Paris, March 2017 (Part 2 - Philosophy, Food, and Booze)

It was a cold and rainy day on Saturday, our third day in Paris. Audrey and I decided to have a casual tour around the city. Audrey is currently working on her master’s degree in philosophy and Paris has always been a hub for some of the greatest minds of philosophical thought.

Located a short stroll from our hotel was Montparnasse cemetary, a notable resting place for many of France’s intellectual and artistic elites. On this day, we were there to pay our respects to notable existentialists and lovers Jean Paul-Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

Sartre and de Beauvoir were supporters of the French Maoists in the 60s and 70s, even going so far as to take over the Maoist newspaper after a large portion of the leadership was arrested. After the city of Paris rose the prices on metro tickets, an act that directly impacted the workers of the city, a group of Maoists stole a large quantity of metro tickets and began giving them away for free, as a result, visitors place subway tickets on their grave as a token of respect and appreciation, so Audrey followed suit.

After paying our respects, we continued our tour of the intellectual and artistic side of Paris headed over to the Saint-Germain-de-Pres to have lunch at Cafe de Flore, one of the oldest standing coffeehouses in the city. In its heyday, Cafe de Flore was a popular gathering spot for artists, poets, philosophers, and writers.

The place was packed, the tables were all really small and really close together. After a string of disappointing meals so far, I went the safe route: a club sandwich served with chips. The sandwich was decent but overpriced for what it was.

After lunch, as the rain continued to pour, we got onto one of the L’Open Tour buses and rode it to the Louvre where we crossed the Pont des Arts where we, as tradition has it, wrote our names on a padlock, locked it on the side railing, and threw the key into the Seine, representing our commitment to one another.

When we got to the other side of the bridge, we walked over to Harry’s New York Bar, a Parisian landmark frequented by famous expats from the United States including Humphrey Bogart, Sinclair Lewis, and, most notably, Ernest Hemingway, who, as legend has it, was given the first Bloody Mary ever made when he came in one morning trying to cure a hangover.

While we were sitting at Harry’s, Audrey got the novel idea of going to an absinthe bar nearby to get some of that sweet, hallucinogenic absinthe you can’t get back in the United States. We took a short walk from Harry’s to L’Absinthe, a well known absinthe bar in Paris. Audrey and I had never drunken absinthe before and were not sure what to do, fortunately, our server was extremely helpful and gave great suggestions as to what we should drink next.

After several rounds of dancing with the green fairy, Audrey and I grabbed a cab back to the hotel to sleep off the high.