Our good friends’ daughter April is living in Paris for a year, and we planned to meet for a late lunch today after she finished her work, which lucky for her ends at 2 pm. So we made the Métro trip from the 15th on line 12 to Place de la Concorde, then transferred to line 1 heading toward La Défense. Exiting at the Charles de Gaulle Étoile station at the Arc de Triomphe, we strolled three block to the Ternes Métro station with 12 minutes to spare for our 2:30 rendezvous with April.
At 2:45 and still no April, Doug checked out all other possible station entrances around the immediate area and found no trace of our friend. Something wasn’t right; April is punctual, and then the something that wasn’t right began to make sense. Doug pulled out his phone, which smartly displays the correct time wherever it is, and the iPhone said it was exactly an hour earlier than Doug’s watch. A Google search confirmed it: France goes off Central European Daylight Time the last Sunday in October, and we’d been living with the wrong time for about 60 hours! Auwe…. April wasn’t late; we were an hour early. We killed the rest of the hour walking through the nearby shopping district. Back at the Ternes station, April showed up at 2:30 on the dot.
We enjoyed a delicious Lebanese lunch at the Nai restaurant a block away and caught up on April’s busy life in Paris. She’s squeezing in a one-week visit to a Cambodian orphanage in a few days. And speaking of squeezing, the Nai squeezed us out the door by 3:30. It was the first time we’ve ever felt pressured to get up and get out of a restaurant in France. Maybe our host needed to go reset some clocks.
We wished April well in Cambodia and the rest of her year in France, then headed off on the Métro to the Shakespeare and Company bookstore near Notre Dame Cathedral to pick up some reading material. The Latin Quarter was inviting, but we decided to save an evening on another occasion to enjoy the district’s night life.
We headed home to the 15th and couldn’t help but notice how dark it seemed for the hour.
(As noted earlier, readers can access a more complete and superbly well-written accounting of our day at Lennie's blog: aloveofeverythingfrench dot blogspot dot com )
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