We awoke rather late this morning after our long and action filled day the day before. The two items that would be today's agenda were quickly discussed. First, Shari announced that since we had done zero shopping up to this point, she had to do some today—the bulk of her Christmas list had been postponed until New Year's on the promise of "something from Paris." And second, we were both very hungry, having slept a long time and been denied our crêpes the night before.

Suspecting that it was probably too late for breakfast in the cave, we headed the few blocks to seek out the shopping mall associated with the Louvre. This would fulfill both agenda items in one place, since the mall was said to have an excellent food court.

The Louvre's shopping area was beautiful, gleaming with marble and glass and polished chrome, but we moved through it rather hurriedly looking for the food court, which turned out to be quite large and varied, with many excellent-looking choices.

The problem was that it was, like everything else in this city, absolutely mobbed. Simply moving from one end of the food court to the other was a painful and frustrating exercise requiring several long minutes of pushing, levering, and being prepared to instantly lunge for any crack of light or space that might open up, trapped like a rat among the masses of flesh. Trying to stay in the same spot for very long in this mob, for example to secure and hold a place in a food line, was hopeless. Trying to find a table was even more so—dozens of people were already performing the amazing circus-performer feat of simultaneously fighting the throngs and carrying full trays, somehow managing not to spill them, circling and circling in the knowledge that their only hope of ever eating was to happen to be at the exact place and time where someone was getting up to leave, since if they were so much as a few yards away, some other prowler like themselves would be there first.

Clearly, eating here was only a possibility in a theoretical sense and just wasn't going to happen in practice, so I led the way as we fought our way back to the exit where we had come in and prepared to leave. We broke free into the less dense crowd of the mall and stopped to come up with a new plan, when I found out that Shari hadn't given up on the old plan. It was after noon, we hadn't eaten since dinner the night before and that was just a hot dog. Shari wanted to eat RIGHT NOW, and thought she was up to the challenge of somehow extracting some kind of nourishment from this place. A small voice in the back of my brain whispered: "this I gotta see."

So we plunged back into the food court, Shari in the lead this time, circling and circling. There were very specific signs forbidding anyone from reserving a table, insisting that you must get your food first. We weren't about to do that, so we circled just like all the other table-vultures, except without any food.

Finally Shari spotted some people leaving, and we went for their table. It was a tiny round table, crammed in among many other tiny tables, pinned between a railing and a mob of traffic, and we forcibly wedged our bodies into the spaces between it and the adjoining tables like the child in a musical chairs game who figures out that even if he is in the chair first, he will still lose if he can't defend against the child who arrives later but shoves harder.

While Shari went to get some food, I sat there holding the table, but it was the most active and exhausting form of "sitting," constantly shuffling, elbowing, and butting my head and elbows back against the knees and shoulders of the passing mob who wanted to occupy the same volume I was already in, while simultaneously trying to make sure that the constant movement of our various accoutrements such as my camera and Shari's purse didn't result in them getting too far away, and all the while trying to look inconspicuous and keep a very watchful eye out for some unknown type of official who would throw me out if he saw me occupying a table without any food. After an interminably long time which felt like days but was probably about fifteen minutes, Shari returned with her food.

I went off to select some food for myself, choosing a Spanish style chicken-and-rice meal and a side of eggplant whose primary points of appeal to me were for reasons not related to the food: The stand was in a slightly less crowded area, the menu had an equivalent of the "value meal" which made it less baffling to order than some of the others, and the queue was a bit more reasonable.

Our meals were actually very good, once we had them and were able to eat. We took our sweet time, mainly needing the rest, and my adrenaline level finally subsided a bit by the time we finished. We re-emerged from the food court into the mall area feeling a bit more human again.

We agreed to meet back a couple of hours later, and Shari went off into the mall to do her shopping, while I left and went wandering around to see what else was interesting in the general vicinity. I had a very pleasant time wandering the gardens of les Tuileries, taking pictures of some of the statues and interesting architecture, and just soaking in the ambience of it all. I got a close-up look at the big glass pyramid designed by I.M. Pei (who for some reason the French refer to as "Ming Pei" or "Ieoh Ming Pei") and widely denounced as ugly, and honestly couldn't see the big deal. I was far more fascinated, as architectural features go, by several giant sidewalk grates that the Louvre has, each of which carries suspended upside down underneath it half of a concrete staircase. Somehow, the whole grate/staircase assembly can be hinged up, simultaneously opening the grate and creating a stairway for passage down into some kind of basement underneath the Louvre.

I wandered by the Palais Royal Métro station and took pictures of its ancient "Métropolitain" sign framed by two red-bulbed streetlamps in what I think look like the shape of serpents. Many of the really old Métro stations have these, and aside from the Eiffel Tower, I could think of no icon more distinctively Parisian of which to bring home photographs.

I also encountered, quite by accident, one of the major sights of Paris, the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel. This is "the other arch," and although this one is much less famous than the Arc de Triomphe, I found it much more interesting. Its location puts it precisely on the "Grand Ax," the straight line through the city that starts at the Arc de Triomphe, passes down the Champs Elysées, and reaches the Obelisk de Luxor, passes through les Tuileries, and eventually reaches the third major arch, la Grande Arche de la Défense.

Like the Arc de Triomphe, this one was commissioned by Napoleon (whom the French, perhaps optimistically, always refer to as "Napoleon I") to commemorate his own victories. What an ego! While the Arc de Triomphe is made out of a monochromatic mass of beige stone, this one has vibrant colors in the soft pink of its rose marble columns and the bright gold of the statues of horsemen on top. I stopped for some photos and to gawk like the tourist I was.

I headed at a leisurely pace back to the Louvre shopping area to be ready to meet Shari, and although it was still half an hour before the appointed time, I happened to see her passing through the central courtyard that was our meeting spot. She was glad to see me early, as she had about exhausted the selection to be had there, buying only a few smallish items. She had had quite the run-in with a rude clerk in a jewelry store, who had trilled at her that she could try on anything in the store, then returned seconds later to snatch away a necklace and lock it in a drawer, even though it had been on display just moments before, while delivering a stern lecture along the lines of: "Never try anything on yourself! You must ask for assistance!." It was too bad, they'd had some nice things there and Shari had been prepared to buy several, but they weren't going to get a centime out of her after that.

We decided to try some places that had been suggested in a web-based guide Shari had found, which is collectively written and maintained by a number of American expatriates living in Paris. First on the agenda was a "pan-museum" store, said to be like a large museum gift shop covering many of the popular museums. So it was off to the Métro once again.

The pan museum store was located at Forum des Halles, a shopping district where, much to the dismay and loathing of the locals, an old-fashioned open-air market had been torn down and a sterile semi-underground mall built in its place.

Only the Louvre food court of this morning could possibly have prepared us for the crowds here, and this time it was made worse by the interminable distances to be walked to get anywhere, or even to make a Métro connection, in this giant complex. After walking what seemed like miles and wandering around several wrong turns above and below ground, we eventually found the pan-museum store. It turned out to be but a tiny little gift shop, with merchandise that was pretty, but very sparse and limited in selection. Nothing really struck us as interesting. However, it hadn't really been a wasted trip—we did manage to find a very nice little postcard store nearby, and to experience one of the defining districts of Paris (nauseating though the experience was).

After that, we decided to return to the Musée Rodin, where we had been a few days before, to buy some things at their gift shop. After another harrowing trudge through Forum des Halles, pushing through mobs some more, we made it to the Métro, rode back to the very station we hadn't been able to reach last time due to the demonstrators on the street, and walked the several blocks to the Musée Rodin. We were told rather sternly at the ticket booth and again at the gate that they were closing in five minutes, but since nobody actually told us we couldn't go in, we pushed our way upstream through all of the people exiting the half-closed door, and went into the gift shop. We had our museum passes, so it wasn't like we'd had to pay admission for the few minutes in the museum. Shari bought a couple of shirts, and we each bought a very handsome wristwatch with The Thinker on it, Shari's as a gift and mine as a replacement for the one that had died on the trip over. We exited, high-fived over having made it before closing time, and went off to find our next adventure.

Our next stop was another one from the America expats' web guide, a little shop specializing in cat paraphernalia. This one was quite out of the way, and we were getting rather tired and hungry by this time, so the journey there dulled into a mind-numbing succession of walking, checking the map, and walking some more until our feet throbbed from the continued abuse.

French businesses rarely put up their street numbers—the city has been there 1000 years, by now everyone should darn well know where things are!—making it very hard to find an exact address. To make matters worse the buildings are all connected, so that it is not at all clear where one building ends and the next begins. There may therefore be several shops in a row with the same address, or there may be a big jump in address numbers from one shop to the next. So, it took us several wanderings up and down the block to establish that we had found the address and the cat store wasn't there.

We were both acutely aware by this time, although not daring to speak of it, that after having spent the whole day shopping and fighting crowds, Shari had accomplished almost none of her shopping goals. Soon, everything would close, but it didn't seem likely that our aching legs and rumbling stomachs would hold out even that long. When we rounded a corner and Shari spotted Le Bon Marché, a well-known giant department store, she plowed for this One Last Great Hope like a dying man to an oasis.

We made it to Le Bon Marché, where Shari whirled from department to department like the Tazmanian Devil, stopping here and there to examine one item or another for only the briefest second, then utter a profundity such as "blurgum blargey bruckul" (well, she didn't really, but it would have been a nice touch) and spin off again.

Futility and fatigue having finally prevailed, Shari gave up on shopping for the evening, and we collapsed into some chairs on a stairway landing for a number of minutes to rest. Actually, I had collapsed there a few minutes earlier, telling Shari to come find me there when she was done—I couldn't keep up with her anyway. Shari joined me, sat down, and announced that she couldn't walk anymore, which was going to be interesting since I didn't think they'd let her spend the night in the store, and even getting home from here would require a lot of walking. I could sure sympathize, though! I thought we should find a brasserie within a couple of blocks and eat there, but after a goodly rest, we felt a bit better and Shari came up with a more ambitious plan—we would go for a Lebanese restaurant that had been suggested in one of the guide books.

We didn't really know where we were anymore, so I stopped at an information desk in the store and asked where the nearest Métro station was. Out of the massive flurry of French I got in reply, I managed to extract almost no information, but the accompanying pointing sent us in the right general direction and we found the Métro without delay.

The fates of were smiling upon us again when we exited the Métro, because although we did wander a block up the street in the wrong direction before we saw enough address numbers to figure it out, once we got going the right way we found the Lebanese restaurant almost immediately. We checked the menu outside and went in.

It was a bit worrisome at first that we were the only diners in evidence, but we reassured ourselves that it was still early for supper by European standards. This would turn out to be exactly right, as the place would fill up quite a bit by the time we left. Besides, the staff seemed to be speaking Arabic to each other, so it had to be at least authentic.

We enjoyed a leisurely appetizer and dinner, and for once I had no trouble reading anything on the menu: falafel, baba ghanoush, tabouli, baklava—all the old favorites. The only trouble was forcing my mouth to muddle through the incongruity of inserting such words into French sentences, then bite my tongue so as not to end the sentence with "bitte." In an act of even greater incongruity, we ordered wine with our Middle Eastern food—a bottle of Pinot Noir which, although chosen almost at random due to our ignorance, turned out to be delicious.

We used our magic phrase again: "Une carafe de l'eau ordinaire" and when the waiter brought us one, he stopped to ask what a "carafe" would be in English. We told him in halting French that it would be "pitcher," but "carafe" was an acceptable word as well. This got me to wondering if we had just told him the wrong thing. After saying the word for a week, with much self congratulations for doing so, we found we really didn't know!

There are so many English words for different containers that a subtle change in shape, even with the same usage, might cause significant parts of an English-speaking population to choose a different word. And what was a "carafe" to a Frenchman, anyway? It seemed to vary. The "carafe" of water we had been served at La Fermette Marbeuf was like one of those ornate cut-crystal stoppered bottles used for liquor, whereas here the "carafe" was a plain glass pitcher. They had varied all week, and none had exactly fit the shape of my mental image of "carafe," which is one of the ones cheap Gallo table wines sometimes come in.

I looked it up in my pocket-sized French/English dictionary and found that "carafe" translates as "decanter." Probably correct, but tremendously unhelpful—that information would steer you to use totally the wrong word every time.

I ultimately had to conclude that the translation is by necessity going to be imprecise—the words for such objects as containers don't have exact meanings, but each try to encompass a group of possible shapes and uses. Since the usual shapes of the objects themselves may be different from one culture to another, and the groupings of objects into categories labeled by words will certainly be different, the translation won't be a one-for-one mapping of words. At best, it will be an attempt to find the set that has the most overlap with another set.

It reminded me a little bit of having watched the movie "Twister" with French subtitles on a friend's DVD system. One of the main characters drove a pickup truck, another a Jeep. In French, the truck was never referred to as a truck ("camion"), but was always called a car ("voiture"), suggesting that even though the French have a word that is claimed by all dictionaries to mean "truck," the definition doesn't encompass the same class of objects—they wouldn't consider a pickup to be in the category of vehicles that would call for the use of that word. The Jeep must have been yet another category, since the translators doing the subtitles had coughed up such interesting phrases as "ou est mon 4x4?." At one point in the movie a bit-part character said "where's my truck?" and her truck, unlike the others, was given the literal translation of "camion"—it dawned on me that this must be because we never actually SAW the particular truck being referred to. Had we seen it and found it to be a pickup, it no doubt would have been a "voiture." The country-western song "That Ain't My Truck" probably couldn't be translated into French, but I suppose much of the genre couldn't either, and for deeper reasons than this.

Pleasantly full and with our feet rested, we left the Lebanese restaurant and headed home, somewhat tired and defeated by the fruitless shopping attempts, but already formulating better plans for another attempt the next day.

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All text and photographs copyright © 1999 Sam A. Mahmoud and Sharilyn Horne.