Semaine Sainte

Manila during Holy Week is a lifeless desert, quiet and calm, and very hot. Most offices, restaurants, and shops are closed from Wednesday afternoon, only to open again on Easter Sunday. There is a mass exodus to far-flung hometowns, exotic beaches, and Hong Kong theme parks. 

In contrast, Parisian restaurants are open.

So are all the shops.

My family usually stays in Manila for the traditional "visita iglesia" and stations of the cross because my father got a kick out of driving on the abandoned streets of the typically gridlocked city. Last year it felt strange, because tradition (birthdays, Christmas, new year's day) tends to magnify my father's absence. This year it felt even stranger because I did it alone, in a city I scarcely know. But when one is alone and lost, one can only turn to tradition.

The men in white capes shield the "couronne" from snap-happy tourists.
To the right, on top of the red cloth are the nails and cross fragments.

On Friday morning, my lovely husband printed out church maps for me and dropped me off at the Notre Dame de Paris in Ile de la Cite, where I stayed in line for about ten minutes only to realize that there was a separate entrance for those who want to see the crown of thorns. Time was not wasted though, because I sneaked in a rosary while sandwiched between groups of loud Spaniards.

Once inside, I lined up at the center aisle which turned out to be  the line going towards the thorns.  I made it just in time for the 3pm service (in French, English, Spanish, Italian and German) and an usher gave me a guide. In a matter of minutes I was singing in French too. And then suddenly, I was in front of the relic.

When my mother was here, we went to Sainte-Chapelle to see the church built just to house the crucifixion relics. She had hoped to see the crown of thorns, the fragment of the cross and the nails that St. Helen was said to have recovered from Jerusalem. But the church only reveals it to the public on certain holidays and first Fridays of the month, so she wasn't able to see them. 

The faithful kiss or wipe their fingers on the glass that exposes the Thorns.

The service lasted an hour. I got a seat around the back and stayed until the end, when a woman I helped out with the sequencing of songs wished me Bonne Pâques - Happy Easter.  

Next, I went to the oldest church in Paris, the Sainte-Julien-le-Pauvre, which stood  just across the street and behind the oldest tree in Paris. 

The church of Saint Julian the Poor, who talked to a deer, killed his parents,
then met Jesus on a boat and became a saint.

They were holding a funeral service for Jesus, hence the wreath of roses in front.

When I came it was practically empty.

The church itself is an artifact.

A few streets away at the Saint-Severin, the rosary was being recited in French.

It was all quiet at the Saint-Etienne-du-Mont. It used to be the abbey of  St. Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris. King Louis XV ordered the erection of a big basilica for her relics (adjacent to the church) and rededicated the existing church to St. Etienne. But later secularization turned the basilica into the Pantheon - a mausoleum for notable French men and woman (Marie Curie), and it was back to the old church for St. Genevieve. 

Sadly, many statues were destroyed by revloutionaries,
and St. Genevieve's relics were thrown in the river or burned.

The cross is covered in cloth.

The shrine of St. Genevieve, patron saint of Paris.
On the left is her tomb, visited by John Paul II during World Youth Day.

I had some trouble finding the Notre Dame du Liban because until then, I had been relying on the sight of church towers to guide me when my map reading skills failed. The church was under an apartment building, and definitely not what I expected a church facade to look like.

People come in with bouquets of flowers, or buy some from a florist just outside the main church entrance.

The churchgoers here are mainly Lebanese Maronites.  

Who would have known this could be under an apartment complex?

There was also a TV crew.

Further down the road was the Church of the Val-de-Grâce, one of the jewels of French architecture. The inscription on the portico reads: "To Virgin Mary for the occasion of Jesus' birth," or something to that effect.

After the Church of St. Genevieve was turned into the Pantheon, the former church's organ was transferred here.

On Rue Mouffetard, the ancient road leading to Italy, is the Church of Saint-Médard.  Click the link for an interesting account of its history. 

The church that stands here now was allegedly built in the 7th century;
an earlier church in the grounds made circa 500 was destroyed by the Normans.

It's behind the trees in this pretty plaza.

A Latin mass was being said when I arrived at the Saint Germain l'Auxerrois, the royal parish of the kings of France.

This beautiful structure in front of La Louvre was built in the 6th century by the Merovingians, but there is little evidence of their influence.

Two blocks away is St. Eustache, where Louis XIV took his first communion, Mozart held his mother's funeral, and Moliere got married. It's a very beautiful church, with heart-shaped glass on the windows. Guide books prominently feature the statue L'Ecoute in front.

There was a service and a choir sang after each reading. 

St. Eustache was a Roman soldier who converted to Catholicism and life punished him repeatedly for it. Now, I'm not very religious (in fact I raise my eyebrow at the over zealous) but I do practice a personal faith. Catholics in France are an endangered species, and when I tell people that I'm abstaining and I have Holy Week vows to fulfill, I get strange looks. This is a country that has outlawed the wearing of niqabs and burqas in the name of modernity, after all. Of course, it's nothing like early Christians suffered, or what others suffered in the hands of Christians - but it's hard to explain my outdated beliefs in the face of doubt or ridicule, even apathy. 

For now at least, I am free to exercise my ideology; but with religion becoming less and less popular, I'm not sure how long before churches become mere tourist attractions and relics themselves - and prayers reduced to mere whispers in caves.

Pole-arity

The first few months of marriage forces you to look at yourself through a harsh mirror. You are pushed to face your partner's uncensored judgement, fair or otherwise. Arguments could stem from the most innocent gestures, questions, facial expressions; things you don't even expect to start a row. My husband and I, for example, have had emotionally and mentally draining clashes over the following:

• the right distance between person and horse when said horse has its back towards aforementioned person
• a mysterious noise coming from the vacuum cleaner
• Chinese or Italian

If you are married or live with someone, you might know what I mean. When I was single I never squandered a thought on equino-homo distance, mysterious vacuum noises, or took time deciding between Chinese or Italian. Life was much easier. When something went wrong I could chalk up the frustration on an uncooperative ATM machine, the wrong moisturizer, obtuse office protocol - THINGS. H says I never blame myself for anything - which is wrong in so many levels. I am very hard on myself when I know I am at fault, and I admit it too... it's just that I'm hardly ever wrong about anything! Which is why, on the very rare occasion that I am wrong, I apologize big time. (If you know me well, you would know this to be true.) This brings me to what happened recently, something I'm inclined to only half blame myself for.

Paris' streets are lined by poles of different sizes ranging from about 3 to 4 feet high, irregularly spaced and painted brown so that, if you are walking in the dark or carrying something that obscures vision from 3 feet and below, you just might bang into one... square on the crotch. But we'll get back on this later.

One day, I got a call from a neighbor who asked if I could s'il tu plaît pick up his children from school because his wife is just on her way back from Tunisia and he is organizing a play at the Theatre de la Ville. Friendly neighborhood couch potato that I am, I went to pick the two little girls up.

First I went to get four year-old Ä, who ran straight at me when she saw me entering the crèche maternelle. Then I took six year-old Ś, who initially beamed about a magic box she made dans l'ecole, then wailed about something she misplaced 5 minutes later. And I mean WAIL in the original sense of the word. Her yowling and caterwauling could have rivaled any in Greek tragedy, and it took me a while to understand what it was about. Trying to solve the crisis, we traced the places she'd been, but the marron sac was nowhere to be found. Tired of carrying little Ä up and down the crèche I told Ś it was time to give up, and perhaps she could have a better chance of finding it if she asks around school the next day. Here my own tragedy begins...

Getting the two girls outside school grounds was chaos. Little Ä, who had been in good spirits while her big sister cried, began crying when I got her big sister to stop. So I let the little one walk on the pavement cracks like she wanted, until some cars started coming by and I realized it would take us forever to get home if I had to pull her back each time a car passed by. I snatched her up despite her theatrical protestations and got her to laugh in a few seconds. This small victory was undone a few seconds later when, jealous of her big sister's consolatory juice box, she started throwing another hissy fit.

Meanwhile Ś, who was usually in a contrary mood, was finally in good spirits and was gamely repeating the English words I was teaching her (and if you know French children, this is a mean feat). To my relief, Ä noticed her tears amounted to diddly-squat and stopped crying. It was at around this time when we were shouting some random English word and both girls were laughing that yours truly's nether regions crashed into a certain vicious, and practically invisible, Parisian street pole.

It was a good thing that Ä's feet were not in the way, but maaaaaannn there are no words to describe the pain. My initial reaction, which I think is quite Pinoy, was to laugh hysterically. Oddly, the girls laughed with me without knowing why. It took me a few seconds to wrap my head around the pain, then we kept walking. The rest of the march home was a battle of wills between me and Ä who kept wanting to run. I couldn't let her loose on these streets full of crazy, stressed-out Parisian drivers, so in between sidewalks I would let her run wild, and then run after her when she strayed too close to the curb. On the last pedestrian crossing I carried off struggling four year-old while my lower body throbbed in pain.

When I finally got them home and in their rooms I heard the doorbell, it was their mom. They were out of my sight for 15 seconds, and when I came back, Ś had given Ä a full makeover. The little tyke was in a princess gown with crooked gray eye shadow, lipstick, and red stripes all over her face that I believe were supposed to be blushers. It reminded me of my crash course in makeup 9 months ago.

But going back, those metal poles are dangerous! I ached for a full week after that. And though I may be at fault for having avoided the ones that came before the killer blow, it's impossible to see if you are carrying something that can obscure your vision, and hard to calculate if there's a next one since they are irregularly spaced. Damn you, pole!

This foray into the world of babysitting had me thinking hard about my ability to raise children. Can I handle tantrums? Can I be patient 24/7? I am living with a full-grown man and my patience grows thin with him sometimes; so what does that portend? Of course I love the two girls to bits, they can be very sweet. But they can also be difficult to handle, especially with the language barrier.

Leaving the girls that evening, I was surprised that Ś had begun using English on me. Their mom told me the two girls really like me and hope I could come by more often. They are very sweet girls when they are not being drama queens (which their parents have accused them of many, many  times), but for now I think I have my hands full with the little boy pretending to be my husband. And I bet if you asked him, he would say the same.

Two rings from the princesses - which cut my circulation so I gave them back.

Charot Cake

In Pinoy street lingo, "charot" means flirty. I bought some carrots last week at the street market thinking I could make something healthy within the week, but you know what they say about the road to hell. We were asked out to dinner and lunch plenty of times this week so I needed to think of something to do with the fruits and vegetables I hoarded before they start to rot. The eggplant was turned into a gratin with some bread crumbs that were dangling perilously close to the expiration date; the tomatoes were chucked into a bowl of romaine with bell peppers, chicken, parsley, grapes, mango cubes, oranges and wine vinegar, while the remaining tomatoes will be tossed in with some fresh mozzarella and basil (by tomorrow or else!) for a traditional salad; extra mangoes will be transformed into jam while some will end up on a pizza I'm making tomorrow and the overripe bananas will find a new lease in life as cake as soon as I buy more eggs. Meanwhile, the carrots were enjoyed for three nights straight after I transformed them into a moist cake. The first night we shared it with a friend who came over to play video games, the second day I had it for breakfast, and today H was dead set on eating the strawberries before they got soft so I let loose the whipped cream and set our diet back 2 weeks. 

Malanding cake.

And I'm not sorry!

Chicken Mango Salad

Senator and ex-fugitive Panfilo Lacson and I have something in common: we learned how to cook while in self-exile (or in his case, hiding) through the wonders of the internet. One of my more successful forays into Jamie Oliver territory is this mango salad, which I tweaked from a recipe I found on Google.

H and I have been trying really hard to lose the winter weight, I only just realized I had gained 14 lbs since last year! So for a month or more we have been trying to stick to salads. This one he said I could make every day. 

So as soon as I woke up today I went to the fresh food market (which visits our street only on Thursdays and Sundays up to 12 noon) and got some giant Peruvian mangoes and heads of salad to surprise H with after swimming.

Dressing

3 tablespoons orange juice
3 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
1 cup olive oil
1 teaspoon mustard (optional)
salt and pepper
chopped parsley
basil

Salad

Chicken breast slices (boiled or roasted)
2 oranges, peeled
1 peruvian mango or 2 yellow mangoes, sliced
cherry tomatoes, halved
grapes, peeled
1 bell pepper, cubed
chopped shallots

Directions

1) Cook chicken - I prefer boiling it because it's easier, but roasted chicken is tastier.
2) Whisk dressing
3) Toss everything in a bowl

It's that easy :)

Perfect Square

Parisians consider Place des Vosges, once called the Place Royale, the most beautiful square in the world.

Place Vosges in the 17th Century - From Parisdigest.com.

It is perfectly square, with 36 houses, divvied up into 9 houses per edge, standing side by side for all of 400 years. 

It's here that I sometimes take my books to read, when the sun is out and I have nothing better to do. 

This poetry group (Place au Poeme) had the same idea, reading out loud to the crowd.

While the rest of us enjoyed the sun.

A few weeks ago they decided it was warm enough to turn on the fountains, and a capoeira group was jumping around in the grass.

Art galleries and restaurants line the perimeter of the square.

This one I really liked, it reminded me of my dad.

Kings used to live here, but one house in particular has been turned into a museum in honor of its famous occupant: a writer whose "oeuvres" are synonymous with Paris.

The dude who wrote Les Miserables.

In fact, my guidebook says it was here that he wrote most of the book.

He lived on the second floor of the hotel, and the museum has reconstructed the rooms. My mom would have loved to see this, even though when you really think about it, looking at furniture should be boring! But Victor Hugo rocked my adolescent world in high school, so he's kind of my rock star. 

Perhaps the desk where he penned Notre-Dame de Paris (Hunchback of Notre Dame)? 
The leather desk top is really worn out. 

The china room overlooks the Place Des Vosges. I think this is supposed to be the dining area.

The man sure loved his chinaware.

This bust by Rodin is in the hallway just before his bedroom.

The museum is free, so if you want to go it's close to the Metro Bastille, and you can take the No.1, 5, or 8. There are also some nice shops outside if you finish early.

I had a rendezvous with some Pinoy friends near Hausmann so I took off after getting some sun.