Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [108]
The bodies of the Wehrmacht soldiers, riddled by machine-gun bullets, lay askew in the trucks and on the grated bridge roadway where some of them had fallen, their blood dripping into the Seine below.
Surrendering to Paris 237
That was my gruesome introduction to what has been, ever since, an almost idyllic relationship to one of the world’s great cities. (I suspect that if there were a poll taken among all the people who have been everywhere to determine their favorite city, Paris would win.)
Paris is too expensive for an American to visit now, of course, but a lot of Americans go there anyway. We try to save some money and take the trip once every few years. I’d rather go to a foreign city I’m sure I like than take a gamble on a place I don’t know.
Two of us went to one of the good restaurants in Paris for a birthday celebration in 1991 and dinner cost almost two hundred dollars apiece. That included one of the least-expensive bottles of wine. French wine is as expensive in France as it is in the United States. You could say that about California wine and California, too.
When you enter a restaurant in France, an American is struck by how many people are puffing cigarettes. The French don’t have nosmoking sections. Morley Safer attributes the relatively good health of the French to the amount of red wine they drink. Some people are always looking for reasons why a vice of theirs is actually good for them. I accept Morley’s word on this myself.
All French restaurants add 15 percent to the bill for the waiters. Service is as good or better than in the United States, where we assume waiters try harder to get a better tip. They don’t, and we should abandon tipping and add a service charge. There’s a restaurant I go to in New York that gets a lot of French tourists and one waitress told me they often don’t get tipped by their French customers because the French assume it’s included on their bill.
The French always seem to be having a good time when they eat. When a man and a woman sit together in a cozy restaurant, it’s as if they were dancing. I don’t understand what French women see in French men, though. I do see what French men see in French women. Even the women who are nowhere near beautiful have an attractive, sexy way about them. French men, on the other hand, are as a whole and by my own standards not as good-looking as the average American man.
Before I left home for Paris, I bought a new pair of white pajamas, because I didn’t want to be in my old, tattered ones when the maid came in every morning with the traditional French hotel breakfast of coffee, hot milk, a crusty loaf of their great bread and several croissants and jam.
I think, by the way, that the French ought to sue some of the bakeries making what they call “croissants” in our country. A soft, soggy roll is not automatically a croissant just because it’s made in the shape of a crescent.
The third night I was there, I was getting ready for bed but I couldn’t find my pajama bottoms. I know I’d hung them on the back of the bathroom door and it was apparent that the maid had picked them up with the white towels and bedsheets and put them in the laundry.
I didn’t know whether to spend the money on a new pair, which probably would have cost as much as the expensive dinner, or sleep in just the tops for the rest of the trip. It occurred to me that it seemed almost impossible to surprise or shock the maids who brought breakfast, no matter what you were wearing, if anything at all. You can guess what I did.
I drove eighty miles from Paris to Reims, the heart of champagne country, and stopped for gas just outside the city. The superhighway gas station had everything one in the United States would have, except unleaded gas. The French don’t have much unleaded gas yet. The gas station sold candy, junk food, Eiffel Tower ashtrays for tourists