Terry eats and drinks his way around Paris

 

Fantastic food shops (providores? Epiceries?)  Most of them will cook or heat something up for you if they can.  Wine shops where you go in and select your bottle, with excellent stuff around €12-€15 and then you can stay there for the plat du jour of something good.  Or you can select from the a la carte menu if you want.  Food, wine, cakes, biscuits, macarons....  Cheese shops with hundreds of cheeses, charcuteries with terrines, pates, roast this and that, fishmongers, flower shops, it just goes on and on.  We walked down one section of the Rue Royal and passed Chanel, Dolce & Gabbana, Villeroy & Boch, Gucci, Ralph Lauren and I forget what else except that Maxims was at the end of the street and Rolex and Breitling were on the opposite side and all within say two hundred yards.  Security guards on each doorway to check that your card is Platinum and not just one of those Gold things.

               Even the burgers were better - with blue cheese and delicious bread

 

We are honorary Parisians now because we went and bought our Metro passes on the Monday (they are weekly passes).  You have to give the Metro attendant a photo to get inserted in it and it's good for 10 years.  You just reload it and swipe as you go through the gates.  Buggered if I know why every Australian city that's tried an electronic card doesn't just use this one.  Probably not enough corrupt dollars to cream off in the contracts.  Millions of people use this every day and it is faultless.

Rude Parisians were nowhere to be found.  Everyone was amusing and helpful.  The lady in the Metro closed her window and came out to the vending machines to walk us through not one but both of our Navigo Metro passes.  Then she went back in to her booth and made up the cards for us. Then she came out again and showed us how to put money on them.

We went to Academie de la Biere on Carol's birthday. http://www.academie-biere.com/

There were two young guys at the next table (i.e. one foot away) and we struck up a conversation about the beers we had ordered.  They were childhood friends from Amiens working in Paris.  One of them is an archivist who is interested in the WW1 battlefields, as they were around Amiens.  He's going to give Carol some private maps of where her grandfather fought, as his grandfather did also.

Maybe in summer with an onslaught of tourists (the most visited city in the world) their patience wears a bit thin but the waiters were cheeky and helpful, the street vendors were happy and charming. 

A great place to spend some time.  Even to stay for a while.  Wine is magnificent, beer is good and if you don't like French 303 or Pelforth Brown, Belgian is everywhere. Chimay is €2.50 in the grocery store!

Be careful when you read the menu on the blackboard.  What you might think is a veal cutlet could well turn out to be tete du veau, which may or may not be to your liking.  I will agree that ours was well cooked and well presented and leave it at that.

http://www.linternaute.com/restaurant/restaurant/115931/bistrot-d-i-d.shtml

In 9 days, there were many others as well, each with its own special charm.

We went to the cemetery, Pere Lachaise, the most visited cemetery in the western world.  You can even get an app for it now.  Visited Jim Morrison's grave, Edith Piaf, Oscar Wilde, Simone Signoret/Yves Montand buried together, Modigliani, Baron Rothschild.....  When they wanted people to stop using the cemetery in Paris, nobody would, so they dug up all the celebrities they had there and moved them out to the new one. This was a hundred or so years ago.  All of a sudden, everybody wanted to go to the new cemetery!  Now even people from overseas want to be buried there.

                                             Jim Morrison's grave has become a shrine

 

It was very cold every day but the sun was out and days were pleasant.  It began snowing on our second last day and continued onto the Sunday, but only lightly.  We wandered down to the Eiffel Tower in the a.m. with some hours to kill and then headed off out to the airport.

 

A great city.

I’ve shown some people a set of noise-cancelling headphones that I got in Vegas in '07.  They didn't cost much and they were ok for drowning out screaming children on planes.  For years I've "wanted" a pair of those high-quality BOSE noise-cancellers, the latest version of which are the BOSE QC15. I could never justify buying them, though.

Well, I was wandering around Orly Sud Sunday evening, as you do when you're waiting for a plane, and there was a FNAC store in the airport.  They had a BOSE demonstration board set up, with movie clips, sound clips etc where you could select and listen through the QC15 headphones.  I happened to have my noise-cancellers hanging around my neck connected to my mp3 Player at the time so I could actually compare the two.

NO COMPARISON!!!  I listened.  Stood there.  Listened to some more.  Turned to the lady on the counter, who was watching me, and said "I'll have a pair of them please".  Cost me €300 but OMG   are they not the absolute best ever. They are already banned from wearing at the helm because it would be impossible to hear anything else but the music.