The other thing I am loving is facebook, the Guardian on-line, the Hoopla, u-tube and email. The on-line SMH very snootily has blacked me out just because I read 10 articles yesterday and didn't sign up for a subscription. Today I would have but they kept blacking me out so a customer lost.
So I have realised how important language is to me. I have read Doris Lessing's 1974 book Memoir of a Survivor and I recommend it to anyone who can cope with a chilling if restrained description of what seems to be happening to our society or be very easily. Boy she was an amazingly intelligent woman. So sad she's gone but at 94 or 95 she didn't go until she had nursed her ill son to his end - what a champion. The book is sad too as she was quoted as saying that there is an element of autobiography in it and the main character is named Emily which is her mother's name. I have started to read her last book Alfred and Emily which is the story of her parents' life - if they had never married and then their actual story. Such damage happens when love cannot be given or expressed in a way that can be received. It's a very sobering read.
What I love about this place? You just walk everywhere. There are people who walk everywhere. There is history all around you. The cars are tiny. There are little electric cars for one person - sort of like a bike but with a covering and 4 wheels. People walk because the roads are so crazy - I admire the brave souls who drive in this place. You eat baguettes with yummy cheese and drink vin rouge - there are whole shops for cheese, shops for amazing pastries, bistros on every block. Grocers sell wine even tiny weeny shops but you don't see drunks anywhere. The butcher shops are like art galleries, everything is presented with aplomb and fabulous visual panache. I'll give two examples.
So this may be a pushover but on Saturday I ventured up the Rue du Viele Temple, as you do, to find the Musee Picasso - Lonely Planet said it had re-opened after extensive renovations. Oh well it wasn't. But instead I saw some lovely little films and a selection of photos of some great collages in the alternative - which is another tale as one has to get lost in order to find one's destination.
On the way there I had spied this little chocolatier and dropped in on the way back. So tiny and gorgeous and well wrapped and being the sucker I am I bought some leetle chocalates and asked if I could take some photos. Well having spent 20 euros for the leetle chocalates the gentleman was very happy for me to photograph. It was a delightful shop. The chocolate is yummy too.
Example no 2 -
The other wonderful shop I discovered on my first day. My friend Susan came home from Paris a few years ago with a beautiful red rose resin ring and some great earrings for me. Some how as if by instinct I drifted into this shop after my first foray out to get groceries etc and voila - the resin jewellery!!!!
BUT to top it off I had also bought a piece of wild resin jewellery by this same Brazilian designer (name to be supplied) from a shop in Beechworth Victoria - the wonderful Rebus!!!
I bought the wildest necklace I could find for my sister Lizzie's 50th.
Howzat!!!
So of course I had to buy a few things and again take some photos - I assured the proprietor that this was a well known designer in my neck of the woods or bush. Hehehehe - you don't say much even the fact you are from Australia quickly closes the conversation....
But the point remains - the shops here are so fabulous and I don't even have the chutzpah yet to enter the snootiest looking ones. I'm talking tiny weeny boutiques - with no one in them..... I haven't ventured into big department stores yet. But my friend Elizabeth made BHV the core of her last trip here. That's the department store next to the town hall - Hotel de Villes.
OK have to go now - I must be acclimatising because instead of going to bed at this early hour I am going out!!!! Ooh lalala! I haven't even mentioned the Louvre yet!
Bon soir!!!!
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