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 […]
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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 […]
At least I think that’s how you’d translate La Figaro’s paraphrase (“de ne pas vendre la peau de l’ours avant de l’avoir tué”) of Segoline Royal’s reaction to Martine Aubrey’s declaration of victory, in the middle of what looks to become a really donneybrook between the two over the election for leadership of the Socialist Party in France. What’s happening is exactly what you’d expect — lawyers are getting involved, […]
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 […]
Being a political junkie, I’ve followed the contest for the leadership of the Socialist Party in France closely. Since the summer, it’s been apparent that the party is split between a more moderate faction, who are amenable to a coalition with the center-left “MoDem” party of Francois Bayrou, and a hard left faction, who believe the party should sharpen its differences with the right. The more moderate faction is lead […]
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 […]