby – something that we had neglected to do. We were at the wrong room! We got out of there fast!
Anyway, there’s a button to push that unlocks the front door, so I push it and out I go. It’s early, and our street dead ends into a pedestrian zone, so there isn’t any traffic. Just me on this old Paris street. Neat.
I walked down to the end of the block where all the action was yesterday. There was quite a bit of action now, too, but of a different sort. The cafés were mostly empty except for the occasional person with a coffee and a newspaper. But there were a lot of little trucks – the miniature kind they have over here – delivering all kinds of goods to the shops.
People were sweeping or washing off the street in front of their shops. Vegetable guys were setting up tables and arranging vegetables for the day’s business. Other shop owners were in the process of raising heavy iron gates that close their places off from the world at night.
Quite a few people appeared to be walking to work. The shops that were the busiest were the bakeries, (“boulangeries” in french), and wouldn’t you know it – the local Starbucks. I think there were three boulangeries on the two blocks I’ve been on. And I’m not including “patisseries.”
See – in this neck of the woods, there are separate shops for bread, (boulangeries), and for pastries, cakes, pies, and the like, (patisseries). Back home, we seem to do OK having pretty much any baked good available at one shop – a bakery. Or more likely, at the “bakery” section of a supermarket, which is generally not a place where a lot of baking is actually done.
Not here. Most of the time there are separate shops specializing in just breads, and other shops specializing in more “deserty” baked goods like cookies, cakes, and sweet stuff. (Not chocolate, though. There are separate shops for that, too).
So I’m saying there were three “bread” shops in this little two-block stretch. It’s kind of amazing to us that anyone would have a shop just for bread in the first place, but then to have three separate ones in a two-block stretch – well, that tells you something about the French, eh? (And perhaps about us gringos, too, eh?)
That’s OK with me, because I’m in the market for some bread this morning. Let’s see… I want to get some bread, some fruit, and maybe something else that looks interesting and take it back to the apartment to have for breakfast. I couldn’t decide what I wanted, so I ended up going up and down the block several times.
Kayser
Finally, I went into a boulangerie called “Kayser”. I remember these Kayser places. There was one right next to a hotel we stayed in once, and we got the best stuff out of there. Turns out there’s about twenty of ‘em scattered around Paris.
Awhile back, Kayser won the “Best Baguette in Paris” award, which, as you can imagine, is pretty special. Baguettes, by the way, are the long, skinny loaves that people here seem to carry around with them practically wherever they go.
The “Kayser” behind Kayser is a 4th generation baker who has a special way of using a starter in liquid form, which is apparently a difficult thing to do well consistently. Like bread bakers everywhere, they use their own starter that gets passed on and on for years – generations, even.
Each Kayser location uses a starter taken from the original, but they bake their own bread fresh each day at each site. You’d think that for all the Kayser locations in one city, they’d do all the baking in one location and deliver it as needed to each location each day. It’d still be pretty fresh, eh?
Nope. In fact, when it comes to baguettes in Paris, it’s against the law to not bake them in the boulangerie that they’re sold in. That ought to tell you another thing or two about the folks over here, eh? I don’t think they’d do it any other way anyway, even if it wasn’t the law.
But enough of this chit-chat. Let’s buy some bread already!
To be continued…
