From rainy to lovely in an afternoon!

Sunday night, 12 September, 2010

Allo!

Well, to help me adjust to the no-sports-on-TV here, I’ve found that I can stream NFL games live on the computer, so at the moment, I listening to Indianapolis lose to Houston! Quelle horreur!!

Well, I think we have had a very, very productive day! After the excursion to the laundry, it got very, very cloudy and overcast. By the time we were ready to go out – about 10, it was lightly raining. We decided that the first thing to do was get Mom’s Navigo Decouverte pass for transportation all this coming week. We headed down to St. Michel, but the lady this week said she needed to have mom’s photograph before selling us the card!! (Last week, the gal trusted us enough to follow the instructions and do it ourselves!) So, the first thing we had to do was find the trusty photo machine in the station – and St. Michel is a VERY vast metro/RER station! Finally found the machine, and R was able to navigate his way through the instructions to get Mom’s picture taken in “mini” – so now we have about 20 VERY tiny pictures of Mom! Back to the ticket booth, and voila, we’ve got Mom’s Navigo Decouverte card ready to go tomorrow!

From there we headed to Bastille Market. Wow; what a zoo! As Mom says, you can basically find ANYTHING there! We bought some cheeses, melon and two baskets of fraises du bois – absolutely incredible very tiny strawberries! After that, we decided we would look for lunch, and took the bus down toward the Carousel du Louvre. The Carousel’s food court has been completely refurbished. It is still a food court, but the seating area has been enhanced and the number of restaurants has been decreased. To be honest, the place was wild. No place to sit; very warm, and long lines at every food station! So, figuring the Carousel would do fine without us, we headed out, across Rivoli and around the corner near Palais Royal. Found seating inside a very nice café – occupying the site formerly held by Le Dauphin where we ate with Art and Anne several years ago. Mom had a composed salad of greens, ham, cheese, radishes, carrots, corn and tomatoes; she said it was great! R had the best Quiche Lorraine I’ve ever tasted – reason to go back there, for sure! I had a salad of tomatoes and mozzarella with pesto; unoriginal but good. Then back to the apartment, where Mom announced that she’d had enough fun for the moment and needed a nap.

So…fast forward several hours and we’re all up and refreshed. The sky has cleared, with blue sky and big white puffy clouds – beautiful day! Went for a nice long walk through the Luxembourg Gardens – we and at least half of Paris! – a band was playing jazz, kids were sailing boats on the pond – lots of things going on! After we circumnavigated the park, we decided to take the 82 bus, right in front of the gardens, for a ride. Rode all the way to the Hopital American (said HI for you, Dr. Kent!), past lots of lovely sights – Tour Eiffel, les Invalides and into Neuilly, a beautiful suburb of Paris. Got to the end and turned around and came back! Tres simple, and home about 8 p.m. and it was just getting dark.

Decided because of timing that rather than do R’s chicken dish, we would have a breasola salad with fraises des bois for dessert. Delicious! R and Mom did clean up and I’ve been blogging and listening to NFL. Could life be better than this?
Take care!
More tomorrow!
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