Elinor in Paris

Our little aerie in Andelys was one room, so Phil got up early and took a walk so he did not disturb Ellie and me. He returned with pain au chocolate and a baguette...a good man. That was a lovely way to start the day. We then explored Gaillard, the local chateau built by Richard the Lion-Hearted.  Then our agent of chaos altered our plans with her own crazy plans that evolved into our dropping her bags off at the seminar camp site and the putting her on a train to Paris so she could meet with the Italian delegates. Between 9 and noon, she managed to organize a homestay as well as the bag drop off, allaying our concerns.  We had a picnic lunch with our leftover Rouen cheeses and charcuterie and then found Ellie's camp site. We put her on a train and will see her next in Miami in 3 weeks! Phil and I drove on to Orleans, and found our little loft above a real estate agency. The ground floor is the agency meeting room. Next door is ...

We bought some wonderful local cheeses a stinky Livarot and a "soft" double cream cheese whose name we can't remember. That, a tomato from the farmer's market, some leftover sausage, some wine and some 1 euro bread made a wonderful, hearty snack. Ellie went off to find a climbing gym, and Phil and I had dinner a t a brasserie in the shadow of the cathedral. The idea was to reconvene at the cathedral at 11 to see the son et Lumiere. Our dinner was nice, I just had an eggplant appetizer and Phil had a chicken dish and a creme brulee. We were tracking Ellie's Uber back on Life 360, but the car was going all over the city and then stopped. Our Internet has not been working so we were taking advantage of WiFi at a cafe. When she did not move for some minutes, Phil went off to try to find her. He missed her, and she eventually turned up at our planned meeting spot. Then we saw the show. It was half in English and half in French, but even the English story line was philo...

We rented a car today...an Alpha Romeo hybrid. We drove to Giverny and spent a gray and sometimes rainy afternoon exploring the light in the garden. We want an egg box. We liked the kitchen. The water lilies were in bloom, and the water was green in the diffuse light. The bridge is now covered with vegetation. The area is glorious. It was gorgeous. Us in les fleurs: Our Airbnb is a little attic apartment, and the valley town is beautiful, with a castle guarding it. Dinner was not the best, but we will find a place in Orleans tomorrow to enjoy!

The day began with a flea market/farmer's market. Truly my kind of day. Books...lots of books. A lot of intellectual books. In the US, I would expect a lot of romance novels. Lots of textiles, mostly in piles that people dug through. Clothes, of course, but I found sheets and a sleeping bag, which we found out we needed for Ellie's CISV trip. Five euros for two nice clean sheets and a light and clean sleeping bag. We have laundry here, so we washed it all. Bric a brac, furniture, jewelry...it was fun.  Some weird stuff, like this liquor bottle with unexpected liquid in it...not the advertised anise! We probably spent an hour. At the end, we got some delicious cherries, a melon,  mange-tout beans (snap peas), and raspberries.  On to lunch: a creperie. We had three different ones, along with a glass of cider and a kir with cider. Soo good...sausage, eggs, cream, mushrooms...all sorts of deliciousness. And you can s...

Am I a philistine if I don't love the Louvre? It is too big for me, too crowded, and too hard to manage in a day. If I could get a yearly membership and see a couple of hours a week or month, I would love it. But the crowds...they come to take selfies. They don't know anything and are not there to learn. We got up early having struggled yesterday to find tickets online. Maybe we could have rolled up to the door and got in a line, but we felt like we needed to be sure that Ellie saw the icons this first time in France. On the way to the Metro, we saw the amount of fresh cilantro and mint a South Asian restaurant needs. We got our third delicious croissants of the week and took the train to the museum. While waiting for a train, we heard the Four Seasons being played. Turns out it was on our platform. This amazing violinist was playing her heart out. I dropped a couple of euros in her basket and she leaned to we to thank me, telling me that I was the first of the day....

The last time I was in Paris was 1994, and Phil and I were in France for a month, and Paris for a few days. Three years before that, I spent 6 weeks in Paris. Before there were cell phones, I got here, found a youth hostel, enrolled myself in language lessons, found a sublet, negotiated it in French, and generally found my way around Paris by myself. Today, I felt like Rip Van Winkle. The city mostly looks the same, but it isn't. Much of my logistical knowledge was useless. I had no idea that the existence of online tickets means that you HAVE to buy online tickets. Or that there are so many more visitors to Paris now that they sell out in advance. Even our relatively recent experiences in Greece had not prepared us for this...we rolled up to the Parthenon and got 20 tickets whatever day we wanted. So we are learning all over again. We got our morning pain au chocolat, took the Metro to the Seine, got on our bato-bus, cruised to the Musee D'Orsay, and realized that tickets wer...