Month: September 2016

We’ve been here a bit more than a week now and there is so much to report!  Hope I don’t bore you.  I’ll try to be complete but succinct.

We’ve done an amazing amount of walking, seeing museums and lovely sights.  Favorites include Museé de l’Orangerie, a museum of a pleasing scale that houses enormous Monet Water Lilies paintings in two oval rooms (this could not be captured in a photograph!) and Sainte-Chapelle, a smaller church near Notre Dame that made almost entirely of stained glass(!). We also attended a concert by a string quintet of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in this chapel one evening (Awesome acoustics and great music even though the stained glass was dark at night…)

 

We joined the American Library in Paris (great place to borrow books, attend lectures, and access their catalogue of e-books), and attended their grand reopening on Sunday. We reconnected with Anne & Jeff Vitek-Doniger at the Library opening and shared a meal with them on Tuesday.  Anne & Kathy went to high school together and Anne & Jeff now live in Paris.

Yesterday, we walked through the Tuileries Garden.  This seems to be a popular place for locals and tourist alike. How wonderful to have a large beautiful garden in the middle of this bustling city!

Then we found an English language bookstore, “Shakespeare & Company,” where many famous authors (Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, James Joyce) gathered and where, even today, aspiring writers are allowed to sleep in the stacks in exchange for helping out in the store!

We are really getting to know the Metro and have wandered through our own and many other neighborhoods (sometimes unintentionally!) as we explore this great city. Last night we tried a bus to get to the Champs de Mars and found this to be less satisfying…buses, unlike the Metro, have to deal with traffic!  But we did get to picnic at the foot of the Tour Eiffel…a beautiful sight day or night!

We’ve been eating well but are trying to stay even with exercise.  Rick has found a few nice places to run. And, after numerous visits to places suggested by Google (one was out of business, two were only class sites, and one was a corporate office of a fitness company), I finally found a gym within a 15-minute walk that would allow me to join for a month.

Today marks the beginning of Fashion Week in Paris. I may try to score a ticket and check it out.  I’ll let you know…

 

Well, we made it!

We arrived in Paris on Tuesday morning on a WOW Airlines flight from Baltimore by way of Reykjavik (more about the flight below).  We are each traveling with two carry-on size suitcases, which we checked through. We’re carrying a few things that wouldn’t pass security (liquids, corkscrew, cheese knife) and the allowance was only one carry-on on board.  In a later post, I’ll share the contents of these bags for those of you who’ve wondered, ‘Just what to you pack for a 6-month trip?’

After retrieving our bags and getting some cash from an ATM, we proceeded to the train station where we purchased Navigo passes that allow us to use the Metro, buses and RER trains. These are sold in weekly and monthly increments, so we got one of each to carry us through our time here.  The trip into town took about an hour and our Airbnb apartment is about a block from the St. Paul Metro stop.

The apartment is small but comfortable for the two of us…a living room/dining room, galley kitchen, bedroom (with a nice big, firm bed!) & 1.5 baths. We rearranged a few things to make the closet space work and were able to unpack!!

The weather has been glorious…sunny with highs in the mid 70s…great for walking as we reacquaint ourselves with this lovely city. We’ve located close-by a wine shop, a boulangerie (ahhh, the bread!), a cheese shop, a Franprix grocery that squeezes fresh OJ, and even a little foie gras shop! (Those of you who know Rick understand the importance of this…)

Review of WOW AIRLINES:  It is cheaper than the competition even with the extra fees…checked luggage (everything is weighed so pay attention to weight limits), extra leg room (worth it!). Food and water are for sale on board. I say bring a good sandwich and be sure to bring a bottle of water (it’s cheaper in the airport than on  board…).

This weekend we’ll be embarking on a Locavore City Tour.  Stay tuned…

 

Well, summer is over and we’re almost ready to launch. We saw lots of my family (including Julie & Levi, Andy& Nicole and, of course, Owen) at Alex Hartman’s wedding in Maine.  What fun!  FYI, Owen’s headphones are specially designed for babies to wear in loud places…like wedding receptions!

Now we are spending two weeks in Baltimore, seeing friends and tying up loose ends before we leave for Paris on Sept 19.  But since our house is sold, we’re staying in an Airbnb…the 3rd floor of a grand mansion on Chase Street in Mt. Vernon.  Many friends offered to have us stay with them, but two weeks seemed like too long a time to impose on their hospitality…and it’s great to try a new neighborhood where we can walk or take the Circulator to almost everything.

Stay tuned. My next post is likely to be from Paris!!