Update from Paris

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…