By Eva Ciabattoni

Eva Ciabattoni/Special to the Town Crier Architect I.M. Pei’s Pyramid du Louvre, located outside the museum, were once a target of Parisian scorn.

Let me tell you how much I love Paris. I love Paris for the waiter who showed my son how to use the silver escargot clip and tiny fork as well as for the hotel receptionist who finally coughed up the gorgeous top-floor corner triple overlooking both the Tuileries garden and the Pyramid in front of the Louvre, tried to renege, then presumably decided it was easier to explain to someone else that the double they were getting was in reality the triple they had reserved.

After a bit of pandemonium at the Avignon TGV train station - the official explanation involved lots of shoulder-shrugging and narratives of train cars mysteriously getting reversed - we arrived at the Gare de Lyon late on a Saturday afternoon. My son, who last visited Paris in utero nearly 12 years ago, was fascinated by the Eiffel Tower, so that became our first destination.

The next day, we skipped the lines at the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay to catch the sublime Pierre Bonnard exhibit at the Musée d’Art Moderne. Once dismissed as a painter who paints only happy things, Bonnard is now gaining long-overdue recognition. A New York Times article on the retrospective quotes Bonnard as saying, “Few people know how to see, to see well, to see fully.”

The kids and I stood in front of the paintings and watched as elements not seen at first glance slowly resolved into a person drifting in from the left-hand side of one painting, a face glimpsed as a reflection in a window pane, a dog (seen only by his black nose and by following the sightlines of the two children), or an entire white ox in one case. I loved how this painter of “happy things,” in a painting circa World War I depicted a man and woman illuminated in a sunny patch of garden. Only on close observation does one notice how the events in the larger world are projected into their idyll - the peaceful scene is marred by the ominous green-black clouds reflected in the surface of the water in their glass pitcher.

After our primer on how to see, we toured Paris on a Carte Visite (available at any subway station with an attendant), a card that allows unlimited rides on bus, subway or train within a specified area for a specified number of days. We popped up like gophers all around central Paris and explored various neighborhoods on foot.

Wandering the narrow streets around Bastille Place vainly hoping we might stumble upon Algerian bakery Bague de Kenza, we got caught in a torrential downpour. We didn’t find the bakery, but we did pass a laundromat. People gave us questioning looks, which soon turned to amusement as we stripped off layers of clothing and piled them into the dryers. We leaned against the toasty warm dryers and watched the rain lessen as our clothing revolved behind us.

“Pas mal,” said one young man, nodding approval and smiling as he rolled tobacco in a cigarette paper after piling his wash into a washer (whites and darks together - augh!).

I can say with a high degree of confidence that in Vienna, first, we would not have found a laundromat, and second, if we had, we would have gotten a stern lecture on the hygienic inadvisability of drying unwashed clothing and, okay, I confess, shoes. The Viennese are right, of course, but it’s that old debate about wanting to be right vs. happy. Or maybe it’s the one about whether germs are good for us or not. Whatever. Ça va.

We moseyed to the Place des Vosges, where we spied a bird nesting atop the head of the Louis XIII statue and designer Issey Miyake at work in his studio accompanied by the whine of live electric guitars.

Best language tip from the nice folks at tea salon Chez Pierro: When you want to ask for a little milk with your tea, you ask for “un nouage de lait,” literally “a cloud of milk.”

After the #67 bus dropped us near the Louvre, we walked along the Seine and heard music. Following the sound, we came upon a group of dancers and musicians on the Pont des Arts (Google it and click on Renoir’s painting of the bridge from 1867).

The caller was calling Irish dances in French as couples whirled and swapped partners and invited bystanders to join the dances. We watched until the sun sank into the river.

Back at our hotel after supping on escargot and pommes frites, we noshed on a strawberry tart from Le Nôtre and called it a day, a fortnight, a vacation.

Adieu Paris. Bonjour Vienna.

Eva Ciabattoni is a Los Altos resident and freelance writer living abroad with her family in Austria.