Bon Jour,
The computer decided to send you an empty message. Perhaps it was a test to see if you are awake. This is an earlier than usual posting because at 4:58 pm in Paris I am in for the day. Bright sunshine and blue sky means a little colder than on other days, but a little sunshine brings these Parisians out to the streets, the parks, the cafes in huge numbers. It might even bring them to church, but you can’t tell because there are too many churches and too many Masses in all of them. Consequently, it appears that there are only a few hundred at Mass when in fact, the total for the day would be quite a bit more. At any rate, Jim was enthusiastic this morning and may have been the first to open the street market on rue Raspail. He brought the breakfast baguette! Coffee, Orange Juice, French Butter, Marmalade, one Croissant, and a big junk of baguette. I’m in heaven but it looks like Paris.
Then we marched off in the sunshine for the 11:00 am Mass at St Sulpice.
Nothing extraordinary there except that when the Bach Prelude began at 10:55 I thought I would have to scrape Jim off the ceiling.
After Mass there was only one thing to do in the sunshine, walk. We did for four miles over to Luxembourg Gardens again where there were tennis players, badminton, basketball, soccer, the Pony rides for children, and as always on a nice day, the sailboats in the basin.
We walked all the way up to Montparnasse and then down to St Germain de Pres where we crowded into Le Bonaparte for late lunch. Crowded is the word because every place was jammed with people. Beside us was a typical french scene: an older couple (older than us). He was reading the paper and she was reading a magazine. I don’t think they said a word to each other for the entire 90 minutes we were there. Of course, they each had their dogs under the table. At some point one of the dogs got mad about something, the other dog or the waiter, and began yapping. The woman began yelling at the dog and swatting it with her magazeen. Ah the delights of a french cafe. There’s always a show.
Le Bonaparte is across the street from St Germain des Pres church, and as we were leaving it was obvious something was going on in the church at 3:30 so we wandered in. After admiring the remarkable pillars each of which is completely different, I slept through about 20 minutes of an organ concert of fugues. Too much wine and gnocchi with pesto, cheese, and ham! It was probably only about 850,000 grams of fat from the butter, cream, and cheese. Oh well. we walked four miles today. I deserved it. Jim ate a ham sandwich. How unimaginative, but he did have a very large portion of beer.
Back home now, and you can understand why we are finished for the day.
