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Cheese Glorious Cheese
Here you see my cousin Carey, talking to the Fromager at the little cheese shop in Vincennes, the town where we spent our nights (and some days) just outside of the Paris city limits. I told you about the day we were too worn out from our travels, including lots of driving and late nights, to stick with our initial plan of driving to Versailles. We stayed local, got massages, had a glass of wine and watched people, then got some food to eat, brought it back to our time-share, and watched a movie, ate bread, cheese, salami, and drank wine. And did laundry. It was a nice, lazy day.…
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Onion Soup in France
This sad, sad picture is of our dinner one evening in Cannes. We had had a lovely lunch (I think this was the day we took the boat to Saint Tropez and had a big lunch, so we weren’t terribly hungry), so we thought we would a light dinner. Carey had been wanting French Onion soup, so when I saw ‘Soupe a l’oignon’ on a menu, we decided to give it a try. I don’t think it’s that big of a thing in the South of France, and we hadn’t seen it on any menus yet. This was the soup we received…the broth was not the dark, rich broth, the…
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Picture of the Day – Outside Sacre Coeur
First off, let me apologize for the inordinate use of the word ‘amazing’ in yesterday’s post. The fact that the croissant was delicious and perfectly prepared is not something to cause great surprise. You kind of expect that in France. It was lazy writing. I considered editing the post and finding some other adjectives, but decided to leave it as is. I like this picture of a street musician and his cat, entertaining the tourists on the steps of Sacre Coeur. He’s even wearing a beret. The messy ‘No Entry’ sign on the door takes a bit from the picture, but I like his cat.
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Pictures of the Day – Fruit in Mougins
We absolutely fell in love with the local boulangerie in Mougins. We began our days by walking down our little hill and getting a baguette, croissant, or pastry for breakfast. The quality was AMAZING, and the staff were wonderful. Above is breakfast one day, amazing croissant, amazing fruit, amazing French butter and locally produced jam. The tea is British, I brought my tea bags from home, which I buy from the local Indian shops and are imported from England. The ashtray is useless, but I left it in the picture because it seemed very French to me. Due to COVID, there was often a line in front of the store.…
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Picture of the Day – Shopping for Gifts
While in France, I did a little gift shopping. I bought Christmas gifts for Ted and Maya, and for my siblings and Mother figures (that’s my step mom and my mother in law). One thing I wanted for Ted was a nice shirt, but not something for work. Too much like getting school clothes as a gift. There was a shirt I liked at a shop in Vincennes, but I wasn’t sure of the size, and I wasn’t sure it was something he would actually wear, and it was almost $200. I would absolutely spend $200 to get Ted a shirt from France that I knew he would love and…
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Picture of the Day – Mulder
Mulder has now finished his first 2 months of weekly chemo, now he is moving on to the next phase, which is chemo every other week for the next 4 months. His weight has stabilized, he doesn’t seem to be losing weight anymore. He is not tolerating the chemo as well as he did at the beginning, meaning for the first 6 weeks, he only had one instance of losing appetite and diarrhea, and more recently it has been every time. It lasts a day or two, but is controlled by medication and us tempting his appetite with chicken and rice or scrambled eggs, which he gobbles down. He’s lost…
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Picture of the Day – Locks of Love
There is a relatively recent custom in Paris (and other European cities) for couples to put locks on bridges and railings, which is adding so much weight to said railings, fences, and bridges that they are threatening to destroy them. This is a railing near Sacre Coeur with thousands of locks, and you can see how they might do damage. Of course, the souvenir shops in the area sell the locks, so most tourists don’t know that it is doing damage and that the city has to remove the locks periodically. Personally I don’t get it, and I don’t find it charming or romantic, but clearly there are a lot…
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Picture of the Day – Train Station
Busy day today, and we have darling friends arriving in mere minutes for dinner, so I will make this brief. This is the stairway from the train station to the glamorous and stunning restaurant that I posted about a few days ago. Kind of brings it back down to earth, right? HA!
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Picture of the Day – Street Performer in Paris
Our last day in Paris found us back at Sacre Coeur. Carey liked the neighborhood vibe, and wanted to climb the front steps to the church, which we had missed before. This time we knew which Metro train to take, and what exit to take. It was Sunday now, and more crowded than the first time we were there. I think it’s generally a crowded area, though, unless you are staying close by and get there early. As we approached the church, this man was putting on quite a show. You can’t really see it in this picture, but he is balancing a soccer ball. He started out doing all…
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Paris! Part III
Our 3rd full day in Paris started with a VERY fancy lunch, at one of the restaurants in one of the train stations, Gare de Lyon. The restaurant is Le Train Bleu. We didn’t have reservations anywhere on our trip, because we really never knew where we would be and didn’t want to have to work around it. So when I tried to make a reservation the day before and saw they were booked for the next month, we decided to give walking in a try. Happily, this worked for us. We arrived just before noon, and were told that they had reservations for 1:00, so if we could make…
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Picture of the Day – Tapestries
Exciting new feature! A temporary installation, if you will. It’s almost bedtime on November 1st, and I’ve been debating back and forth about writing here every day for the month, as I have done several times before. I thought about how, when I was in France, I had intended to post here every day, at least a picture, and my iPad started acting poopy. It’s still poopy, I tried to load this picture using it, and it tried four time and failed and gave me error messages. Then when I boot up a regular computer, the picture is there, four times. Whatever. Anyway, I’m going to try to post every…
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Paris! Part II
Above are the beautiful stained glass windows of Sainte Chapelle, a stunning gothic chapel built in the mid 1200s. Sainte Chapelle is located on the same island as Notre-Dame de Paris, Île de la Cité in the river Seine. Unlike Notre Dame, Sainte Chapelle is no longer a church. We actually started our day at Sacré-Cœur de Montmartre. We used a helpful app called CityMapper to get us from point A to point B, which you can use in any location, not just Paris. It will tell you what the quickest options are. Unfortunately for us, we were unfamiliar enough with the area that we didn’t know that it was…
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Paris! – Part I
While we spent 10 nights in the Paris area, at this point we’ve been here almost a week and spent very little time seeing the sights of Paris herself. The next four days were spent enjoying a taste of the beauty that Paris has to offer. We started off at the Palais Garnier, which is a stunning venue built for the Paris Opera, and opened in 1875. It was the home of the Paris Opera until 1989, when the Opera Bastille opened. Since that time, Opera is primarily performed at the Bastille, while the Garnier is primarily Ballet performances. The picture above is the Grand Foyer. From there we moved…
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Wordless Wednesday
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Our Day of Rest
After two days of many hours on the road, we awoke (late) on Wednesday morning with plans to go get breakfast from a local place that advertised pancakes and omelettes (we’d been eating croissants and baguettes most days, were ready for a bit of a change), then get in the car and drive to Versailles. Versailles isn’t that far from Paris, but it is southwest of the city, while we were staying to the east. Talking over breakfast, we discovered that each of us thought the other really wanted to go to Versailles, but neither of us cared enough to warrant getting back in the car. So we bailed. I…