Christophe and Kirsten met us at our place in the morning. We had a quick petit dejouner and then took the metro to the outskirts of Paris to tour the Antique Market, which is enormous. We walked around countless kiosks/shops, some large, some small, full of incredible things: Louis XVI furniture, lifesize pigs and roosters, modern furniture, antique lace, dishware of every imaginable pattern. It was overwhelming. There was a lot of English spoken, but the people there were not tourists but professional antiques buyers. Kerstin and I were distracted by a two storey store that sold antique clothing, but we were too intimidated to try anything on, as everything looked very fragile and very expensive. Also during this time, Eric discovered the black and white feature on the digital camera, which was perfect since Paris was so grey. ( I thought some of the pictures look like they were taken during the Sixties.)
For lunch, Christophe took us to a restaurant in the heart of the Market. He knew the head waiter there, and we got a great table by the window looking out into the street. During an excellent lunch of steak, Christophe regaled us of stories of his youth. Christophe’s mother is German and his father French, and he grew up mainly in Germany. When he was a teenager, his mother would send him to the Paris Antique market to buy antiques and smuggle them back to Germany, so he got to know the dealers (and this restaurant) really well. He remarked on the irony of the EU and the euro now – you can no longer “smuggle” antiques in this manner. He had great stories about this time. Kerstin actually knew Christophe during this time as they were in high school together, but she had no idea that he had such a lucrative side business – she just knew he wasn’t in school much.
After lunch, we left the Antique Market through the much less glamorous flea market, and then took the metro to the train station to say goodbye to Kirsten and Christophe, who were going back to Germany together. Suddenly, we were bereft. What were we going to do without our incredible tour guides? I cornered Christophe in the Metro and asked him what we should do, and he gave us our itinerary: the Moulin Rouge that night, breakfast the next day at Montparnasse with a trip to the top of the Montparnasse tower for a view of Paris, and the Pere La Chaise cemetery. A trip to Versailles.
With those instructions in mind, we said goodbye to these dear friends of ours, who had made Paris so wonderful for us. After they left, we felt like we needed a little downtime. It was grey and wet, and we did not want to go to the Moulin Rouge. We didn’t have anything to wear that would suit that kind of evening. We went back to the apartment and had a relaxing evening.
