5 summer destinations! Part 3

Paris


WELL before midsummer, the sun sets late over Paris. Even at 9 p.m., you can sit on the banks of the Canal St.-Martin in the 10th Arrondissement, and see in the still water the reflection of the sky, a blue mottled with thin clouds, and the low pale buildings with their amber lights just turned on, and the ruffled, fractal edge of the trees in full green bloom. Night seems as if it will never come.

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By the water, there is a small pink dot of a helium balloon, bobbing in the intermittent breeze. The balloon is key. It was given to you by Pink Flamingo, a pizza parlor down the nearby Rue Bichat, whose bicycle deliveryman will use it as a beacon to locate you and present the five pies you’ve ordered (10.50 to 16 euros each). They’re not all for you, of course — you’ve got friends to help eat the pizza and drink the four bottles of red wine (40 euros) you picked up from Le Verre Volé, a wine bar across the canal.

You’ll love the pizza’s quirky toppings — the Poulidor’s goat cheese and sliced duck breast, the bacon-and-pineapple Obama — and the earthy pinot noir. But finally it will be dark and you’ll be more than tipsy and your friends will be heading home by Métro, by Vespa and by Vélib’, the city’s rental bicycle system.

And you, you’ll take off on foot, up along the canal toward Belleville, where Asian, Arab and African immigrants live alongside artists and yuppies and bobos. And you’ll climb the stairs at the Hipotel Paris Belleville and collapse into the single bed of your spartan room, not caring that the toilet is in a smelly closet down the hall, because the sheets are clean, the rate is dirt cheap and you’ve just experienced the most wonderful, traditional and frugal activity in the City of Light — the picnic.

The picnic is the great democratizing institution of summer, when Parisians spill onto riverbanks and bridges and into parks and gardens, chasing away the memories of winter and rain with baguettes and bottles, sandals and sundresses. For the wealthy, picnics are a lark, for the less wealthy an escape, and for this Frugal Traveler, who spent nine days in Paris at the end of May and early June, proof that classic Parisian indulgence doesn’t have to cost a fortune.

In fact, this idea that Paris is expensive has always struck me as odd. Of course, it can be, if your conception of Paris is built on haute couture and Michelin stars. But Paris — the physical as well as the cultural — is the creation less of the moneyed nobility than of the strivers, schemers, hustlers, freeloaders and starving artists who roam its streets, sing chansons on its subways and make tiny cups of coffee last hours at zinc counters. When I imagine Paris, I think of Émile Zola, the 19th-century novelist whose based-in-reality characters — from ambitious laundresses to real-estate speculators — are, in their own way, just as responsible as Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann for transforming it into the grand, boulevarded city we know today.

I also think of Ernest Hemingway, whose “A Moveable Feast”— a “restored” version is being published this summer by Scribner — is the ur-text of rose-tinted Parisian poverty, a collage of scenes in which the young novelist starves for his art in a cold-water apartment, yet somehow manages to enjoy ski trips to Austria, bottles of good white Mâcon and platters of oysters.

Of course, Hemingway didn’t spend the rest of his life in a dingy garret (hello, Key West!), and neither would I. In the spirit of Parisian strivers past and present, my plan was to switch hotels every few days, starting with cheapest but (I hoped) still recommendable bed I could find, and moving my way up to grander and fancier digs — while, of course, staying well under 100 euros a night. In a twisted kind of way, I wanted to develop a bit of Baudelairean “nostalgie de la boue,” or nostalgia for the gutter — a romantic vision of poverty that can only really be embraced after climbing out of privation.

My descent into Paris’s lower rungs began at the allegedly two-star Hipotel, which I found through my trusty European hotel guide, EuroCheapo.com. The photos were sharp, the location decent and the price (32 euros a night, or about $44 at $1.41 to the euro) terrific, and the poor reviews on TripAdvisor only fed my dream of finding the ideal, undiscovered hovel. Dream on. When I arrived around 11 a.m., there was no one at the front desk and the hallways were just clean enough to dissuade complaint. After lugging my suitcase up a flight of stairs (what, did I expect an elevator?), I found the corridor dark, the light switches dangling on exposed wires.

The room was, in the French description, a “simple.” I had a desk, a bed, a sink, mismatched hangers and a single window that let in some welcome daylight. The only towels were hand towels, and the shower was down the hall, in a locked, windowless closet whose key I had to request at the front desk. It was bad, but neither hilariously bad nor charmingly bad. At least I was well situated, around the corner from the Colonel Fabien Métro stop and walking distance from other neighborhoods.

Because of this, I spent little time in Belleville. Instead, as always seems to happen, I wound up wandering the Marais, the former Jewish quarter that straddles the Third and Fourth Arrondissements and has, in the past 15 years, become home to innumerable galleries and fashionable boutiques. It’s also one of the few neighborhoods relatively untouched by Haussmannian urban planning. The streets remain narrow and chaotic, and feel more so because of the masses of tourists bumbling about.

Source: NYtimes