Linda's Journal
August 2001

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August 5th

I made a booboo with something I did on my computer and messed up this month's journal and couldn't get hold of my son to help me until today. I haven't done much in the way of being a tourist. Our things arrived from the States and I have been busy trying to find a place for everything. This is a little difficult as our kitchen still isn't finished and I can't put all of my glasses, etc. away. A small armoire came and I have stuffed it with everything I can't find a place for.

We have way too many clothes. I need to find the equivalent of the Salvation Army here in Paris. We did give a lot of Maurice's things to a homeless man who lives in our neighborhood. He has made a little home under an old railroad track with some walls of plywood and he has a bed with a comforter and pillows and plastic flowers in a vase. I don't think he has access to electricity as I have never seen light at night but I have heard him play a radio. We often see him wearing one of Maurice's shirts now.

Here are a few more pictures of the facades I love so much. On the buildings there is always a name of the architect, sometime the name of the sculpture of the facades, and the date when the building went up. I've noticed that all of the facades I like were done between around 1890 and 1910. It looks like that type of work stopped after WWI. The pictures below are in the 16th arr., a very nice area of Paris.

Grapes and grapevines are all over the building

I like these roses

I wonder why they chose a squirrel? But, cute.

August 5th, 2001

Maurice and I have bought a new car, an Audi. We could park in on the street but that could lead to damage to the finish, and many parking tickets, if we were lucky enough to find a parking place, so we also rented a parking space in a garage near where we live.

Here is our new car

To celebrate, the first night we went to a neat little town called Barbizon for dinner. It is an artist's village rather like Carmel, except for no ocean. The car really drives great.

Today we took the car south of Paris into an area with a beautiful forest and drove wonderful little country roads weaving between Plane trees on either side, one of my most enduring memories of France. We stopped in a little town called Chevreuse with the usual chateau on a hill over looking the area.

One of the towers of the chateau

While we were up on the hill I could hear the bells of the town church and went in when we reached the bottom. It was really charming, made of the rock so commonly used in building around the suburbs of Paris. It seemed to be different from most churches in Europe in that it didn't have that shape of a cross. Here is a picture that give a little idea of what it was like inside.

Charming and rustic

It was a great day and fun to use our new car. It uses diesel fuel and gets great mileage with lots of zip.

August 8th

I had to make a trip down to the Les Halles area at the same incredible subway stop I had been at before that is entirely lined in copper, Arts et Metiers, so I decided to go look at the museum of the same name. It's a museum of science and technology that was just totally redone in 2000 and it is a beautiful building that was once a priory. It has an incredible display of all of that man has discovered or invented starting with microscopes, glass making, cloth making, construction, energy-that is electricity, etc.-communication, mechanics, and transportation. There are little computer screens here and there telling you about certain things, or showing the objects being used.

How would you like to tell the time with this?

The first camera

I was amazed that I was taking a picture of the obscura camera that used delicate plates of silver nitrate to make picture with my digital camera. It's amazing how far mankind has come in 200 years.

My favorite part of the museum is the presentation in what was a beautiful chapel. There is a pendulum swinging at the entry and then planes floating overhead and a ramp going up past "horseless carriages". So well done.

One of the airplanes

There was also an interesting display of the technology used to create and put together the Statue of Liberty. There was a small model of it there, a duplicate of the huge index finger of the statue, and a display of what it looked like when they were putting it together.

A small copy of the Statue of Liberty

See the little men working on the head?

A great museum. I'm sure school age children would love this place.

August 12, 2001

We went out and exercised in the wonderful cool morning and then came back for an exciting few hours of scraping wall paper off the bathroom walls. I liked the wall paper we had before but it had been damage by plumbers when they replaced the hot water heater which they call a balloon here. I bought some new wall paper that I thought was somewhat similar and the painter that had been painting the kitchen hung it. Not only did I not like the wall paper but the painter did one of the worse jobs I have ever seen. So we have removed it and are going to try and paint the walls. I have my doubts as to how it will look, but, oh well.

I thought I would show a few more pictures of the metro system. As I said before, some stops are really plain, some really run down and dirty and some are works of art. Every time I go to the American Library I go through a long tunnel at the Franklin D. Roosevelt stop on M1 and am amazed by a mass of electrical wires that are bundled together and hanging very low over head.

Does this look safe to you?

There is a new system called the Madeleine which is high tech in that there is no driver. It is all automatic. The floors are marble, the trains stainless steel, and there are gardens behind glass looking somewhat like a tropical forest.

One of the high tech trains

Here is the little forest at one stop

August 15, 2001

Today is Assumption Day, a major holiday in France, rather like our Labor Day, I think, and Paris seems so dead. A lot of the shops are closed for most of the month of May, although the big stores, grocery stores, and most restruaunts are open.

On Monday I did get out with a new friend I met through the internet, Chris. She is Belgian but lives in the States but is often in Paris at their apartment here. She and I decided to do a little exploring of Paris. It was really hot, so we did a slow exploration. We got off of the subway at Gare de Lyon which is one of the 5 major train stations in Paris. I loved the restruaunt called the Blue Train so we went in to look and take pictures. It's a wonderful place, a historical site, with scenes from all over France painted on the ceilings.

A view of the bar

The resident cat

We then did a walk down the Seine to an outdoor museum with sculpture, all very modern, initiated by Mitteraund. We also went to a movie just to cool down. Chris wanted to take some pictures from the ferris wheel that you can see in the distance down at the end of the Champs Elyesse, so we walked down there. It is in the middle of the Place de Concorde and there is a sign saying it will close at the end of the year, so I'm glad I got to do it before time ran out. It was fairly stable and didn't swing alot.

Close-up of fountain on Place de Concorde

View of the fountain from the ferris wheel

It was a great day. I left my place around noon to meet Chris and didn't get home until almost 11 PM.