Sunday in Paris

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On the 5th we set off to visit the market my daughter usually visited twice week when she was living here two years ago.

It's quite a hike from here. Our hotel is very near la Nation Metro stop and her market is right near la Bastille. Along the way, we passed another market. The produce is gorgeous, and displayed in beautiful pyramids of potatoes or oranges, and French outdoor markets have all sorts of stuff you never see at the Ann Arbor farmers' market, like fish. We have a tiny bit of meat at our market in A2, but it's all frozen, and just a very little bit of cheese. Much (MUCH) more meat here -- everything from all sorts of birds to all sorts of cuts of meats to all sorts of preserved meats -- sausages, hams, etc, etc, etc......... There is also cheese, cheese, cheese, more cheese, and, also, cheese. Lots of cooked food for sale here, too, but at home, pretty much only baked goods.

My daughter's even bigger market has artists, clothing, shoes, sewing machines (thread, etc).......

We got mirabelle plums, carrots, reine de reinette apples, nectarines, some brie cheese, bread, and last but not least, some of the very small potatoes that have roasted underneath a large rack of rotisserie chickens. They taste of all the seasonings on the chickens, as well as the chickens themselves. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm!

We had brunch in la Cafe Francaise, which is right on la Place de la Bastille. Very nice omelettes, ok quiche with spinach, and coffee. (A constant search for cooked veggies. Perhaps people eat cooked veggies always at home, and when they eat out, they don't care if they eat them then.....) Both the quiche and the omelette came with very nice mixed-green salads. All of those different greens tasted very good (and very nicely dressed, too). That was also the first place our server brought us a carafe of water without being asked. The water was cold, too. I guess they must get a lot of Americans there. :-)

La Place de la Bastille was the focus of the demonstration we saw on Saturday, and was much more quiet on Sunday.....

We enjoyed my daughter's familiar market, and then gave my feet a rest and rode the metro back up to Nation.

We loved the potatoes (and tried very hard not to eat too many and then wish we hadn't), and some of the mirabelles, and then we headed to for first-Sunday-of-the-month free-museum-admission day.

As did every other tourist in town..................

We went to the Musee D'Orsay (which has impressionist-era work, and which used to be the train station, so is a very cool building on its own). The line was enormous, so we walked on. I wanted to see the I.M. Pei glass pyramid addition to the Louvre. We saw it from the outside, but, of course, the lines were immense there, too.

Then we walked back east along the Seine toward a much less well-known museum which has older artifacts from parts of the world other than Europe. By this time I was needing a bathroom (here, you ask for the toilettes. Finding public ones can be a real problem. There are guides to pastry shops, guides to bakeries, guides to this, that and the other. There are probably guides to public toilets, too, but I don't have one....... We passed some embassies, and I said that if we passed OUR embassy, I was going in to ask if I could use the facilities..........

We passed The American Church, so I gave it a try. I think they were preparing to have a service, and I asked a man handing out programs if, since it was an American Church if they had toilettes. I don't think it was the first time he'd been asked that question..... He gave me a big smile and said (in American) OF COURSE there were toilets, and told me where to find them.............

AH. Much better.

(Digression -- hearing MUCH more English here than elsewhere. Our first week, in Bayonne, Carcassonne, and Bordeaux, not much at all. In La Rochelle, a bit more, in Tours, a bit more, and here in Paris, relatively a lot. I had read that there are a lot of British Tourists in the north of France, so we weren't surprised to hear more English as we got farther north. Hearing a lot of American, here in Paris...... End of Digression.)

Ok. On to our museum in comfort.................

It made up its mind what was "primitive" art, and displays that. We wondered why some groups of artifacts were displayed together (one group from all over the American hemisphere, from over 500 to less than 100 years apart in age (and not all for the same function), and also wondered about the "primitive" designation, as some of the Australian works were less than 30 years old..........

My daughter took a history of art class on how museums are arranged ... and on how heavily that impacts the way people react to the objects in the collection.........

In any case -- a large collection, and with many interesting objects. It was very dark in there -- necessary for preservation of textiles and some kinds of paint, but, I believe, not for objects of metal or stone........... We'll see if any of the pics come out........

The front of the building is covered in plants. Hostas, for example, not climbing vines.......

Then we went to the Eiffel Tower. We'd been seeing glimpses of it as we walked along he Seine, and it was drawing me like a moth to a flame........

I didn't need to go up, just to walk right under it.........

It is very very big. Every few steps, as you get near, there is a new view........

Some very ritzy people were having some short of shindig upstairs. One of the sets of elevators was reserved for them, and a street was nearly blocked, with a dozen people dressed in black ready to open limo doors and escort the guests to the elevator.....

We got a coffee (to keep my caffeine level at anti-headache level), and then took the metro back to the hotel. It was VERY crowded, but we were lucky enough to be able to sit most of the way.

Hoping for a less walk-y day tomorrow, to attempt to preserve my feet........ Which are doing well, and I want to keep it that way....



In order to facilitate chronological traverse of these posts, here is a link to the post that comes after this one.

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