Chicken Dinners and a Twenty-Six minute walk to Saint-Chapelle. Or four hours if you are directionally challenged,

Another installment....happy reading.

Dinner Sunday night. Paris has the world’s best chicken. Really, when you go to Paris, or anywhere else in France for that matter,you have to seek out  a trattior that has one of those chicken roasting cabinets sitting outside on the sidewalk. The kind where they roast not only chickens but have a pan of potatoes under the chickens so that the potatoes roast in the chicken fat. Bliss That and a salad, bottle of vin makes the perfect meal. It was a great way to round out a very soggy day in Paris. We spent all day walking, which more of less was the idea, but we’d headed out in the morning to go to Saint Chapelle. Google said it was  a 26 minute walk from the apartment, but Google hadn’t counted on how directionally challenged Kate and I are, so it took about 4 hours - mind you we window shopped, stopped for coffee and browsed in books stores, but still. Getting back was also a challenge, but by then the girl GPS kicked in - “oh I remember this shop, it has the cute dress in the window we must be headed in the right direction because we passed this on our way out this morning...”

One of our detours along the way was a stop at Shakespeare and Company, Paris’s iconic English language bookstore. What a place it is. An old crumbly hole in the wall crammed stem to stern with books of all kinds. Books line the rickety stairs, there are weird little alcoves filled with moldering cushions and mouldering patrons and papered with little mementoes (the alcoves, not the patrons, but you never know) of people, students mostly by the look of it who were passing though. There’s a piano on one floor and someone was up there playing it. We browsed though the shelves and I  would have like to have bought a couple of posters from the box labeled, amusing posters, 1 euro each, but would never have got it back to the apartment in tact in the driving rain.

38 Rue Vaneau

our Paris saga continues.....(new posts will appear when my broken wrist improves)

Saturday, finally here, grey rainy Paris, hooray. What is it that makes Paris in the rain look all misty and romantic, while Ottawa in the rain just looks cold and grey - oh wait, I think I answered my own question.

We are met outside our apartment by Joel, the rep from Paris Address, company I rented the oh so cute 5th floor apartment with the sleeping loft from. This little adventure  had started out as a solo trip to celebrate, although that’s not quite the right word, my turning 50. There’s something about this milestone birthday that makes you evaluate your life. Fifty is tricky because while you don’t feel old, or even think you look old (more about this later), there’s no denying it. You have more years behind you than you have in front of you and it makes you think. What I thought about mainly was, why wasn’t I doing the things I love to do? In many respects I have a blessed life, I have a comfortable lifestyle, a husband I love and two daughters that are the joy and wonder of my life, yet I feel most of the time as if I’m just going through the motions of getting through the week, only to run around like mad on the weekend doing all the chores I didn’t have time to do during the week because I’m working. So, when 50 hit, and I realized, that well not to put too fine a point on it, I had if I was lucky about 30 years left, I decided that I’d better start doing the things I wanted to do now. Those things were, travel, France mostly, I’m in love with it and always have been, drawing - I’m not very good at it, but again, that shouldn’t stop you from doing it. If you never try, you’ll never know if you can get better, and write. I started a blog a couple of years back that probably only has 2 readers, but that isn’t the point. Writing, drawing and even traveling to some place you love should be done for yourself. So here I am, in Paris, sketch pad, and laptop in hand and ready to go. 

But I digress, I do that a lot. It’s one of those things you catch yourself doing more and more as you get old. Where was I? Oh, yes, we’re outside the apartment, waiting for Joel. He arrives and leads us up the 5 flights of very narrow stairs to the top of the building and our apartment with sleeping loft and pull out sofa bed which till be home to Kate, who decided to accompany me on this little jaunt after I’d rented the flat. We heave our two large bags up the incredibly old and increasingly more narrow stairs (it’s like the builders had ADHD and lost interest at about the third floor and just laid the stairs out any old way so they could call it a day.

We finally make it to the top though, huffing a puffing, and.... the pull out sofa bed isn’t. Isn’t a bed that is, it’s a sofa, but with no pull out bed. Looks like Kate and I get to share a bed, (see early entry about matching jackets). But no, Joel is very good about it, they told us there was a pull out bed, they made a mistake, they’d find us another flat that would have two beds. That’s how a few hours later we end up at 38 Rue Vaneau.