The last post

This is the last post. We are winding down with our last weekend.

Some pigeons in the Paris parks are obese. A classic case of too much carbohydrate as they eat baguettes and croissants fed to them by tourists. Chestnut trees are everywhere in the parks, and some streets, and there are chestnuts everywhere lying on the ground. Tempting to pack a few, they are expensive at the Prahran market. In fact it is tempting to do my market shopping here and bring it home with me. Certainly the quality is better. I think they pick the fruit ripe so it tastes heavenly on the day you buy it, the beans are tiny and tender and the black figs and melons are perfection especially with the ham.

A couple of days ago I enquired about a beautiful bowl in a small shop. The bowl was glass with enamel and painted iris on it. When I asked comme bien? the woman smiled in a patronising way and answered in French. It was four, fourteen or forty thousand euros. I didn’t ask for clarification. Once I heard mille – game over.

This evening we went to the big Monet exhibition at the Grand Palais. The queue was not bad, about half an hour. Then when we got in we had to wait almost as long to check the umbrella. The delay was caused by blinding incompetence, both systems and personnel. The French have a serious fault, they are very patient. When we finally got our tickets they were very beautiful, each one a perfect little print of one of the paintings. And the exhibition is huge and wonderful. Paintings brought together from around the world - even a contribution from the National Gallery of Victoria.

There is a plaza new the Petit and Grand Palais which has war and political references. Charles de Gaulle and Churchill are there and I wondered where Stalin was, an ally after all. Then I thought I saw him but it was Clemenceau, it was the big handlebar moustache that tricked me. Roosevelt has an avenue rather than a statue. I suppose it would have been tricky for the sculptor to do a wheelchair.

The French are still very keen on cheques and write them in supermarket queues. It seems everyone still has a chequebook – must add a lot to banking costs. And our friends paid cash, in euros, into a local bank account and was told it would take four days to ‘clear’.

Today with my friend Penelope as a guide I checked out some vintage shops in the Marais district. I bought a divine 1930s tea dress in good condition – all I need now is a garden party – anyone? I think that has to be the end of the shopping. My suitcase is stuffed and so am I. I will be pleased to be home next week although I am planning to enjoy the next two days.

De Gaulle triumphant

Charlie led the march down the Champs-Élysées when Paris was liberated

The little palace

Le Petit Palais was a delight, both in terms of its exhibition and its cafe in the courtyard.

Storing jewellery in Paris

Our friend has found a way to set up her earrings that show off their beauty and enhance that of her lampshade

Parking in Paris

Will la petite voiture bleue ever get out?

Paris sights

Our friends from Adelaide are staying in Montmatre - there's a bit to see ...

And the fashion shops show off their wares in various ways:

Champs Elysees

Yet another triumph


A mix of gold and water at Concorde


A couple of Gallic Symbols

Pigeons have no respect for a very dignified, if somewhat lacking clothes, gentleman.

Paris river cruise

In our quest to rise above the standard tourist pastimes we went on a cruise on the Seine.

French table manners

My sister Anthea and niece Sophie are in Paris at the moment and our landlady Sylvie invited the three of us to dinner a couple of nights ago. Obviously keen to make a good impression we paid close attention when told the names of the other guests. One was called Geoff which seemed unusual for a Frenchman. Fortunately we found out just in time that his name was Jean Francois, referred to as JF only once. It seems everyone is bilingual, even trilingual. It was a good night and I thought I would pass on a few tips. No clean plates or knives for the cheese course. If your knife has sauce or gravy on it you wipe it on your piece of bread. Cheese is not eaten on crackers or bread which are used between mouthfuls of cheese to clear the palette. Speaking of cheese I have been eating my fair share so I am hoping the French Paradox is still applicable. Fortunately I am back in walking mode which is helping with my resolution to come home weighing no more than when I left, hopefully a bit less with summer coming.

T. S. and the meaning of life

The day after we arrived in Paris we went to hear our friend Penelope deliver a lecture on T. S. Eliot’s “the Wasteland”. It was part of a conference on Eliot’s poetry held at the Sorbonne and Penelope was considered to have made a very impressive contribution, not just by her fans, but by the many highly regarded academics who were there. She spoke of Eliot’s attempts in the poem to reconcile the conflict between memory and desire through the Eastern (eg, Budhist) approach of transcending the self centred individualistic approach to life, which causes such conflict, and moving stage by stage to the point where one has become part of the hole – sorry – whole.

This raised many interesting questions. One questioner asked if in fact the poem was an account of failed therapy, because all the transcending he attempted didn’t solve Eliot’s problems. It was also apparent that one had little or no hope of following the poet’s line of thought unless one was au fait with the sources of all the references and allusions he made (a friend of mine once described the Waste Land as a giant cryptic crossword). And how acceptable was the notion of losing the awareness of one’s individuality - in fact ceasing to exist as a person - in order to merge with the highest level of existence?

So, given all this, is it worth grappling with this difficult poem in the first place? Many would say it is, just because it gets you thinking about so many issues.

Travelling in France

We are now in Paris after the south, both west and east. Lots of walking, the Metro - and no car. In the Pays Basque we hired a car which I, Bronwen, was shocked to find had gears. I thought driving on the right (wrong) side of the road, finding our way and changing gears was too much of a challenge at least for the passenger. For our drive east I insisted on a car with automatic gears. It seems they are more expensive to hire and, in France, only for the disabled. We got a nice Renault but I think Jack was a bit mortified.

We discovered despite the many strikes how compliant the regional French are – they take their own rubbish to communal bins. So far no protests about paying their rates. Speaking of strikes, the day we were to drive across France there was an airline strike which affected our friend in the south who works in London and commutes. He had to be driven to Spain to get a flight.

We now have a lot of experience of the European trains. Currently the French (SNCF) and German (Deutsch Bahn) trains share the international routes and jointly staff the trains with the Germans and French working side by side. The French union won’t let the French conductors serve food to first class passengers so the German conductors happily do it. The Deutsche Bahn makes a profit of 85 million Euros a year and the SNCF (pronounced sniff or something close) loses 85 million (or something close). SCNF is bidding to buy Eurostar and it seems the two companies are moving towards being competitors which doesn’t bode well for the French unions. The new national pension rules are to be decided in parliament next week so there will be a strike that day – I think it is 23 September.

French joggers are out around 11.00 am which seemed an odd time to me until I realised they are preparing for lunch by knocking off a few kilojoules. We were in the Luxembourg Gardens and I was very impressed by the herbaceous borders which were glorious. All purples, pinks and reds with a touch of blue. Artichokes in flower and purple grasses giving height with lots of grey green leaves and every now and then a dash of lime green. The gardens around the Senate were a co-ordinated work of art and makes you wonder what they are doing at the Botanical Gardens.

la vie à Paris

Well, now we're in Paris staying in a cosy little apartment in a 17th century building in the 6th.

We are in rue Dauphine which leads onto Pont Neuf.



And the shopping has started ...

Sunny Sète.

There's a few canals in Sète.

Say cheese

Roquefort is a town built over a number of caves created by landslides (which makes you wonder how secure the town is). Various cheeses that can use the "Roquefort" label are produced in these caves. The milk comes from sheep kept locally, except when they are taken somewhere else to have their lambs, which is what they were doing when we visited. During our guided tour through the caves of one of the producers a man in our party challenged the guide, saying it would be impossoble to produce so much milk in the prescibed area. She smiled and responded with a set of regional and seasonal statistics that appeared to put him in his place. Anyway, the cheeses are lovely.

Victoria had a spare lamp or two

Lodève is another attractive town with a cathedral containing the chandelier given as a gift to Napoleon III by Queen Victoria - he obviously didn't know what to do with it so he stuck in a church down South.

Slow and Steady ...

In Montpellier we met a young woman who works there as a vet. Her clients are mainly dogs and cats; so, in order to provide some relief from them, at home she has a pet of a competely different species.

Who says?

Uzès is a pretty little village (town?)

The good life

After checking out le pont du Gard we partook of lunch at Vieille Moulin, a fancy restaurant near the acquaduct, where everyone ate well, especially Jack who had a "queer" Tartare that consisted of steak tartare sandwiched between to thinly sliced, fried steaks.

Roman efficiency

Wherever you go there are rules ...

even - or especially - at Pont du Gard, an amazing Roman aquaduct

with a few 1,000 year-old olive trees planted nearby:

and walkways that dwarf the puny humans ...

Oh for a Mini

This is the view from the house in Soubès

This is the smallest automatic we could hire for our drive over from Bardos - automatics are viewed with distain by the French who see them as vehicles for the disabled. Back in Melbourne I would probably call the one we've got a Toorak Tractor, here it's a Soubès Shuttlebus.

Serene Soubès

Yesterday we drove from Bardos to Soubès - in fact Jack had been on a 4 hour round trip to Bilbao before that in order to get his host to an airport not affected by the latest strike.

The country on this side of France is quite different to the West Coast from whence we came, still mountainous, but stony rather than wooded. We're staying at a lovely house with our friends from Adelaide, have been shopping at a local market (well, some fifteen minutes' drive from the house) and gone for a walk into the village.

Down by the riverside

Today our friends had a barbie down by the river on their estate.