Author: Sarah Cohen

I was in serious need of something nice. Some reason to believe life was good.

In June my oldest, Becky, had to go to Orsay to meet with people who, like her, do research for Cuore, a cryogenics lab. Most of her trip was paid for by her college. My youngest, Gracie, got so many scholarships that she had a bunch of money left over after she graduated, and we thought it would be fun to blow it joining Becky in France and meeting a former neighbor in London. The kids grew up with this neighbor, who was kicked out of the U.S. a couple of years ago because she didn’t get a visa in time after turning 21.

Since Becky had to work for several days, Gracie thought going to a little town called Bougival would be entertaining while waiting for her sister. Bougival was high in a Google search of interesting neighborhoods in France and was near Versailles. We could see the palace, the River Seine, and something called an Impressionists Walk while Becky worked.

The first thing I noticed about France was that during rush hour in Paris, hordes of people accept that they can’t fit into the first subway that comes by. They wait after a crowd oozes itself into the train and wait again for the next one.

The second thing I noticed was how whimsically colored the train from Paris, the Transilien, to Bougival was. Seats of green, red and purple, spots of light on the ceiling – charming. Something pleasant in the winter perhaps. The Transilien was also refreshingly empty.

Poppies grew like weeds by the side of the road. Bricks looked like a mosaic of rocks with mortar wrapped around the pieces, rather than the red rectangular blocks in the U.S.

Bougival smelled nice. Some of the scent was honeysuckle, I knew from an app that identifies pictures of plants. Some of it might have been jasmine and a plant with a white and yellow flower, said a woman on the Transilien.

Here’s something that was true in France and London: The Airbnbs and hotels provide packs of instant coffee with an electric tea pot that heats in a few seconds. Not a single place where we stayed had a drip coffee maker. Also, air conditioning isn’t a thing in either country.

France’s elevator music is jazz, much of it American.

Nobody in France treated us rudely for speaking English, but my daughters took nine years of French in grade school and spoke French even if their grammar was off.

The good news about French food is there isn’t much. Even in a little town like Bougival, the restaurants are mainly international food, including a Moroccan restaurant, which isn’t easy to find in the U.S. France’s bakeries, called patisseries, are heavenly. A croissant in the U.S. is dry thing compared to an almost melting piece of bread in France, even better with additions like almond and chocolate. Maybe about as wonderful as anything you could taste.

But escargot? It was fried fish, nothing special. Foie gras, equally as bland and the consistency of cheese for which ducks and geese suffer. The mango chutney to improve the foie gras lacked seasoning. It was chopped mango instead of chutney. Boeuf bourguignon (and I have no idea why French words require so many extra letters) is good.

On the other hand, I had the best naan I ever ate in an Indian restaurant in La Celle Saint Cloud, near Bougival. It was luscious, buttery with a light cheese in it.

The River Seine was just a few yards wide along the Impressionists’ Walk in Bougival. I don’t know if it was wider 170 years ago, and maybe it was really only a few Impressionists who painted along the river because the walk went on for miles, with only five paintings, two by Berthe Morisot, a woman I’d never heard of.

No tourists cluttered the Impressionists Walk. Just a couple making out and another on a hike. Gracie and I walked into other towns, and hungry and thirsty, we happened upon a hotel with a restaurant. I ate foei gras because I still wanted to try French food. Gracie, a vegetarian, had a cheese plate.

Some wait staff in French restaurants earn a decent hourly wage and don’t work for tips, like in the US. Our waitress seemed uninterested in us until we got up to go to the bathroom. She chased us, afraid we weren’t going to pay the bill, I assume, then ignored us for another half an hour while we waited for the check.

The next day we went to the Chateau de Saint-Cloud. It was a sprawling, nearly empty park filled with sculptures from various royalty and clergy dating from the 16^th century to Marie Antoinette. It was beautiful – again no clutter of people. You could see the Eifel Tower across the Seine.

The Palace of Versailles in contrast was a trauma of waiting, lines and crowds. The palace’s website was down, so we couldn’t buy tickets online. I got a call from my local bank in New Jersey for part of the time we waited for tickets because of unrecognized charges when Gracie and I took an Uber. I waited for my bank for 35 minutes until it hung up on me, and we continued to wait in line to get into the palace for a total of an hour and a half.

The first room was sculptures of women and their nipples. Perhaps royalty like to leave their guests with a pleasant first impression, and what’s better than nipples?

Sightseers pushed their way through the palace, back-to-back in and out of rooms with elaborate beds and matching décor. Paintings covered the walls and ceilings. Because the throng didn’t allow for standing, you couldn’t stop and study anything.

One particularly elaborate room was cordoned off and had an enormous ceiling painting, I assumed of the heavens with Jesus as a healthy, meaty, blond Nordic god, his puffy loin cloth about to fall off. But it might have been Hercules. God or Santa dressed in blue stretched out His arms below.

Sculpture and manicured foliage stretched though a garden that seemed to have no end. If you thought you finally got to the end of the garden, after all that waiting and pushing through rooms, you were wrong.

Gracie is a forgiving girl who tries to see the best in people and things, but the Palace of Versailles was traumatic. She said at the end of our ability to take it anymore, “I learned that Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI deserved to die for their excess.”

Right? Who did they think they were? I read that the palace once smelled of urine and fecal matter.

Onto Paris. The most notable thing to me was that I fell three times. Once because the exit to the Airbnb had some triangular, metal thing covering what in the U.S. would have been flat or a curb, and I didn’t expect the slanting decline. Once because the bathtub at the Airbnb was unfamiliarly high. Once because the tub had no mat or textured area to keep from slipping. I wiped out twice. I was unharmed but about to turn 60 and in theory, could have broken a bone.

I learned that, at 60, I don’t break bones.

The international restaurant scene far outnumbered French restaurants in Paris too. I saw a Kurdish restaurant, something I’d never encountered before. No Tibetan and Nepalese within eyeshot, like in my neck of the woods. But who knows what I missed? Plenty of Mediterranean food, and some things, like pizza or pasta, had truffles.

Cheap, tourist paraphernalia surrounded the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, or Sacre-Coeur. I got a bag with Van Gogh’s Almond Blossoms printed on it for EUR 6, and an imitation Pandora bracelet with the Eifel Tower and a red beads for EUR 3. I also bought a shirt for EUR 5 that looked like a scarf with the neck cut out. My kids got a few discounted beauty items at the Champs-Elysee which was, for the most part, for fancy people who want to buy EUR 500 dresses. Some American fast food had twists, like McDonald’s set up a bakery in the center with macarons.

We made our own perfume in Paris for EUR 90. We chose from a selection of 25 pre-made scents. I chose red peppercorn, berries and a spice I forget. The scent lasts only a couple of hours, but I hate most perfume because it’s just some overpowering nameless smell, more annoyance than anything. But I liked what the kids and I made.

Away from tourist shopping, I found a EUR 52 dress that I could have fit into when I was in my 20s, before becoming a full-time mom and happy. Happy Sarah eats, and she wants so much sweets, she has a constant yeast infection. But that’s happiness. Ruin, fear, stagnation, hopelessness and voices who want me to kill myself means I care less about food but fit into itty bitty clothes.

We left for London after a week to meet Chynelle, who grew up next to my kids in a New Jersey townhouse. We knew Chynelle as a child. She always excelled and even as a young adult, did better than I did at anything but motherhood. A year and a half ago, a plan to marry fell through and she ran out of time to get a U.S. visa.

She was working for Deloitte and instead of a marriage or grad school, she got a promotion that enabled her to transfer to an office in London. My daughters wanted to visit her.

I felt I had to warn the children that London had no interesting food. I worked in a Baskin & Robbins in Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus for a few months 40 years ago. I got sandwiches in convenience stores for lunch and once a week, went to Chinatown for something called “mixed meats.” Sure, I ate ice cream every day, but I could have gotten the same thing at the mall near my house. London also had Burger King, but I never bothered. I ate Indian food for the first time at the behest of coworkers, but we had to take the Underground to some out-of-the-way place.

Now, there’s a Saravana Bhavan in Leicester Square. But I didn’t know that yet. I warned the kids: forget patisseries and food from areas of the world that use spice. You’re going to London. They drink beer, which they call “lager” and must have nutritional value.

What I didn’t know was London, in the last 15 years, became international. The first place Chynelle took us to was a lunch market, like a New York street fair but every day, with food from around the world and especially the Middle East. Londoners had a particular thing for a sheep or goat cheese called halloumi. Halloumi is everywhere in London, and it’s used alone wrapped in pita.

I’ve only come across halloumi twice in the U.S, both times in Queens.

Gracie and I chose Ethiopian. There are a few perfect foods, like pho, which is a Vietnamese beef broth with rice noodles, bean sprouts, Thai basil and jalapeno peppers. Ethiopian is another perfect food, reminiscent of Indian with lots of lentils and a fermented bread made of teff called injera. We walked as we ate, and I got so involved in lunch, I didn’t see a car coming at me as I crossed a street and dipped my fork lentils while I did so. The kids looked at me aghast.

A friend of mine and an Uber driver said the international food and modern buildings that looked like jellybeans and other whimsically shaped structures began sprouting when London was the center of European Union. The city became a beautiful mix of what in the U.S. would be impossibly ancient and modern from the gray, old place it was 40 years ago.

Londoners, who I remembered as being uncomfortably proper, and startled at the raised voices or laughter from Americans, became fearlessly loud. We could hear the roar into the night in Chynelle’s apartment in Southwark, pronounced “SUTH ik,” perhaps borrowing from France’s disregard for letters.

When I was in London 40 years ago, I had to accustom myself to the rudeness of strangers and friendliness of coworkers. A stranger was a person who purposely gave wrong directions when asked, and coworkers were people who drank together. “Do you fancy a pint?” meant your presence is expected at the pub.

Americans like strangers and ignore coworkers. “The Empire State Building is four blocks east,” is announced to the stranger, who likely doesn’t know east from west. “Oh, I’m sorry, I have to pick up the kids,” is the response to the coworker, who never asked you to drinks before and never will again.

Forty years ago, I saw very little in the way of London tourist attractions. I worked and walked around the city, but I didn’t go to things like wax museums or whatever. This time, with the kids, we behaved like tourists.

We visited the Tower of London and heard boisterous tales of its literal bloody and filthy history. People didn’t have the mechanisms of cleanliness and legal protections they enjoy today. A thousand years ago, kings could chop off heads whenever he wanted and pour defecation from the tower into a moat. He was a king, after all, and did what he pleased.

We visited the Natural History Museum. Forty years ago, it was about skeletons, artifacts behind glass and taxidermy, in keeping with the gray palette of London. Today, it’s brighter with discussion of man and evolution, evolution and dinosaurs. The kids and I already saw the titanosaur in New York and chose not to spend extra to see it again. But there’s a baby titanosaur that takes up a whole room.

The food highlight in London was in Borough Market where, once again, we could get enough halloumi to last a lifetime, but also had interesting fudge, Iranian food, venison, a multitude of dips and teas, but coolest of all, a high tea at a restaurant called Roast. Some high tea in London cost as much as EUR 120 for a few pastries, scones and finger sandwiches. Because I’m from Boston, and a couple of hotels once served high tea for $25, I thought the price was ridiculous. But Roast ixnayed the fancy china and, using metal tea pots and regular plates, put together a very nice high tea for EUR 35, still a lot but worth the experience of piling butter onto scones that weren’t soaked in sugar, like in the U.S. High teas also have thin sandwiches with crusts cut off. (I’m old enough to remember a time when mommies cut off crusts on their kids’ bologna sandwiches, which consisted of a single slice of baloney in between white bread.)

Travel can be much needed relief from your own stale, if not poisonous, daily existence, and in that regard, the trip worked. Travel is about renewal, somehow. A fresh perspective, worth blowing money to remind yourself, yeah, you’re alive. It’s the world, and you’re in it. You can play again with food, culture, the singsongy sound of a language.

I still recommend avoiding the line for the Mona Lisa.