A Little Bit of This and a Little Bit of That

First, a bit of AZ info.  Many of you have asked about my volunteer work.  Today an e-Letter from CASA of Arizona, one of my volunteer activities, dropped into my Inbox.  For the curious, click HERE to see the web version.  The Employee Spotlight happens to feature my supervisor, Kourtney.

Back to Paris.

There is a large, moderately priced but very nice department store known as BHV (Bazar de Hotel de Ville) & yes, it's across Rue de Rivoli from HdV.

On the 5th floor is a cafeteria, very reasonably priced.  Susanne & I stopped there for "thé au lait", €2.90 vs. €5 or so on the street.  The atmosphere is somewhat sterile. The view is nice, the upper part of HdV, also a beautiful church, and a little piece of the Seine in the distance.

Locals hang out there a long time...one man doing crosswords, another sleeping.  Two elderly Madames de Paris chatting away a storm.  The only photo of note was of an ingenious wine dispenser.  A chalkboard to tell us what's for sale, the price & labeling each spigot.

€2.90 for a 19cl glass is very cheap, assuming the wine is drinkable.

BTW, in the US we use the liquid measure in the metric system differently.  We use milliliters, a bottle of water might be half a liter, 500ml.  Here they use centiliters.  That same bottle of water would be 50cl.  A 12oz can of soda here is 33cl.  Wine-wise, 19cl is quite large.  The standard wine serving is 14cl.




It's another grey day today.  Started to lighten up, we went out, started to rain, we came back.  Here's a shot of the Bastille Column straight down our street, B&W, the mood of the day.

As you may have gathered, Susanne & I are not much into visiting or photographing monuments.  Anyone can Google them & see far better pics than what we could take.  So we tend to stick to street sights & people.

Since we're out of the tourist area, we see regular work-a-day Parisians; here are five in one shot.

Several more folks, unremarkable but not likely to be seen back home.

In the foreground, another Mademoselle Noire & behind her a safer motor scooter, two wheels in front.

Marcel Marceau re-incarnated?

She looked at me just as I snapped the pic.

Canoodling across the boulevard.

Now THERE'S a classic car, a la Française. I know it's a Citroen, maybe from the fifties.

As I passed it going for a rear shot, I wondered what the white bunting on the door handle & around the hood was all about until I looked inside...a bride & a groom!!

What the well dressed, totally outfitted Honda Goldwing couple looks like in Paris.  The bike has to cost $40,000-$50,000 here and has every conceivable convenience except protection from the weather.  Looking at the license plate, the little "75" with a blue background (middle right) says they're from Paris...it coincides with the first two digits of the postal code.  In France, the Federal govt. issues the plates while ours are done by the states, each state unique.

An oyster shucker at a restaurant just up the street from our place.  "Emporter" means "to go" in Yank English, "takeaway" in the Brit version, more common here.  To eat the food at the restaurant, you say "sur place".

At the same restaurant, Susanne loved the elegant table setting.  The olive oil looks like it was in a perfume bottle.  Ash tray for smoking outside.  Inside...Non!

Here is one of those rare electronic cigarette stores trying to look important & inviting.

And now to the Department of Weird Observations, Paris Office.  When it comes to toilet paper rolls (yeah, you read that right), the French & maybe the Europeans are ahead of us in recycling.  Their rolls are biodegradable, just flush 'em down.  BTW, TP in French is "papier hygenique".

I just can't end the post on that topic, so on a lighter note the Velib people have crews making the rounds of all the velib stands (and there are hundreds) keeping everything in good repair.  Here is a crew helping some newbies getting started.  Yes, it's raining, we were rushing back to the apartment.

Tomorrow we're looking at taking one of the Metro lines out to near the end to a suburb called Montreuil to the east just outside the Peripherique (Beltline).  We're motivated by a blogger post featuring the town & what to do there.  We're going to a street market, then lunch at a South African restaurant.  All this depends on the weather, of course.

We're moving on Saturday but discovered a lot of food in the 'fridge.  So we're eating in for lunch & dinner.  Actually it's a pretty inexpensive way to do Paris, especially for a family; breakfast & dinner in, lunch out...lunch is always a better bargain than dinner.