Ten Years

Uniqlo coat (similar)
Glam Sesh sweater (c/o)
Mavi jeans (c/o) (similar)
Jonak mules (similar)
Louis Vuitton handbag
RayBan sunglasses
ASOS beret
Elizabeth Lyn Jewelry necklace (similar)
Wolf Circus necklace
Location: Place Saint-Sulpice – Paris, France

My darlings,

Do you realise we’ve been coming to Paris together for ten years? We didn’t. Not when we were planning this trip. Not even when we looked at all of our tickets and reservations, marked with the year 2019. But it’s true. This year is the tenth anniversary of our first trip to Paris.

About a month before I graduated from university, I had an idea. I’d never taken a gap year. Apart from a single week-long holiday to the Dominican Republic and a family vacation to Florida, I’d barely travelled during my four years at school. And I hadn’t felt like I was missing out, either. I lived away from home, which was already exciting enough. My inclination to take holidays was minimal. But, flipping through the pages of my last university-era day planner, I noticed the world map in the back. Suddenly, I wanted to travel.

I proposed a two-week post-graduation tour of Europe to my best friend from university. She was on board. But when I told Ian our plan, he said something I didn’t expect – something innocuous, really, but that nonetheless changed the course of all of our lives. “I want to go, too.”

It took a two-year move back to Winnipeg for us to save the money we needed for our European escapade. The trip quickly expanded from a two-week tour to a two-and-a-half-month adventure. In January 2009, we boarded a plane to Chicago and, from there, went straight on to Paris, where we spent most of our time between trips to places like Budapest and Bratislava in a studio apartment on rue de Clignancourt. (We were even counted in the Paris census that year. The local census taker was a friendly man who took his duties very seriously and insisted that the current resident of our apartment must complete the forms he dropped off, whether they were on holiday or not.)

That was ten years ago. At the time, we travelled with a single suitcase. We discovered everything we love about Paris together, and although the city has evolved significantly since then, much of what we loved about it back then remains. That includes Pitzman, a small Jewish restaurant on rue Pavee in le Marais.

Ten years ago, we were not the planners that we are today. We slept in most mornings, and Ian went down to the patisserie next door to buy a baguette for breakfast while I showered. When we came back, we ate while deciding how we wanted to spend the day. There was a certain freedom to that way of life that I occasionally miss, but I also know we missed a lot of things we would have loved because of our lack of research and planning. The lack of planning also meant that we often found ourselves out at mid-day on Sunday, unable to find anywhere to eat lunch.

In Paris in 2009, Sunday was still an official day of rest. Groceries stores kept their doors locked. Shopping, apart from on the Champs-Elysees, which is only for tourists who have all the same stores at home, anyway, was unthinkable. The only exception was le Marais, a primarily Jewish neighbourhood where businesses close on Saturday and reopen on Sunday after their own day of rest. We knew nothing about it, mind you. We were just wandering rue de Rivoli, hungry and suddenly aware that all the restaurants were closed for the day. Uncertain what do to, we turned a corner on what, we later discovered, was rue Pavee and stumbled straight into a line outside of a restaurant. It’s not often we queue for food, but we had few other options, and so many people waiting to eat at one place could surely only mean good things…?

We decided to wait, and it’s a decision we’ve never regretted. That line was outside Pitzman, and we are back again to have lunch there today, on a Sunday ten years later. It’s when our waiter seats us that we realise. “We’ve been coming here for ten years, haven’t we?”

“I think this is even the same place we sat the first time we were here.”

A quick look through old photos confirms that it is. We fell in love with Pitzman on that first visit, so much that Ian took a picture of me grinning, fork and knife in hand, in front of my half-eaten pizza chavignol. Ten years later, I still order it – the combination of spinach, cherry tomatoes, goat cheese and honey, which is served straight from the jar so you can add as much as you like, is far from fancy. But I think it’s actually gotten more delicious over time.

Pitzman is now as it was then; small and crowded, often with a queue at the front door. The formica tables are covered with disposable plastic clothes that can be changed between diners, and drinks are served in the bottle they came in, with a plastic cup on the side. A live video of the wailing wall in Jerusalem plays on an overhead TV. Despite the religious overtone, the restaurant is a casual, convivial place. The lack of space means that diners often have to greet one another as they ask each other to make space to move through or sit down. All of the staff are part of a large extended family. The man who was our first waiter is the manager now; his hair is greyer each time we see him, but he takes our payment before we leave with the same smile each time.

Ten years. It seems hard to believe. I joke to Ian that I hope the passage of time doesn’t show so obviously on me. But I guess I don’t really mind either way. Like my beloved pizza chavignol, I think I’ve gotten better with time. And I think our trips to Paris have, too.