Chalk it up to the grey and the cold, the shortness of the days, the impending end to our time in Paris, a nagging cold, or a combination of the foregoing, but I haven’t felt much like writing lately. This is our last week at the Alliance Française; I’m acutely aware that the next few days may be the last we ever spend there, that the times I see my […]
Today had to be the low point of my time in Paris. Where to begin? Well, first of all, I’m getting sick, or am sick, or am fighting off sickness, I’m not quite sure which. I’ve picked up Suzie’s cold, which makes me feel like I’m running at fifty percent. This morning I woke up and my throat felt like sandpaper and I wondered how I could possibly get out […]
If a picture is worth a thousand words, is a video worth a million? I don’t think so. Even so, here are a few recent videos, not particularly interesting in and of themselves, but they do give a sense of my life here in Paris. (Since most of you have high speed internet connections, I recommend going to the YouTube site and watching these in “high quality.) First, I visited […]
Last weekend we drove to Luxembourg to visit a friend of Suzie’s from high school. Longtime readers will recall that we made the same trip during our last visit to Paris, and encountered there the horrible Vaches Sauvages de Flaxweiler. This time, the plan was to have (belatedly, on Saturday) a real American-style Thanksgiving, with turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, pumpkin pie, the whole, real deal. The trip had an inauspicious […]
Amidst all the blogging about snow and socialists, I neglected to tell about the trip the boys and I took yesterday to Chartres, a town of of about 40,000 located 60 miles or so southwest of Paris. We decided to go because Suzie was off visiting a friend of hers in England. We left our apartment in the late morning, took the Metro to Gare Montparnasse, bought tickets for the […]
After finishing the last post, I shared with my fellow Parisians the Sunday tradition of hunting for the few food stores open on Sunday. In my neighborhood, it’s the Monop store, which was packed, and after that I went to the bakery just down Rue Alphonse Daudet, which makes the most incredible baguettes, which they call “Tradition,” and which are usually still warm when you get them, and absolutely delicious, […]
Referring to this post, a pean to cold weather, which has of course caused the weather to change very much for the worst. The forecast this morning from Le Monde (my attempt at translation below): PARIS, France Mise à jour 08h13 heure de Paris Maintenant -2 °C Frais. Vent – Direction : 6 km/h – SO Humidité : 93% Point de rosée : -3 °C Pression atmosphérique : 1015.24 mb Météo à […]
Based upon anecdotal evidence, it seems that cell phone customers here in France must engage in running battles with their providers. Certainly that has been the case with us. Shortly after we came, we managed to obtain three phones and a relatively inexpensive subscription from Orange, the mobile service trade name of France Telecom. Unfortunately, about two weeks later, we received a letter and text messages telling us that our […]
This is what the past week or so has been like in Paris: The days have been cloudy, foggy, damp, and sometimes rainy, bordering on cold. The kind of weather that some people would call “miserable.” But I love it. There is something about the clouds and the drizzle that is embracing, enfolding, comforting; something about the cold that is cleansing and clarifying. To me it says: Be calm. Be […]
I realize I haven’t posted any pictures since we returned to France, and since a picture is worth a thousand words (or perhaps worth even more than a thousand of my words), here are a few new ones. As always, more are on my Flickr site. I carried my large telephoto lens all the way to Paris, but didn’t take it out of its case until just this week. Don’t […]