Street art

We have seen a lot of good graffiti and street art on this trip, but nowhere as much as in Paris. I thought I would share a few of my favorites here. 

I don't know if I have already shared this one seen in Ljubljana? But I like it a lot, in spite of the message. As anyone who knows me well can tell you, I am NOT a rule follower, in fact, if anything, I'm a bit of a rule breaker. One of my favorite quotes is, " if you follow all the rules, you miss all the fun", or something like that. I truly believe that. But I like this graffiti. 

Some of these photos I took, but this one was courtesy of Rita, seen in Monmartre. 

Speaking of art,we were near our neighborhood in the Village St Paul and came upon an art opening. 

In hopes of being offered a free glass of champagne, we wandered in to look at the art. I told Rita I would give my eye teeth for a photo of the " food" on offer. No fancy canapés or even some cheese, rather on the large table there was a small plate of some tiny muffin like cakes, and a plate of what looked like the candies I remember from my childhood as " dots", in bright colors. Very chic. And no one offered us champagne. So much for the Paris art scene! Haha.

Paris things

Can you tell I'm running out of words, perhaps? I'm also running out of steam for travel, especially on my own. I don't, for one moment, take for granted how much easier it is to travel with someone else, rather than solo. For one thing, you can confer, and puzzle things out together. And when you're lost, at least you're lost with someone else. It's a little lonely traveling on your own, even if you are going to someplace you want to be. 

But for the sake of continuity, let's pretend that Rita and I are still in this together...

It is different for us to be in such a touristy place,and among so many crowds. We haven't heard so much English spoken since we left the US! 

Since we were in St Germaine already, we decided to do a little more browsing there, but it seemed that the deeper we went, the more tourists we saw. 

But I couldn't pass up my favorite, Aquarelle( watercolor) without a few photos. I was sorry that I didn't buy flowers for our room earlier.

Wow, what peonies! They almost look like they are made from  tissue paper.

Clever " vase", eh? 

The French just have a way with flowers...

I wanted to buy all these bunches!

Another thing they do well are darling baby clothes. These are so simple ,but cute.

Heck, I might even try my hand at sewing some, but then I have my friend Sue who us an expert at making cute kids clothes. 

I'd happily dress a little grandbaby in any of these outfits! Just sayin'...

And from the Ritzy part of town, something a bit more formal. 

Up near the Sorbonne, we encountered a few police and others were setting up barricades along the street. 

I asked a shopkeeper what was going on and in our broken translations, she said it was a "celebration", but of what, I couldn't deduce. Looks like fun. Nothing says fun like vans full of riot police. 

We decided to move away from that event, and came across some traditional food and craft booths.

I had to laugh when the guy at this stall started speaking to some customers in English, and they replied in French. His response was something along the lines of " whew, finally some a French people!"

Some really big nougat.

After looking at all this food, we realized it was time to head back to our neighborhood for a rest before dinner. So long for now, St Germaine. 

Big Paris Days

I apologize for the lack of posts, but between our busy days seeing the highlights of Paris and the general lack of good wifi, it has been challenging, and I'm not one to spend a lot if time hanging out in Starbucks for fast wifi( until today). It is my last morning in Paree, and I bid a fond farewell at 4:15 am to my sweet daughter in law, Rita. She has been a dream travel companion. She can look at a map and quickly identify where we are and between the two of us we have found our way around this city pretty well, even on very tired legs. I've always known that Rita is easygoing, but I can't say enough about how fun and easy it has been to have her for my travel companion. 

She had her agenda, which really helped to structure our days. My theory is that you should do or see the things that are most  important first, so we set off to see the Eiffel tour on bus 69. 

We weren't sure if we would go up in the elevator or just observe from below, but we just had to go see that view...

It was cool and a little windy, and me without a jacket...but it was cozy in the elevator! 

We opted not to take the stairs!

Gray skies didn't deter us.

We got someone to take our photo after we decided that we didn't take good selfies. Guess we do need that selfie stick afterall. The very nice fellow was determined to get the tower in the photo and was nearly laying on the ground to get this shot! We appreciated his dedication.

Afterward we walked past this beautiful vertical wall in front of Quay Branley museum.

Then I coaxed and cajoled Rita into going for a spin on bikes. I have tried the velib system with some success in the past and had some fun ( and scary) moments. She was reluctant, but agreed. It was nice when there was a path, but it would disappear. We gave it a go until we reached St Germaine where it was just too busy, and not fun.

We stopped at Pain Quotidian for some fabulous salads. Everything people ordered looked equally good. I know it's a chain, but the food was delicious, and the place was packed! 

Good graffiti poster

We founds some fun shops along the rue du Dragon. I had never seen this street before, but we'd both return for good browsing.

And here's a classic Paris view. 

Taste of Paris

We had already had several delicious tastes of Paris by 11 in the morning, but we had tickets to THE Taste of Paris at the Grand Palais. I always read about fun festivals in Paris, but it is always so darned inconvenient to fly over here to attend them! Fortunately I read about this one beforehand on one of my favorite blogs, parisbreakfast and the timing was right. I bought our tickets online for Sunday, the last day of the event. 

Good thing we decided to get there ahead of time, because the line was already long.

But that gave us time to look at the magnificent building in front of us. There is so much of a Paris that I have not discovered, and the Grand Palais is one of those grand monuments I have passed by many times near the Champs Élysées. 

It doesn't usually have a huge pink fork out in front, however. Now THAT I would notice! 

We waited outside of the huge glass domed interior until they opened the doors. As you can imagine, once the sun was shining, it was like a greenhouse in there. 

But oh, what a greenhouse! One filled with tempting treats and delectable morsels...our tickets came with tokens for tastes of food and drink, but not enough to go very far...fortunately there were lots of free samples, too. 

Like little cups of chantilly cream served by handsome men. 

Not free, but beautiful to look at. 

The whole idea is that chefs promote themselves and their famous restaurants, and for the public it is a chance to possibly see these chefs up close and in person, and sample their foods without going into their expensive restaurants. At least, that's how I see it.

We didn't have too many taste tokens, so we decided to team up and share bites of a few things. Of course I read later that for €10 more we could have had double the tokens... But we tried this lovely tarte first, from Pierre Sang Boyer

There were a lot of flavors and textures, but we found it a bit unusual that in a savory tarte, the pastry shell was sweet.

He's cute, though he might not approve of this action shot I took. Although we didn't know of many of the chefs beforehand, it was still fun to see them in person. 

And we saw Kei Kobayashi discussing ( and smelling) the Japanese knives. 

We also tasted his dumplings. Pretty good. 

I liked this tower of tomatoes, but did not sample the ketchup...

We loved the ice cream cab, especially the cute guy who popped out of the top to give us tastes of ice cream! This could be the next business venture. The ice cream wasn't bad either...

There were lots of chefs who's names I do know, like Joel Robuchon, Alain Ducasse and Guy Savoy, but we followed the longer lines ,figuring that those in the know knew the young chefs to try. 

This was one of our favorite samples - a bite of cheese and charcuterie, but the real star was the beer from Leffe- the ruby could be my second favorite after framboise. 

This was the last of our "paid" tastes that Rita found for us. Not sure which chef it was from, but it had interesting combinations of textures and thankfully, no foam! Foam seems to still be the rage and we saw plenty of it at the Taste, but neither of us are big fans. 

After a lot of walking and being on our feet for over 7 hours, we happily hopped on the metro back to the Marais, calling our first full day in Paris a big success!