In a corner of a massive gothic church in the heart of Paris is a monument to the fruit and vegetable sellers who, after 800 years of selling goods in front of this church, were relocated to a suburb in Paris to make way for a train station and a giant shopping mall.

Until 1969, the food market operated in front of this church (L’eglise Saint-Eustache).

Called Les Halles or The Halls, merchants came from all over to sell food to Parisians.

Near the church, in a local foie gois shop, I took a photo of what Les Halles looked like a long time ago.

In front of and in the halls of Saint-Eustache is where our Belly of Paris Tour with Context Travel began.  We walked with our guide Carolin Young as she painted us a picture of a Paris table long ago.

We walked through the streets listening and learning some history of Paris and food.

And we made stops along the way. For sure one of the highlights of our walk through Paris with Carolin was all the shops.

Foie gois shops, cheese shops, wine shops.

Even an open air market or two.

And then there were the chefs’ shops. 

My sister was super excited to purchase a few tools for her kitchen from the places where France’s greatest chefs buy their copper pots and knives.

Within a few blocks of each other, there were four or five of these storied old restaurant and chef supply stores. 

Here’s Anna in front of one of the oldest ones. We had a hard time getting her out of there.

But we bribed her with food.

Our guide, Carolin, chose a few cheeses.

And a few more cheeses.

And baguettes and croissants from a well-loved boulangerie.

These prize cups represent many “bests” in Paris baking….best croissant and best baguette to name a few.

At the end of our tour, Carolin led us, along with our treasures to a room painted with old frescoes in Le Rocher de Cancale, one of the oldest restaurants in Paris, to have a simple meal of wine, cheese and bread.

Le Rocher de Cancale translates to the Rocks of Cancale, which is an area in Brittany famed for oysters, hence the rock and oyster sculpture on the outside of the restaurant.

A couple days later, Anna and I had oysters in an open market, where they served them fresh and then filled your empty shells with white wine to follow.

Fresh from the sea, we experienced having the freshest ingredients in Paris from all over France.

As Carolin had told us, in Paris, the food is not necessarily local, but you can have the best that is available in the capital city of France, and because of the central markets in Paris, it has always been this way.

In Paris, you can have the very best.

And we had SO many meals in Paris that were the very best.

One of our favorites was prepared for us right in our apartment by Chef Fabrice from La Belle Assiette. We were super excited to get to watch a seasoned chef in action, admiring his knife skills and asking questions about sauces.

And little warm melt-in-your-mouth chocolate molten cakes.

Divine!

Another of our best meals was at Les Papilles. We happily took the last 10pm reservation available at this popular Paris bistro.

Every day the chef has one set menu, which you have family style at your table.

Our first course was a gorgeous carrot soup that came in a tureen that we poured over these beautiful bowls of bacon, croutons, creme fraiche and herbs.

Then we had a copper pot full of slowly stewed beef with potatoes, onions, carrots and mushrooms. So tender. So delectable. So full.

Followed by cheese and fruit.

And a salted caramel pot de creme.

The meal at Les Papilles was for sure one of our very best.

But also high on our list was one of the many lovely recommendations we got from Carolin, another bistro called Terroir Parisien, a nod to local food in the region of Paris.

Anna had smoked trout.

Mama and I had the menu of the day, which was local eggs and bacon. (We’re still dreaming about these.)

Chicken and potatoes.

And a pear clafoutis that I will be trying to recreate very soon.

In fact, there are so many desserts from our time in Paris that I would like to re-create. We ate many gorgeous crepes, of course.

Like this one with chocolate and bananas that arrived after Anna asked our waiter to bring us his very best crepe.

Another dessert highlight was this roasted apple with caramel and nuts from La Grande Epicerie.

And this rose macaron from Pierre Hermes.

We had so many gorgeous pastries and tarts. I kept saying that I am going to make more efforts to make my food beautiful when I serve it after being in Paris.

Where even a simple fruit salad is a work of art.

Our very first meal in Paris was a meat, cheese and bread board, which we devoured in a street cafe, slightly stupefied that we were all sitting in the middle of Paris.

But a week later, we pracitally considered ourselves regulars at the patisserie just a few steps away from that same cafe, where even the Queen of England has been to taste the famous eclairs.

On our last night in Paris, we named all of our favorite foods we had eaten over a week of filling our bellies with so many delights, and we could not narrow it down to one meal. It was all the very best.

A big thanks to Context Travel for sending us on the Belly of Paris tour for free to help promote this fun walk through the history of Paris and food. And thank you Carolin for a lovely afternoon in the heart of Paris!

PS. You can watch our highlight videos from Paris on Vine!!

The post Snapshots of Eating in Paris appeared first on Alison Chino.

But the knowing does not stop me hoping.

Every time the yellow stars are handed out or the trains roll in, I long for the people to rise up and stand together, Jew and Gentile side by side, refusing to obey the German orders. Just one time, I want to see a massive revolt instead of passive cooperation.

Of course, I also want to think that I would be that person who would not stand by and let it happen.

While we were in Amsterdam, we had the opportunity to stand in some of the places where these events occured.

We followed a local through the Jewish history of Amsterdam, and she walked us back in time to long before the war, when Amsterdam’s arms welcomed Portuguese Jews escaping the Inquisition. A community grew up in the city, among the Catholics and Protestants. Amsterdam was a place of religious freedom, she told us.

We visited the Portuguese Jewish Synagogue, where for hundreds of years, services have been held by candlelight. It is still a mystery, but this sacred space was untouched during the war, despite massive looting of all Jewish homes and businesses. Though every scrap of wood that could be found was used for fires in the winter of 1944 when the city was at its coldest and most desperate, the carved benches and beams of this synagogue remained intact.

A small number of Jews returned to begin to light the candles and worship here again after the war. Their children are the keepers of the ancient books in the library and the tapestries in the museum, all preserved from harm.

Small miracles in the details fuel my hope for light within this dark story.

We walked past the theatre that was used as a holding place for Jews while they awaited the trains that would take them away. Some remained here for a few hours. Others spent days in the overcrowded hall. Children were held across the street in a building from which many were smuggled out by a man who sent them to live with families in the countryside.

We stopped at a statue of a dock worker, marking a strike of Dutch workers that took place when the first Jewish men were arrested and taken away in Amsterdam. The strike was immediately squashed by the Nazis and its leaders executed. Only one of the 427 Jewish men from that first arrest survived the camps. I remained fascinated by this story because strikes and protests against the Nazis seem to be rare instances in the WWII narrative.

More commonly the resistance took place behind closed doors.

In hiding.

Claire, our guide, tells us that when she was house hunting in Amsterdam, she discovered that many homes still have a secret annex or hidden rooms from the war. Over 25,000 Jews were hidden in Holland during the war but around half of those were discovered and sent to camps.

We stood in line to see where Anne Frank and her family were hiding before someone betrayed them. We walked through the rooms where Anne and her family spoke in whispers for over two years. We saw the little desk where Anne scribbled her story onto pages, hoping that one day someone would read it.

And we did.

But there is something about being present that is so different from reading about it.

All those stories I have read and films I have watched do not have the same weight as seeing my own son crawl into the hiding place for the Jews that the Ten Booms built in their Dutch home. We rode bikes to the neighboring town of Harrlam to see the closet at the end of Corrie Ten Boom’s bedroom, built with bricks that were smuggled into the house inside grandfather clocks.

We sat in a circle in chairs where the Ten Booms lived and breathed and carried out their part in the resistance until they were betrayed and arrested. I’ve heard Corrie’s story all my life and watched The Hiding Place as a young girl, but being there in her house made me ask different questions. Would I have put my family at risk by hiding others?

Would I have faced arrest?

Would I have been like Corrie’s father when they came for me?

Because he was an old man, in his eighties, they told him he could stay behind if he would promise not to help anyone else, to which he answered,

“If someone knocks on my door tomorrow looking for help, I will open it to them.”

He chose death in prison over remaining quiet at home.

Father ten Boom’s bravery makes me cry happy tears in spite of learning over the last few days that the Dutch Jewry were practically annihilated during the Holocaust. The percentage of Jewish people who lost their lives in Holland was higher than in any other nation.

Claire pointed out on the street a small gold square, ten centimeters on each side.

A stolperstein. Or a stumbling stone.

These are all over the world now, she told us.

An artist in Germany, Gunter Demnig, was speaking to someone once who claimed that no victims of the Holocaust had lived in her neighborhood.

She was wrong.

This discovery led Demnig to create small memorials to victims of the Holocaust that would be placed on the street in front of the last known residence of the victim.

Most of small brass plaques begin with the words, ‘Here lived…’

This phrase is followed by a name and birth year. Then a deportation date. A death camp.

You are meant to stumble over them. And then to note that someone once lived here, a person for whom life took a turn down a very dark road.

Now that Claire had pointed them out to me, I kept my eyes open for them.

There were more stolpersteine on our walk into Amsterdam.

There are just over 40000 of these stones in the world at present. A vast number considering the project is less than ten years old.

But it’s a small number when you think that there are over six million Jews to be represented. As well as many non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust. And if one day there are millions of stolpersteine on the sidewalks of Europe, will everyone be remembered?

And what about the victims of homicides that have occurred since?

Is there a world in which no victim of injustice will be forgotten?

When we came back from Amsterdam, we watched The Hiding Place together.

Again, we watched the story go the way it always does. The trains carry the people away to their deaths.

The Ten Booms are arrested and sent away. Corrie tells her sister that she is sure they have reached hell and her sister takes her by the hand and tells her,

“There is no pit so deep that God’s love is not deeper still.”

It may seem a small comfort in the midst of so much suffering.

When I see a stolperstein I wonder who they were. I wonder about their story. And I am in awe of the one who knows all the stories.

God has seen every tear, heard every cry, felt every injustice. He knows every name, whether they be written on the streets or not.

Sources:

A great big thank you to Context Travel for sending our family on a tour of Jewish history in Amsterdam! We’re grateful to Claire for her patience with our kiddos and her extensive knowledge of the city. 

This was our second Context Travel Tour and we love getting to learn those special details about a place that only a local can share. 

We visited the Anne Frank House and the Corrie Ten Boom House separately from our tour. Both are well worth the time and effort to see. 

The post Stumbling Through History: Jews in Amsterdam Tour appeared first on Alison Chino.

Bankside Beach Combing for History: A London History Tour

Simon was waiting for me as I got my usual pat down in security.

(My dreads always have to be manually checked to be sure I’m not hiding something in them.)

We both walked over to where his backpack had been flagged.

The man behind the counter pulled the long, rusted piece of metal out of a plastic bag,

“What is this?” he asked.

I looked at Simon to see if he was going to answer.

He began quietly, “Well, it’s something we found by the river…” he looked up at me for help.

“Well, you see, Sir, we went on a tour of London today and as part of the tour we went ‘digging for history’ (air quotes) down by the Thames and that bag of spikes, nails, rocks and clay pipe fragments is what we collected. Our guide told us that it’s all really old, like two to three hundred years old. And actually you can tell that this piece (pointing) was made by hand, like by a blacksmith, because of its uneven edges.”

Raised eyebrows from the security guard as he put all our treasures back in the bag.

“Just a minute,” he said. He took the bag to another counter.

I looked at Simon. “Sorry, bud.”

We had told him it was a long shot that we would be able to get all of our newly acquired historical artifacts through security at the airport.

We sat down with Dr. Jim Harris on Sunday morning in the courtyard of The George Inn in London.

He told us a little of his own background. He is a professor of art history at Oxford, and before that he was an actor in London. Then before we set off on our walking tour of London, he asked us about ourselves and our interests.

When Simon mentioned that he really likes dragons, Jim told him that we were going to see a lot of dragons. And in fact we were already sitting near a dragon. The George Inn is named after the legend of Saint George and the Dragon, a tenth century tale of a saint who killed a dragon.

“Go and have a closer look at that sign and you can see the dragon in the corner.”

This was the first of many times over the next several hours that Jim would draw Simon into learning by helping him observe the world around him.

We left The George to walk through part of Southwark, which was the seedier side of the Thames in Shakespeare’s day.

Technically on the outskirts of London, once you crossed the river into Southwark, you could engage in the sorts of past times that were not permitted in the City of London.

And one of those activities was going to see a play.

The official title for our walking tour was The Evolution of London Theatre, but many other stories came into the telling of the story of the theatre, so we received more of London’s general history in the bargain.

But it was also fun to see where playacting actually began in London, as well as where it is today. There is an authentic replica of Shakespeare’s Globe on the South bank of the Thames River today, but it is only about twenty years old.

The original Globe is long gone but its place is still marked in this apartment courtyard.

So much of London’s famous roots are marked like this, small reminders of a long and varied history.

And many more have been forgotten and are buried unmarked beneath buildings.

Often when a new structure goes up in London, discoveries are made in the laying of foundations that are then excavated and preserved.

Jim told us how he used to come to a construction site where the original Rose Theatre (Rival to Shakespeare’s Playhouse) had been discovered. He and his friends protested with others that the theatre should be preserved beneath the new building and their requests were met. You can tour the excavation site today.

So much of London’s history revolves around the river, and so Jim took us right up to it to find a story or two of our own.

He encouraged us to just look along the shore and pick up remnants from the river.

And it turned out that the metal bits at our feet had stories to tell.

Simon would pick something up and show it to Jim, and he would make up a possible scenario of how the wooden caster or iron spike made its way to Bankside.

Then Simon would pass on his new knowledge to us.

He filled his backpack with his river collection, but some pieces had to stay behind.

Like the giant chains.

Jim brought to life in words a picture of the Thames as it was long ago, a river that used to freeze over in the winter.

The original London Bridge was like an entire town on the river, and it could hold back the flow of the river enough to turn it into an ice skating rink.

We heard how Shakespeare actually built his theatre on the other side of the Thames, but then disassembled it and brought it over to Southwark in planks across the river.

Back on the river bank, the clay pipe stems that look like cigarette butts were our most common find, left by folks tossing their pipes into the river hundreds of years ago.

These “penny pipes” that were smoked between the 16th and 20th centuries were filled with tobacco when purchased, so they were practically disposable. The pipe bowls are easier to date but we didn’t come across one. Maybe next time.

We could probably have stayed down by the river for the rest of the day, but we had many more stories still ahead of us.

After the river we warmed up for a minute with a coffee and then we walked on, making stops for playing around whatever we passed of interest.

And of course we stopped for dragons.

All the entrances to the City of London are marked with dragons, a detail I had never noticed though I have visited London several times.

I loved seeing the city from the perspective of a Londoner and hearing stories of outrage over plays depicting real life scandals and modern day references to brilliantly mad directors.

When the security guard returned with Simon’s bag of contraband from the river, he handed it back to him and said surprised us by saying he could take it on the plane.

He could not wait to show it to his siblings when we got home, holding up one piece at a time and explaining to them what he had found in London.

Our anniversary weekend in London was Taido’s first trip to London, so we wanted our time to be full of things he would enjoy. And we promised Simon legos and ice cream along the way. But we were delightfully surprised by how much we all three enjoyed our Context Travel London History Tour. Simon was sad to say “Goodbye” to Jim and he drew pictures of dragons to post to him when we got home.

Context Travel offers many different tours of London (as well as other cities). They gave us our tour as part of a blog exchange, and we loved our experience so much that we are booked to do another one in Amsterdam next month.

Our trip to London was made possible in part by Travelodge. We stayed in a family room in the Covent Garden Travelodge. You can see images of our room on this six second video. 

The post Bankside Beach Combing for History appeared first on Alison Chino.