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The Best

the-best

It’s no wonder why Paris is the romantic destination of dreams of so many.  It makes sense why it’s the most visited city in the world.  It is after all, Paris. Enough said.  In this city, a flakey croissant, a flawless meal, an aimless stroll down a boutique lined street, a view from the top, will invariably be the subject matter of one of those experiences of a life time for anyone who visits this city.  We come here to absorb her romance, to live out a movie scene, and to experience perfection.  We come here because it’s supposed to be the best, and it is.

Our first day we sat at one of hundreds of street side cafes at a table too small for anything more than a glass of French red wine, an espresso, and the obligatory ashtray.  We sipped and watched as manicured tourists and pretty people all dressed in blacks and grays, and checkered versions of both strolled the streets with shopping bags in tow all searching out their own small cafe table to also sip wine and waft wisps of smoke.  Afterwards we took our turn to stroll the streets of this famous arrondissement window shopping in boutiques and antique stores.  We’d pause to watch an occasional street performer or make way for a groups of annual pub crawlers dressed in team culinary costumes befitting only the French.  Later in the afternoon we’d sample baguettes until we had no room left. 

One morning before the day’s first croissants were baked, we piled into a van for the three hours journey to France’s famed northern coast.  On grassy hills abutting long strips of windswept sandy beaches we stood and listened to some of our most famous, historic, and tragic stories of war.  Down on the beach, dogs played in the water and lovers walked bundled against the wind.  Looking down from the hillside we shared a sorrow not only for the toils of the war that soaked the sands here, but for how distant, almost unreachable, that past now seemed.  We drove through country lanes where the farmhouses saluted us with the unexpected sight of proudly displayed American flags and antique vehicles of war sprouted from the gardens.  A short reprieve from the atrocities of the past was provided by a bowl of steaming freshly netted mussels and a cup of locally churned butter that left no doubt that this is still France; and France is the best.  Our last visits of the day endured a duet of tributes to the lives sacrificed by those on each side who fought for their homelands.  One was a field of nameless black stones, lined up in groups of five.  Thick patches of trees threw dark shadows on the darker headstones casting an eerie gloom through the graveyard; yet at the same time they offered a blanket of protection to the tortured souls buried beneath the trees.  We entered the American cemetery on a tree lined pathway with a lone trumpet blaring in the windy distance.  The gently sloping hillside was streaked with perfect rows of white crosses and the occasionally lit by a Star of David, most of them displaying a name, dates, and home state.  A salt tinged wind blew up from the ocean at the base of the hillside, cleansing the souls of the men resting there for eternity. 

Back in the City of Lights we continued a schedule of doing all the things a good visitor should do at least once.  We queued with the masses to ascend the Eiffel tower to walk her decks and take innumerable pictures.  A rainy morning provided a perfect day to stroll the never-ending rooms of the Lourve, all the while trying to make sense of an impossible audio guide and map.  We carefully planned our meals and ate until every Parisian culinary category had been accounted for.  We walked along the Seine more than once,  and we stared up at the Arc de Triomphe.  It was just a little too perfect. 

On our last few days before leaving the European continent we moved to an outer arrondissement.  For the first time in six months of travel we aborted an afternoon walk because we felt uneasy.  Typical Parisian austere frostiness was replaced by aggression.  Groups loitered on street corners and in front of derelict buildings.  We saw a different city, rippling with palatable tensions. 

As we flew eastward that next morning and stared down at the the world’s most visited city we wondered if the next time we came here if it would be as changed as it is in the last four years.  It will no doubt continue to be the opportunity to live out a day from a movie scene, and experience the best of the best.  Inevitably however in the world of today, with that territory comes a slew of expectations and imitations.  Trip Advisor ratings and 10 Best lists, become the de facto experience guides.  For every 10 best there are fifty abysmal examples with pictures on the menu, tour guides with umbrellas and headsets, and street vendors hawking the same keychains and light up gadgets.  It can muddle the experience of a place that is supposed to be a version of perfection.  That said, the truly unique and ethereal experiences in this city that many of us come to this place in search of are still very much there, but for most they lie just beyond our grasp; behind black tinted windows of luxury sedans, on private rooftops where the cost of entry is a at least a three figure cocktail, in restaurants with six month waiting lists that fill up in five minutes, at the bottom of bottles of wine worth more than a plane ticket, and behind velvet ropes to clubs that employ the strictest of dress codes and frustrating selectivity.  On the other side of the gap is a place that may follow the fate of Casablanca, a city remembered for an iconic romanticized past that now has the charm of a stale cigarette, where metal detectors guard the entry to public places and five star hotels, and where tensions run high.

Leaving Europe we’re not for the first time confronted with a powerful reality of travel; that expectations will always be shattered and that travel is not in fact about meeting expectations, but rather having new experiences that often make us at least a little bit uncomfortable.  As far is Paris is concerned, the best croissant may be in San Francisco, the most memorable meal belongs to Israel, and the most powerful sight to behold isn’t in the Louvre, it’s several hours north along the shores of Normandy.  Paris will however, forever be Paris, and that alone is worth going to experience “the best” at least once. 

                                                

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parfait
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Parfait

The southern french countryside employs a certain quality of life that everyone has seen depicted in countless films and across the pages of books on shelves, and as far as we can tell, they all are entirely accurate.  It isn’t graced with grand palaces, and it doesn’t sparkle with the precisely maintained beauty of Paris.  There is no vibrant and energetic nightlife.  In fact, it’s still and quiet; the type of quiet that makes you want to turn off the music, open all the doors and windows, just to listen to the wind blow through the rows of olive trees.  The two horse cart wide roads are restrained to their two hundred year old girth by rows of tall trees, long ago planted in preparation for a grand entrance by a king.  Vineyards are announced not by garish signs and billboards, but by simple plaques next to a gate.  Wine vines drape on their stakes only over specific plots the land, as if placed carefully and with much consideration and not in the mega industry style of their foreign counterparts. 

The days this time of year are warm, but for once not hot.  A gentle breeze always gusts at just the right moment.  The nights are cool but still invite us outside to watch orange moons with a glass of wine in hand.  Three hundred year old farmhouses, now converted to cavernous homes are the only infrastructure dotting the countryside between the one-laned towns.  On the lane there are no supermarkets, no speciality coffee shops, no stores that bear a logo of any kind. Mothers pick up their children from the schoolhouse and afterwards stop at the the boulangerie for that evening’s freshly baked baguettes and a sweet treat.  Meat is purchased from the butcher and has never known styrofoam packaging covered in saran wrap.  Cheese is selected from the formagerie; sometimes there are two.  The market is stocked as the Garden of Eden itself would have been; each item perfect, the subject of its own Cezanne painting.  Of wine shops there are many; but never is there a giant convenience store fridge filled with cardboard cases of beer.  There’s also a salon, always a church, and numerous restaurants all with patios for enjoying a slow meal.  Some days the street is closed for the local weekend outdoor market, but only just for the morning.  Afternoon’s are sacred and personal.  The already peaceful towns become perfectly still, with just the breeze that blows through the leaves.  It’s a time the people use to read books with yellowed pages, that smell like libraries, or to take long walks and hunt for fallen almonds, or wild mushrooms.  In the evenings the restaurants are always in business but are never crowded or rushed.  The rest of the people cook at home, simmering things slowly in glowing copper pans.  They pass time outside in the twilight at weathered wooden tables on which sit glass vases filled with white candles inside.  The air smells softly of lavender and lemon.  In front of them the is expanse of the southern French countryside.  Like the trees have sealed in the old king’s road, the residents of this place have sealed in their way of life here away from the rapidly spinning rest of the world. 

                 

egeszsegere
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Egészségére

Sometimes deciding to go somewhere can be as simple as tracing a spinning a globe with a pointed finger, or tossing a dart at a map.  This trip happened very much that way, and as we’ve repeatedly discovered, the most underplayed destinations often make for the most unexpected and memorable surprises.  On a whim we decided to meet a friend here for a few days of absent minded wandering and discovery. 

The main boulevard in front of our apartment that leads to and from the river was closed off to traffic that first night.  Shortly after the sun went down we joined into a sea of people marching towards the water.  Echoing in the distance we could hear Viennese waltz music.  Behind ornate Austro-Hungarian buildings a constant cannon fire rippled off cement and stone.  As the crowds grew thicker from more people pouring in from side streets, the cacophony rose in tandem.  At the end of the block where the buildings gave way to unobstructed views up, down, and across Danube the the music crescendoed, while overhead, synchronized bombs of color exploded in the sky dancing to the rhythm.  Glittering streamers of fire raced down into the water off the sides of the bridges.  Ash and smoke twirled through the crowds standing on the shore.  With our eyes closed and craned skywards, and jaws slack, it didn’t take any imagination to fall back in time to when the flashes in the sky were real bombs, and the march music was coming from real instruments.  Budapest, it turns out, has a magical ability to drop her visitors into a semi-permanent time warp. 

Five minutes of walking through her streets is all it takes as a reminder that this place once housed one of the greatest and longest European empires in history.  The buildings display an intricate grandness that is the product of a bygone era, that has been regifted back to the people who walk through her streets now.  It’s impossible to stroll along the riverbank, the great separator of two great cities conjoined as one, and not experience the same lighthearted butterflies you’d have from a first kiss.  It left us breathless, awestruck, and euphoric.  Sometimes that same breathlessness was a gut punch that knocked the wind out of us.  Behind a chain link fence a world war two memorial of bronzed empty shoes were scattered on the river’s edge.  Concert speakers lining the sidewalk for an event later that night played an ironically poignant song about the bonds of humanity. 

We crossed a chain bridge guarded by two stoney lions and weaved through the crowds on the opposite riverbank where all the sights and smells of a celebration drifted in the air. Cold beers and homemade apricot liquor poured from taps.  A folky band played on a stage and people danced.  Giant charcoal baked apple breads dusted in cinnamon rolled off the grill into hungry hands.  Sometime later, over satiated and exhausted we lost ourselves in one of Budapest’s great institutions; a bathhouse.  Inside, fancifully tiled pools were tucked away in and endless maze of rooms.  Locals seemed to have a purpose for each one;  lap swimming, lounging for hours on end conversing, and water stretching, depending on their size and temperature.  Outside, rows of lounge chairs surrounded a wave pool that would draw splashing crowds every thirty minutes.  The three of us found our place in an adjacent hot spring and did like the locals do; soaked ourselves until our fingers were wrinkled and any worldly worries were sufficiently washed away.    

By night, the palatial persona of the city fades to black its eastern European hard edge cuts through the darkness.  Crowds from restaurants and bars spill out onto broken sidewalks smoking cigarets and clanking bottles.  Ruins of buildings decimated by a long finished war, have been deliberately un-maintained and transformed into one of several infamous ruins bars in which we sipped drinks on shrapnel tables with twisted rusty plane parts hanging from the ceiling.   Just before the sun begins to poke through the horizon as we strapped on our backpacks and left our apartment that next morning a few groups of friends sat still swirling the dredges of last nights beers, half an unopened pack still in front of them and no intention of going anywhere anytime soon; still lost in the alluring vortex of Budapest.  So are we.