A Festive Fete

We'll be leaving fascinating Paris soon, but we were able to enjoy some street food before leaving. This weekend Montmartre is having a Fete at Sacre Coeur a few blocks uphill from our apartment. We took the funicular up (looks like it operates much like the San Francisco cable cars) and looked back as we rose to view the city spread below, subdued due to gray cloud cover.

The previous day had been clear, cool and breezy with a bright blue sky - perfect fall weather! We took the Metro to the Musee d'Orsay to spend time with my favorite artists' works, then took a jaunt on the Seine down to Notre Dame and St. Chapelle. Time just flew by!

So the cloudy coolness of Friday's Fete was a big change. For some reason it made it difficult to get photos of the stained glass while inside the church, but it didn't matter because this church, while grand and gilded,

is also a holy place not just a tourist attraction. We lit a candle for Max and said a few prayers.

Outside the festival included street performers, an assortment of food stalls and lots of wineries stalls. There were also people dressed in costumes from the Napoleonic era.

My favorite food stalls to look at included the raclette sandwich stall where heaters warmed the top of a wheels of cheese and the bottom of a half baguette until a customer ordered. Then the melted cheese was scraped onto the warm bread and ham or other toppings added.

Another had an aprons young man stirring a mass of melted cheese in a large pot with a long handled stirrer who kept the mass of hot cheese moving and occasionally he lifted some up, showing thick strands of deliciousness looping from the sturdy stirrer.

 Sweetie bought a traditional potato dish that combined potatoes, bacon, olive oil, cheese and pepper. One stand served that mixture in small containers made from bent thin wooden strips. There was a colorful candy stall

and one that sold Japanese cashews, which Sweetie enjoyed.  I enjoyed some macarons with no filling - just two cookies with bottoms pushed together. The apricot was especially intensely flavored, although they were all delicious!

It was the day when high school aged students were invited to come, so there were lots of young people around with their youthful energy. We walked down a series of broad steps through the Willette Gardens, directly below the church. Despite the gray day it was a fine excursion to end our trip to Ireland and France.

A little later we visited the Anvers weekly market across the street from the apartment and purchased some roasted chicken and veggies for our dinner and some fruit for breakfast. The displays were works of art!

They had some delicious looking roasted chicken livers, mushrooms and potatoes, but I wanted to make dinner myself.

I cooked up onions, garlic, red pepper, carrots and zucchini with some thyme for a veg, and roasted cooked fingerling potatoes in the onion and garlic scented oil left from the veg dish.

A green salad with house made balsamic dressing completed the meal. Forgot to take a photo until we had almost finished! The apartment, La Parisienne on VRBO, was a delight and fun to cook in. There was everything one could want, lots of spices and condiments and pretty serving bowls and plates, too.

Hard to believe that it's time to go home!

Off to Paris!

I've wanted to visit Paris for a very long time. Since I started reading Vogue magazine when I was about 9 years old, the idea of Paris as the fashion capital of the world is long standing. I'm not as interested in fashion anymore, but it is still one of those 'bucket list' places to visit while we can.

 As a baker I am thrilled that I might visit Patisseries while in Paris and see the delights master pastry chefs have created.

 Tasting the true Polaine boule is another goal for this trip (partially fulfilled). We have been having delightful baguettes daily (and a few croissants have been devoured by Sweetie).

Then, as an artist, I hope to visit art museums, plus take lots of photos to inspire my own art once home.

Best of all, I' m here in Paris with Sweetie.

We took a wonderful, clean and comfortable high speed train from Avignon to Paris this morning. Once we arrived we took either the Metro or the RER subway to the Gare du Nord, a few blocks from where we are staying. Any time we were confused, there were extremely helpful French people. Not sure where the rumor came from that the French are unkind or dismissive. Maybe in some past time,but we have not experienced that at all on this trip so far.

Finding and getting into our apartment (the building at the top of the post) was like doing some kind of puzzle, but it was worth it. It is lovely and overlooks a neighborhood park where children were playing with joyful noises all afternoon...actually all day from about 9 am until about 7 pm.

We had a simple dinner at the cafe on the corner, then enjoyed the street performance nearby. The crowds around the Metro stop nearby are dense. A far cry from our quiet rural life at home! Love it.

On the way back to our apartment in the Montmartre neighborhood, we stopped at a green grocer and stocked up on fruits and vegetables. Sweetie came home and enjoyed a perfectly ripe fig and an Asian pear that tasted like a cross between a pear and a lemon. Very refreshing!

Never did figure out how to add photos from my phone, so I've added 'em now that I've returned home. Bon soir!

Bridges

The last two days have been relaxed, with a visit to Pont du Garde yesterday and a close look at the Avignon bridge, St. Benedict's Bridge (I think), the one in the nursery rhyme.

The experience at Pont du Garde was a bridge of sorts, too. Their excellent museum really communicated the Roman experience of creating the aquaduct that carried water for 300 years from the mountains all the way to Nimes. It was a marvel of Roman engineering. The bridge is taller than the Statue of Liberty, long enough to match three modern jetliners parked nose to tail. It has three graceful sets of arches and the museum exhibits showed what went in to making those successive arches.  By the time that we walked to the bridge, it was raining, but since neither Sweetie nor I melt, we were fine. If you look you can see the umbrellas of other visitors. Look for the umbrellas on high, found during our walk through the old town of Avignon later.

Not to be forgotten is our lunch that day. We still are not used to French business times. Shopping is done in the early morning and after 4 or 4:30 pm until about 7 (at least in Provence) and lunch is from noon to 2 pm. We left the Pont du Garde site about 2:30, forgetting to eat, so turned off at a grocery store only to find it closed since it wasn't shopping time. The only place we could find still open for eating was a McDonald's! I hadn't eaten at McDonald's in the States for something like 20 years. But I was grateful that they were open, that they had touch screens so we didn't have to order in fractured French, and the McNuggets tasted about the same, as did the frites (fries). Here is a near by building set showing the juxtaposition of old and new.

Today we walked around Avignon's old section

and had a picnic lunch in the gardens by the Palais du Pape. Plums, local cheese, pate and baguette...very French.

It was sunny but quite windy at the top of the garden where we could see all the way from the Luberon mountains where we were last week to the Rhone river and ramparts nearby.

Avignon

Yes, there is a bridge, an old one (although it is only partial and hasn't been used for a long time as an actual bridge...they build a modern one). The Rhone River runs under it, right next to the walled city of Avignon. Prior to 1309 it was a tiny town, but then the Catholic Church had their first French Pope. He didn't think that Rome was safe enough, so he moved the whole organization to Avignon and turned it into a real town! For almost 100 years the Popes lived here and all the administration of the Church took place from here. That required the building of a massive fort/palace for protection and to house all the workers. It took decades with 400-500 men working all the time to create the Palais du Papes, or papal palace.

The papal palace is enormous, stately and sort of brooding. It was eventually used for a state prison sometime after the Pope left and returned to Rome at the insistence of the Romans. In the early 20th century they started to reconstruct the building, and that work is still going on as you can see if you look at the large arch in the photo below.

As you can imagine after centuries of neglect, some of the frescoes are damaged, but even fragmented or faded, they are still beautiful.

Inside the Palais there were numerous gargoyles. I spotted this fellow and he reminded me a lot of a similar creature hiding under the Fremont bridge near Seattle. What do you think?

We are staying a very short walk away from the Palais and can see the bell tower from our room in the hotel in the old section.

We hear the bells peal every hour. Since the same happened at our last place, I'm thinking this is the trip of the bells.

The plaza in front of the Palais du Papes has lovely cafes and one of the days we were there an amazing musician was playing jazz. One of the days we were here we walked up to the gardens just to the right of the building behind the cafe in the photo below and had a picnic. We were pretty fortunate with the weather. It only got cloudy the morning that we left town.