Fourteen is about halfway through the four weeks here — so it’s all downhill from here on.
By now it’s completely automatic — I get up in the morning, wash my face, have a cup of coffee, and then head downstairs and out the door to the corner bakery to pick up a fresh baguette — and sometimes an additional pastry or two. And tonight it occurs to me that this is EXACTLY what I always said I wanted to do: to live in a little apartment somewhere in Greece or Portugal (or Paris) and the only thing on my daily agenda was to go down to the neighbourhood bakery and pick up a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine for the day. And maybe read the paper. And that’s what we are doing. Except not reading the ‘paper’ — now it’s our various bookmarked sites on the interweb. And I’m not so much into wine — even though it’s France I really should be drinking good wine — but I’m enjoying some European beers.
Today after breakfast I ‘walked’ Sue down to the big Paris shopping area, to the Galleries Lafayette. It really isn’t very far from our place, about a 15 minute walk. And although I was more than willing to go back to ‘pick her up’ at an agreed time later, Sue thought she could manage to find her way back home okay. And she (almost) did. Well, she DID have to stop and ask someone just around the corner from our place how to get to our street, and the man was (so un-French! well, actually not. Everywhere we’ve had encounters with the ‘French’ they’ve been helpful, kind, friendly.) happy to show her the way.
I stayed home and organized a bunch of stuff on my computer and did a few ‘killer’ sudokus.
Before supper I went down to the fancy wine store around the corner and bought a couple of ‘real’ French beers. The couple who run the shop are super friendly and happy to speak English. “Ah, deez are bode beer-r-rs fr-r-rom dee nor-r-rd of Frahntz. Eets ver-r-ry goud.” I think to myself, They better be, they are 6.50 Euros apiece! So on the way home I stop at the little market across the street from our place where every night I see the owner out in front of his shop, having beers with a few buddies. I go in to look at his selection of beers and choose a couple more that look French. I go to the checkout to pay and ask him what kind of beer he likes. “What? Beers? Oh, Heineken!” (Well, at least he didn’t say Coors light!)
Back home Sue has supper ready. What would that woman do without a kitchen? Shopping and cooking — is there anything finer? And by shopping I don’t mean ‘buying’ — no, I think she actually came home without any shopping bags.
After supper I do my best to quickly write my blog before the beer(s) kick in. We’ve got an evening movie on the agenda for tonight — we’ll see how that goes…
Oh yeah, here’s a photo (have you noticed that there have been fewer photos on this site ever since Ed Peters ‘schpotted’ me about my photo galleries!). Well, here’s the ONLY photo for today:
