We crossed the Rhein river in the lavender light of a setting sun.

“Germany.” My mother said, and something like ancestral pride welled up in her, staring out across the land from which her people had come. A tunnel drew us into Baden Baden. Warp speed, in the amber colored tube of concrete, trailing neon signs like passing stars as we hurtled closer to the town where we would be spending the next few nights. Baden Baden isn’t as well known as Munich or Berlin. We ran into an Eastern European friend at the airport, who asked us where we were going and when we told him he nodded at us and said,

“Nice. The bottom bottom should be very pretty.”

Most of the information that I had on the place was centered around an episode of a Rick Steves show in which he and his wife got uncomfortably naked in a full service spa. I think Rick Steves’ penis wears glasses (more about the spa next week).

The tunnel spit us into a twilight city that had drifted off to sleep while we were underground and we spent twenty stressful minutes driving the same loop of the same 4 streets snarking at one another about which turn to take the way tired families in cars tend to do. We finally threw the whole operation in park beneath a sign in our hotel’s parking lot that read “For Ladies Only” which I promptly took advantage of.

When we’d checked in and dropped off our stuff in our rooms, it was dinner thirty and there was a collective growl that started at our stomachs and was finding its way behind our teeth. The woman at the front desk told us that there were two ways into town from here. The first was shorter but uglier and the second was longer but prettier (like the movie Twins) and in our slathering, exhausted state, we opted for the Devito of the two. The sidewalks were narrow and in the dusky light, the buildings felt drained of color. Silent city, save for cars. We wound up and down grey streets, poking our heads into empty restaurants, feigning polite carelessness about where we ate, finding many of the options that we could agree on closed when we got there. We missed Monte Christo on the first pass. Saw that it was a tapas joint and felt the hunger in us bray at the thought of sharing anything. As we rounded the block, though, we heard the raucous sounds of serious cooking through a window in the alley, smelled the lush smells that accompanied them. We made a second pass and stuck the landing. The door of the place opened and the building enveloped us in its warmth. Red paint on the walls, bodies stacked shoulder to shoulder in the flickering light of candles. I had been wondering where everyone was as we’d walked into town. Here, apparently. Paprika hung in the air, smiles on faces, forks near mouths. A silver haired man rounded us up at the door and parked us at a table in a corner where we ogled the menu with its wild offerings, pointing at things. So many things. Too many things. The silver haired man returned and we ordered the too many things and he saw that we needed them and he didn’t argue. The energy in the room was a damp log on a hot fire, crackly and warm and we sat in the glow of it while we waited for the food.

The courses came like little birds that landed on our table when they were ready. No rhyme or reason and no need for it. Bacon wrapped dates and balls of fried cheese. Pickled things and calamari and polenta. They were all different and storied and they tasted as though they’d picked up their flavors as they passed through restaurant. Sound and warmth and color coalescing into taste. We stuffed ourselves and the lights came back on behind our eyes. Laughter like a ringing bell from our table, another flavor for their spice rack. When the food had been mostly picked over, our silver haired waiter came to our table, drawn maybe by our accents or our English.

He had lived in Los Angeles for a little while and New York for some time as well. He told us that he liked the places but that he had missed driving in Europe. Somewhere in Baden Baden there was a BMW with his name on the registration, a speedometer that went all the way up to 160 and a needle that had pointed at it.

“I like to drive fast. I missed it too much. Plus,” he said. “You all work so hard.”

He got six weeks off a year, here.

We told him about our trip and he told us about Baden Baden and his native Kosovo. He practiced his English and we practiced our German and we all practiced laughing and smiling.

We walked home in the darkness and it was a different city. Stars shone in the spaces between the buildings and the distant gurgle of a river whispered up the streets. The hills rose black and jagged with trees against the cobalt sky and a wind slid down the alleyways, but the city was not cold.

https://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/monte-christo-baden-baden

We were loosed like an arrow across the French countryside, pulling asphalt beneath our tires to the tune of smooth jazz on the radio. Rapeseed in the fields on either side of the road, fluorescent in the sunlight, shining back at the sky. Before this, there was a mad scramble through the Châtelet Les Halles with its swarm of commuters, ebbing and flowing through the place, oozing from its exits and cramming into the trains that tore screeching from beneath it out into the world. Before this we rode one of those steel javelins into the heart of the train station near Disneyland Paris and wove our way up all the stories of starry eyed children and their depleted parents to the Enterprise rental car station where our crushed-can-minivan sat waiting for us. Before this, there were struggles with a manual transmission and traffic circles full of honky Peugeots and a good deal of swearing all around. But then there was this. 

Soft hills of green with lone standing trees. Herds of sheep gathered around cottages gathered around steeples amidst the expansive fields that feed them like the clouds dotting the deep blue sky. We cut a line through the center of it all with a red pin stuck in Germany, but plans for one detour along the way.

     Reims was one of the places that jumped out of the guidebooks for Melissa and me. Crumbly stone walls and cobblestone streets in the heart of champagne country. We had done just enough research to know nothing about the place, which made it both enticing and mysterious and so, once we’d freed ourselves of the gravity of a big city and were soaring through the orbit of the countryside at lunch time, Reims popped up on our GPS and we cut the wheel for the center of it. Melissa, the designated navigator, pointed us at a place called Les Cornichon, and as we followed a waterway into the city, she furrowed her brow at the map in front her and said, “ These streets are like spaghetti on a plate.” which was as poetic as it was troubling.

We elbowed our way down narrow chattering streets of stone, ogling the buildings with their tile roofs and cracked exteriors. Dad kicked it though the gears on the stop and go streets, head on a swivel for one-ways, trying desperately to keep us from being the sauce in the spaghetti. We finally threw the rattling beast into park in a lot near the water and we walked the rest of the way to Les Cornichons, which was supposed to close in 30 mintues. In fact, the whole goddamn city was set to close at 3:00 according to all the hours on the Yelp pages and our hopes were not particularly high for preferential treatment from kitchen staff, given the way things had gone in Paris in the days that had preceded this. Even the hospital crew was blasé about helping us, and they thought I might be having a stroke. We skated into Les Cornichons 25 minutes before closing time, expecting to be turned away at the door, but we were pleasantly surprised to find them happy to see us, seat us, and feed us.

     The menu was a blackboard by the door and I pointed at something on it in an attempt to be accommodating, not knowing what I’d ordered, but knowing that I’d ordered it quickly, which was good enough. We sat by a window, watching the quiet town trickle past in the midday light, sighing our tired traveler sighs, making small talk. The waiter brought our food to the table and laid a burger in front of me, the likes of which I’d never seen before. A thick beef patty slathered in an inky black mayonnaise. Cheddar cheese and thin cut pickles, all sandwiched between two jaguar-black poppyseed buns.

“Merci” I said, unsure of whether I meant it.

“What is that?” My dad asked and I feigned confidence.

“It’s a burger.” Like he was the idiot. I bit into it so that my mouth would be full when he asked me all the other questions that I didn’t have the answers to.

It hit me in the roof of the mouth and sat there crackling and broody with flavor. Deep, rich, and measured. The patty was smoky and savory, which was offset every so slightly by the sweet and tang of the pickle. The cheddar cheese had a bite to it, but the mayonnaise was all run through with truffle oil and the flavor of the two coalesced into something like hickory smoke.

“Why is it black?” Dad asked.

To which I astutely replied “Holy Fuck.”  

His further inquiries were stifled with his own mouthful of my burger and he suddenly came to the same conclusion that I had, which was, “I don’t know why it’s black, but since it tastes like this, who cares?” We ate our inscrutable food in a respectful silence.

The high curbs and cobblestone streets of Reims all led to one central point. Something storied and monolithic that peeked out at us between buildings and snuck glances at us over the tops of trees. Then we rounded a bend and popped out of an alley and it was upon us. The Notre-Dame de Reims. A 261 foot tall masterpiece of stone and glass, rising from the floor of this town by the sheer will of pious men. Conceived of by people who never lived to see its completion, built in 400 AD without power tools or cranes.The first glance of it was absolutely stunning. Standing in the street with my bell rung, shock like a fireworks display, epic and dazzling.

What was it like to see this thing before you had a frame of reference for anything like this? To live in a one story village your entire life and then ride your horse out of the treeline and come upon something like this? People devoted all of their skill and every day of their lives to the completion of this thing and they died before it was ever even finished.

My eyes grasped at the grandness of the thing. I took in the intricacies of its stone and the stories that its windows told and I wondered if I would ever recover from the disbelief that I felt at being in the presence of such a thing.

The human psyche is an adaptive and dynamic organ, though. Normalizing unknowns and learning to live with them is an invaluable tool in terms of survival. All the humans who came across an elephant in the wild stood and transfixed by its size and strangeness instead of running like a burning monkey, didn’t pass their genes on. The stunned silence into which we’d stumbled melted into quiet murmurings, and then into drippy conversation about the cathedral and its history, and finally formed a puddle of loud questions about what we were having for dinner and how long it would take to get to Baden Baden, because we are survivors. We took our pictures and shuffled back to the crumpled can minivan. We ran for Germany like burning monkeys.

Les Cornichons:

https://www.yelp.com/biz/les-cornichons-reims

This one was supposed to slide through the net. One of those meals that didn’t have enough pictures to make it a post. It didn’t end in an epiphany or come with some powerful deeper meaning about humanity or the city of Paris or the people of France. Honestly, with the facts all laid out in front of me in bullet points, the whole experience pretty much boiled down to a nice walk and some creme brûlée.

It was a really nice walk though.

And don’t even get me started on that fucking creme brûlée.

So here it goes.

A cobalt night had started to fall on Paris and the city was a velvet sheet with holes pricked in it, light spilling out of them. We were following my wife, Magell-lissa, through the winding alleys of the Marais in the twilight, four dark figures on nearly empty streets, winking in and out of existence in the honeyed glow of the shop windows. Yelp had pointed us in the direction of a place called Le Compas and we found it bustling on this quiet night. The air outside was patio temperature, but the cigarettes were out like swarms of fireflies in their outside seating area, so we opted for a table inside.

At our table, Melissa ordered a glass of Ricard from the waiter. I wouldn’t shut up about it since Roger Martinho told me it was one of the biggest things he missed about France. The waiter brought her a half full wine flute of it. It was the color of fresh ginger and it smelled like licorice. She managed to take a puckering slug of it before the waiter could commandeer her glass and explain that she was supposed to water it down.

The restaurant had the candlelight glow of the kind of bar that a mobster might own. Smoke coming in off the patio, hanging around the bulbs and if you did a chicken dance in your chair, you’d knock people unconscious on either side of you. There would be no chicken dancing this night. I don’t remember what I ordered, which says nothing about the quality of that meal (which I remember being excellent) and everything about the dessert that followed it. Creme brûlée is one of those dumb touristy things that I felt I had to try at least once while I was in Paris. Like a Guinness in Ireland or schnitzel in Germany, I pointed at it on my menu for the sole purpose of knocking it off a list and didn’t commit any thought to actually enjoying it until the first bite was in my mouth. My spoon crushed a crater into the surface of it, spiderwebs across the eggshell thin layer of carmalized sugar on the top. Still only half paying attention, I dug a groove in the custard below, dumped it into my blah-blah mouth and the good boy part of my brain went out like a light. Good boy brain knows what noises are appropriate to make in a crowded restaurant. Good boy brain knows that one should pace themselves when eating in polite company and that spoons are for scooping and not for licking obscenely.

But those shards of sugar crunched between my teeth and that custard glazed out smooth and creamy acrossed my tongue and good boy brain hit the lever under his seat and was ejected from the cockpit trailing moans and eyerolls. I embarrassed my wife and I made my parents regret not getting me tested for stuff when my second grade teacher told them to and I’m pretty sure there’s a picture of my face at the hostess stand of Le Compas, warning them not to seat me in future. That’s on them though. Don’t make crystal meth if you don’t want people to take their clothes off in your driveway… or whatever. 

Le Compas:

https://www.yelp.com/biz/le-compas-paris

The people of Paris turned out for May Day in droves and it was a day for sirens and darting eyes. In the courtyard outside the Louvre, France’s Gendarme roamed in packs of 4, shoulder pads and stab vests, assault rifles at the low ready. The soldier part of my brain saw the city the way a mountaineer sees an avalanche in the making as people ran by us with bandannas over their mouths in the little coffee shop we’d holed up in. We were on foot from the Marais, at the end of a meandering line that led through the business district and over the Seine under a dusty grey sky with empty threats of rain. Shops were boarded up. Crowds were gathered near the government buildings. Later, two policemen would be set on fire by protesters as the buildup of tension and anger let go and came rushing down the mountain, and at that moment, sitting in our coffee shop watching the city go by with its guard up, we could feel it. 

We caught a cab to Montmartre just to escape the dread and the driver dropped us into a throng of people who had apparently had the same thought we had and gotten the fuck away from the city center. We pushed through the crowds of them, past shops full of knick knacks, through clouds of cigarette smoke. The bustle and energy of the place was a welcome respite from the eerie quiet of downtown, with its empty potential like a balloon about to pop. Midday found us at a dog park on a bench looking out over the city in all of its vastness. Beautiful and old. A wind was jostling the trees and pulling the shroud of cloud cover off the city, sunlight speckling buildings, blue skies like stripes on a grey tiger.

“I’m hungry,” Dad offered. It was our most common offering as a family in general. Burdens are not complainers for the most part. My dad re-broke his back and he didn’t know it until his legs literally started to give up on him. My mom almost died from chicken pox because she was busy taking care of sick babies and she didn’t address it until it took hold of her lungs. My grandmother had a root canal without anesthesia because she “didn’t like the way drugs made her feel.” But if we’re hungry, you’re gonna hear about it.

We began to scroll through our mental rolodexes for lunch suggestions, which should have been overflowing. I had spent weeks watching travel shows and scouring blogs about food in Paris. My parents had watched youtube videos about the city and its food and filled notebooks full of addresses and names. But with much of the city so boarded up, we were drawing blanks. We made some calls and got some answering machines. We visited websites and got holiday closure notices. Finally, I remembered a lunch I’d had almost a month ago in a Polynesian place in Seattle with Krishan, our friend Jackie and her friend, who was visiting from Bend, Oregon. I had mentioned my trip to Paris and Jackie’s friend lit up. She gave me suggestions that were like thoughtfully selected gifts just for me. Real places with fond memories attached to them. A fondue place that served wine out of baby bottles and a world renowned falafel place that could cure a hangover or just set you right in a general sense. She had written them down in careful handwriting in the notebook I keep in my pocket and I fished it out, there on that bench in Montmartre. The entry was easy to find, because it was neat and helpful and completely out of place amidst the craziness that is the rest of that notebook. Right next to “That muthafucka looks like he eats crayons…” (different day, different story) were the words:

“L’As Du Falafel”

I threw it out there. There was agreement. We dislodged ourselves from our quiet park bench and dove back into the hurricane of people roaring through Montmartre, in search of falafel.

Down a staircase with a tram that ran along it, through choked streets. Middle Eastern men playing a shell game with black disks, cash changing hands as they shuffled and flipped. Cabs fording the rivers of people like alligators slow and predatory and the rain on a tin roof sensation of languages and music and new smells all around us as we made our way to the Marais, Melissa leading us through it all. I don’t know whether being a geography major in college made her a good map reader, or being a good map reader made her a geography major, but that little spitfire is fuckin Magellan even with a halfassed map in her hand. She held her phone out at the end of her arm and it pulled her along the streets and down alleys while we hustled behind her. A cobblestone path wound between buildings and we pressed up against the walls as cars rattled past us, rims rubbing against the narrow curbs. Fifty meters from our destination we smacked into a line of people who had made the same plans we had. There were a hundred something of them, hope on their faces in a gradient scale from the front of the line to the back. The closer you got, the more you could smell. The more you could see. There were men behind the counter, working with mechanical precision, loading pitas, manning fryers, changing out empties. Fire jumped out of pans, knives chattered on cutting boards.

Out on the street, 15 yards from the big show, a kid took our orders and our money. When he passed we realized that he wasn’t wearing anything that indicated he worked at this place and that there was a distinct possibility that he had just capitalized on the obvious pre-falafel delirium that we were exhibiting and cleverly robbed us. Fortunately, that was not the case. We approached the counter and handed the ticket the kid had given us to the maestro with the tongs. He nodded and began slapping ingredients into steaming pitas. His movements bordered on machine automation and I genuinely believe that if that man had a passion for building cars, he’d John Henry the Ford Production plant right out of the fucking market. Falafel, eggplant, sauces, cabbage, tomato, into the pita, into my hand. I floated away from that counter into a different Paris than the one I’d woken up to. The stress and the fear fell away. The sun was out and I was smooshing falafel into my face, little bits of it sticking to my cheeks and cascading down onto my hands. Crunchy, salty, fried chickpeas and smooth, bitter eggplant. Creamy sauce and soft pita. Cars whistled down the alley, drivers ogling us as we hunkered in the gutter, inches from their hubcaps, eating like raccoons from the garbage, probably thinking something along the lines of “ Those Mothafucka’s look like they eat crayons…”
Las Du Fallafel

 https://yelp.to/qTKq/EnJk4CrKWD