I feel incredibly lucky to have all these great markets around me. This is the time of year that begs for days in the kitchen.
I've been buying lots of wild mushrooms. They are so inexpensive here!
I paid a pittance for a kilo of chanterelles- the equivalent of $7 US. That's a whole lot of shrooms. There are so many varieties of mushrooms that I don't know the Anglicized name for, of that I have just never even seen before. I'm not going to get sick of them any time soon.
The First Sunday of the Month is Free Museum Day in Paris. Most major halls open their doors to the public, with just a wait to get through the security line.
Which, because of its popularity, can be quite long, and they will cut the line off at the end of the day.
Which is exactly why we were smug with glee last Sunday afternoon as we were the last people to be let into the d'Orsay museum and had to endure dozens of people trying to whine their way into line.
I hope there is another picture out there somewhere of me on the other side of the ropes, looking victorious.
Afterwards, a walk though the Tulleries.
The goats are still there!
We have officially entered gray sky season, so the warmth of the sun brought the world outside for a few brief hours.
While traditional American brunch has taken Paris by storm in recent years, I'm finding that I'm craving the simpler, Parisian late-morning breakfast.
Not too shabby.
Last Saturday night was the Nuit Blanche festival in Paris- The "White Night".
Museums, galleries, churches, and institutes all stay open all night, with the metro running all night to accommodate. There's lots of concerts, both official and unofficial, and thousands of people come out and stay out all night for the occasion.
While some of the lines were really long- who wants to go to the Pompidou at 2am? lots of people, apparently- some of the smaller happenings were nice, if not a little weird.
I have no idea how I had the capacity to *eff this shawl up as badly as I did. It's a first for me.
I had four gorgeous skeins of The Fiber Company's Canopy Worsted in a gentle light blue shade called "Palm Bud". A lovely blend of bamboo, alpaca and merino, I was waiting for a special project to hit me. I finally settled on the equally lovely Springtime Bandit Shawl. Thousands of other people have made this shawl and raved about it, and it's well-known as a simple and fast item to knit.
"This is *effing easy!" I remember saying to myself as I cast on. Months of teeny tiny gauge projects on size 0 and 2 needles made the worsted weight yarn feel like rope (soft, lovely rope), and it just flew along. I did the called-for Four pattern repeats, puzzled over why I was still on my first skein of yarn, and did two more repeats, just for fun. I thought the shawl was shaping up a little oddly, but, hey, whatever, most knitting surprises me in the end anyway.
Two days later, off the needles, I had my answer.
I had only made one side of the shawl. I totally read the charts wrong when I gave them the quick, "This is Cake" glance-over, and only did half the charts. So. The way the shawl is now constructed, what is supposed to be the top edge is now the bottom point. What is the bottom lace chart is the only part of the shawl that I can get to be a long, flat edge. It's upside-down.
I am genius. Hear me roar. This is getting ripped back and re-made into something a bit saner.
*Grandma is known to stop by the old blog on occasion, and I can't bring myself to say the eff word in front of her. effing, effing effing, effing. Guess who I learned words like this from, Grandma? Your daughter, that's who. True story.
A little bit of 6th ave in Manhattan, just outside of Paris in the aire urbaine.
La Défense is the business end of Paris. I recently spend an afternoon wandering around in the canyons. Unlike midtown, the whole main axis is a pedestrian plaza, so it's much quieter than you would expect. The grand arch completes the straight line of monuments called Axe historique that start with the Louvre, the Concord monument, down the Champs Élysées, through the Arc de Triomphe.
It's a little sterile, with malls and mall shops and mall food, and even a giant shop that is described as "The French WalMart".
I did something that I never, ever do...I grabbed a sandwich and a bag of chips at Pret a Manger (I didn't even know they had these in Paris!) and sat on the steps of the grand arch with the working people and had a nice sunshiny lunch.
There's a lot of really big companies out here...there isn't a whole lot of vertical office space in Paris, so they moved the office park way out to the 'burbs.
Towers, glass, metal, abstract sculptures. Just not what you would expect in Paris.
There are so many museums in Paris, I don't think I've even begun to scratch the surface of the scene yet.
There was an exhibit on Chinese cooking that was closing at the musée du quai Branly. I had never been, but it's the museum devoted to non-Western art and culture. It's right in the shadow of the eiffel tower in a big, sprawling modern building.
The Chinese exhibit was mostly about the cooking vessels, and we were totally disappointed at the fact that they missed the tie-in by selling the museum-famished masses dumplings and noodles at the end of the hall. You can't show me pictures like this, expect me to walk away without shaking in terror with the thought where will my next dumpling come from?
We wandered the permanent collection for a bit, and then headed over to the new special exhibit on human hair.
It started out all nice and lovely. Movie stars and their gorgeous tresses, marble sculptures of different ethnicities and their hairstyles. I knew things were getting weird when we hit the Native American trophy scalps on display. And then...
Shrunken heads! Real, once-live shrunken heads from the Amazon!
Maybe not something you would see every day. They also had some whole mummified people.
Hair is creepy.
