Best in Class

Sina and I were recently discussing the concept of "Best in Class." If you want to serve an elegant meal using commonplace ingredients, you should make the dish the best in its class. Instead of having regular tuna fish sandwiches, serve the tuna on baguette slices. Definitely a useful bit of information.

I have found that Parisians are porchsitters and people watchers at heart. However, they have elevated these great hobbies to best in class by doing them in open air cafes with good food and the continually changing scene of people walking by. Tres inteligents!

We spent the afternoon at Montmartre . . . the neighborhood famed for its bohemian, artsy history. (Marilyn, if you were to move to Paris, you would pick this neighborhood for sure!) While tourists were prolific, we only needed to go half a block off the main road to have the place to ourselves. Our visit began at the steps of Sacre Couer Basilica where hundreds of people sat on the steps admiring the view of Paris and listening to a man play his guitar and sing. The movie "Grease" seems to be the soundtrack of this trip for me. They showed it on the plane and this guy was singing "You're the One that I Want." When he got to a part he didn't know, he just filled in the missing words with "wot the wot the wot". Little girls on a school field trip danced all around him having the time of their life.




We proceeded down the road and found the main square where local artists displayed their paintings and offered to do portraits of passers by. Here, we stopped for a few minutes of Parisian porchsitting and a 4 euro (about $5.25) 8 oz. Coke. It costs more than wine here. We then continued through the charming neighborhood, ending up at a local park where Ruby ran around while we watched some locals play Boules. We never did find the Moulin Rouge but the guidebook assured us that it was close by. Instead we found a different moulin for our photo op.