Last week in Paris

Monday: Lunch with Khem at Lao Douang Chan on Ave de Choisy.  I had noodles with four treasures which comes with a bowl of soup and lots of extra chili condiment.   It was delicious.  Khem had been on the Unity March on the previous day. She hadn't been in support of the kind of cartoons that Charlie Hebdo publishes but was protesting violence and supporting her husband who was keen to go.  She was exhausted after standing around for 2 hours and then walking very slowly.   Khem is off to Thailand to see her family for the next month so I shall miss our Monday lunches together.

Tuesday: Shopping and cleaning and ironing.  It has to be done - now and again!

Wednesday: Craft session at the club with lunch.  I spent most of the day cutting up Christmas cards to be used to make more cards.  It's the sort of job you'd give to a very old lady at a day care centre but that's not the point.  It's the pleasure of being with the group, talking and laughing and exchanging experiences that encourages me to go.  I had turned down the offer of lunch with the French conversation group because I really thought I ought to cut down on the number of lunches each week!  See, I do have a modicum of self control!

Thursday:  I joined a group of 13 from the BCWA at the Musée des Arts Decoratif for a guided tour.  The young guide spoke good English with some strange vowel sounds and occasionally our tour organiser who is French checked that she had understood and re-translated for us.  Despite this slight difficulty, the young woman did an excellent talk about perspective through the ages.  We started with the middle ages and looked at altar pieces reflecting 'relative perspective' where the most important people depicted are larger scale than minor characters right up to a 2014 acquisition, a table depicting a flock of starlings made by a 3D printer from a video re-construction of the movement of flocks. I learned a great deal.

Friday: On Friday the craft group (or almost all of them) got together for a pot luck lunch.  For this I ventured into the 17th Arrondissment which I don't think I've been to before - carrying my bottle of wine, my home made fruit salad and creme fraiche (I know there should be accents there, but it takes too long!).  We had a good lunch, with champagne and then quite a lot of wine (considering it was the middle of the day).  When shopping for the fruit salad I was rather disappointed not to find melon in the supermarket so I went to a greengrocer's.  "Non, madame, ce n'est l'époque" - in other words, melon is out of season.  Since there's a lot of imported fruit and veg in the shops (from Spain in particular) I'm slightly surprised that melon is considered seasonal as it's available, imported of course, all year round in the UK.   It's good to buy locally of course and not rely on imported food, but why not import melon when all sorts of other exotics are being imported - like Sharon fruit for example. Vive la différence!

Saturday:  Great excitement.  I've cleaned the kitchen.  Here it is, in its entirety and gleaming! Yes, that is all of the kitchen.  I leaned round the wall on the left in order to take the picture.