Paris and our Very Good Friends

 July 1, 2023, Paris--Travel was quite easy to France last weekend.   The taxi to Catania, the planes to Vienna, then to Paris, and then the taxi again from Charles de Gaulle to our friends John and Eric in the 18th arrondissement were little more than tiring.  After all it is a five hour air trip.  We have been quite busy so that John has not taken up the keyboard to write.

It is always good  to see our friends and to visit the French capital, a city we love.  After the constant walking, up and down, around and about in Taormina, Siracusa, Noto and Palermo, it is good to have the Metro nearby and few hills to deal with.  Although they live near Montmartre we didn't scale it this year.

We've been to Paris many times, so we did not need to  deal with the usual tourist sites.  Instead John had read about a major show at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, part of the Louvre complex, that was a must for us.  "Hair" was both humorous and informative, going all the way from classic times to the present including how the monstrous head dresses of the 18th and 19th centuries were constructed.  A movie, with one shot here, showed how it is done.   The intricacies and the additional materials necessary were incredible, including combs, other people's hair, ribbons and other stuff we can't name.  Visiting non-Europeans even got photographed, but to make the shots proper they wore European dress.  Some shots:

The following day, Tuesday, a group of John and Eric's expatriot/binational friends came by for a cocktail dinner party that lasted the whole evening.  The conversation went from the sublime to the ridiculous and poop to nuts because John and Eric had just brought home a new dog, Taylor,, and one of the guests brought her 3-month old poodle named Martini. We had a really fine time.

On Wednesday, June 29, we headed out to Le Perreux, a suburb in the Marne Valley by train.  We have known our host and hostess, Marcel and Colette, who are in their early nineties, for about 30 years, visiting them at their summer home in Brittany, and having them visit us in Washington.  Their grandson, a film maker, who had spent a couple of weeks on our street with neighbors when he was about 15, was also present.  Wonderful courgères (accompanied with champagne), then mushroom salad, lotte (monkfish), cheeses (accompanied with a Sancerre) and pineapple-strawberry tarts with fresh whipped cream (accompanied by a Bordeaux).  A truly lovely time together.  

On Thursday we had a good quiet day, shipped gifts home, a sidewalk cafe lunch of wine and salad, whole filet of sole for dinner, cooked on its bone structure, on which Ben very successfully proved his surgical talents and a relatively early night to bed.

Friday, June 30, included one of our reasons to come to Paris, a place which we have never visited.  We took the hour long train trip to Giverny to see Monet's fabulous gardens and his water lily pond that served as inspiration for his magnificent paintings. 

 

Of course there is always an interesting character around, this one happened to be a pet chicken who was clearly well fed at the café in the nearby village.  Today we head off to meet our fellow cruisers and we will board our canal boat tomorrow.