Time is winding down here, but we still find things to love about Paris. This weekend they were having a small Christmas market on the two blocks of Rue de Alésia east of our apartment, which consisted of stalls of vendors selling mostly delicious things to eat. We went to the market on Sunday, and by the time we traversed the two blocks, we were no longer hungry, having tasted […]
So I returned, after my horrible first experience at the Phonetics Lab, for a second session, because I’d paid for it (mostly) but also because I thought maybe the second time would be more useful and not quite so discouraging. Wrong. If anything, it was even worse. I was greeted this time by a friendly, vivacious, middle-aged woman whom I’ll call “D”, who asked me for the results of my […]
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 […]
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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, […]