Poitiers and Paris

I'm in Paris. On my last night in Bayonne I had a Basque dinner at Le Cafe Victor Hugo (not a very Basque name). It was rustic (i.e., bland). I liked Bayonne though and was nervous about heading back to bigger cities. I stopped for a night in Poitiers, roughly half way between Bayonne and Paris. It's a town of some historic significance apparently, although I've lost interest in the guidebook lately. To get into the town you had to climb an enormous staircase from the train station. Poitiers was the coldest place I've been so far. The cold was painful and literally felt like a perpetual slap in the face. And yet I seemed to be the only person there billowing steam from my nostrils - I don't think I'm physiologically adapted to this climate. I had steamed mussells in a restaurant and didn't do much else during my few hours in Poitiers... It was raining when I arrived in Paris yesterday. So I did some much needed laundry in a complicated Parisian laundromat and the sky was blue by the time that ordeal was over. I'm staying in the Latin Quarter although it doesn't seem very latin. It's only a block or two from the Left Bank. I walked to the spot where the protagonist from Albert Camus' The Fall hears mocking laughter from the Seine. I stumbled upon the bookshop that Hemingway used to frequent (I've been reading Hemingway's recollections of 1920s Paris). Of course, Shakespeare & Company was a rental library then. These days it's a standard English-language bookshop. And it's staffed by travelling students, thin sensitive literary types. Apparently the management offers short-term accommodation in return for work in the store, with the added condition that you have to read a book a day. That wouldn't leave much time for anything else I should think, but it's good for some. There were Asian tourists in the store taking photos of the bookshelves. It was odd. Last night I walked around some more - the nights actually seem warmer than the days in France. I had a look inside Notre Dame which was nice. I walked all over the Left and Right Banks and generally soaked it all up. I went to a cafe that Camus and Sartre used to argue in, and I paid eight Australian dollars for a shot of espresso. Later I sat in a bar and watched a jazz band while I drank from a ridiculous German beer glass that looked like a fruit bowl on a stem. Today I've performed the duties of a tourist in Paris. I went to the Louvre. The place is just too big. I skipped everything but the paintings and the Egyption artefacts. There was no queue when I arrived but inside it was hectic. Tour groups just swarming from room to room, taking flash photos incessantly. It all seemed a little absurd - particularly the Mona Lisa room (such a big fuss over such a little painting). I caught the train to the Eiffel Tower, which was more hassle than it should have been. It was too cold to sit and admire the thing, and I couldn't be arsed climbing any more stairs, so I walked under it and then headed straight back to the train. It was pretty good as far as towers go. Afterwards I found an unpopular restaurant in a narrow alley near Boulevard St Michel, and I ate escargot for lunch. That is, snails. I had to pick them out of their shells with a toothpick. A bit chewy for my liking, but they were so drenched in garlic sauce that they could have been chicken giblets for all I knew. I had ordered cognac as well, only realising that I wasn't sure what cognac was when I was served a cup full of something like O.P. rum. All part of the tourist's duty though. I walked off my snails in Luxembourg Garden, where Hemingway used to walk off his hunger pangs as a starving writer. I'm here for another two nights at least, and then it's off to Brussells!