I think that I have enjoyed the blog as much as anybody. I’ve been in the posts, suggested photo selections for the posts and marveled at Steve’s amazing ability to turn a phrase. He has made this vacation more enjoyable for those of us on it and for all our friends who have lived vicariously through the blog. But since this is our last night in Paris, I thought I […]
Well, this is it, we are down to our last 10 hours or so. We have to get up at 5 am tomorrow to get to the airport. We are mostly packed and ready. It rained pretty consistently this morning, and we thought that would keep us in all day, but it let up about 11, and we took the Metro to the Montparnasse area and walked around a bit […]
We have had a request for more detailed descriptions of the food here, and today is a good day to fill that request, because we had the best meal we have had since we’ve been in Paris. It was a very reasonable fixed price menu of 13 euros at a restaurant called Le Reminent on the wonderfully-named Rue des Grandes Degres (sorry, Blogger doesn’t do accents), roughly across from Notre […]
We are regretting very much that our time in Paris is almost at an end. Today was a great day, blue sunny skies, a mild wind, and cool. We slept in and left the apartment at 10, having no absolutely set plans, but thinking of going to the Musee d’Orsay, the famous impressionist museum. It was so nice and sunny outside that we waffled on going, but when we got […]
We solved the mystery of why we all felt so blah yesterday at Versailles. We usually have our coffee 1/2 decaf and 1/2 regular, but yesterday my mom dumped a whole box of straight decaf into the container from which we make coffee. So unknown to us all, we didn’t have our normal morning fix. Let’s see … low grade headache: Check … irritability: Check … fatigue: Check. Sad, but […]
We took the train to Versailles today. Maybe because we are all feeling a bit worn down (I was tired and had a low grade headache, and we’d gotten up extra early), we just couldn’t deal with the tour of the Chateau. Ungodly numbers of tourists, dark stuffy interiors mostly, and the famous Hall of Mirrors was undergoing renovation and thus all under wraps. So it was a downer, not […]
The explanation for this strange thing: is apparently contained here: Sorry we didn’t get it all, but could some of our better-French speaking correspondents please post the translation of what we did get? Merci. Added 2 August 2005: Thanks to Paul Kay for this translation, which we have confirmed from the highest sources is accurate and “exactly the story.” Too bad we didn’t take a picture of the whole sign, […]
We decided over the weekend to cancel the car trip to Normandy we had planned. Given how exhausting the drive was from Germany to Paris, and the hassles with the car, and the work of packing and unpacking everything yet again, and the constant news reports about how packed and slow the highways are because of the beginning of the vacation period (for some, and apparently the end for others), […]
Random thoughts after two weeks in Paris…. (1) We have been surprised at the disparity among the cost of various items when compared to their relative cost in the United States. Some things are much more expensive: gasoline, of course (I had the pleasure of a $110 fill-up during the trip to Luxembourg), but also clothing (particularly men’s shirts, for some reason; common white cotton dress shirts run about $55 […]
My mother wanted to hear a free organ concert in a cathedral called St. Sulpice today. The concert (really just a mini-recital or something, it lasted about 25 minutes) was very good, the same sort of experience we had in the other church, with the huge organ pipes echoing sound all up and through the vast stone space. But unknown to (or unremembered by) me was the fact that St. […]