Sunday, April 29, 2001
All we know is there’s something up with the RER (and maybe the métro) on
Sunday (at least). We saw the notices on the monitors. So we’ve spent our
time at the Clignancourt Flea Market (the trashy edge of it being walking
distance from the motel) looking at huge pocket watches, and looking at both
“angel dogs” (spoiled dogs who don’t have to walk, have cushy places to sit
or snooze, and get “scrubbins” from their humans) and “guuud dooogs” (meat-n-potatoes
ruff-n-tumble good dogs who are lovable, loving, and ready for an adventure
– actually I don’t know quite how to describe a guuud dooog, I just love one
when I see one.)
We ate across from the Marché Dauphine area in the sunshine outside a café. Between us and the Marché Dauphine was a “Hedley’s Humpers” truck whose company name amused Alan no end. Alan had vegetable soup and I had a right healthy like crudité salad. I thought I ordered leafy greens with raw veggies on it. What I got was marinated raw shredded red cabbage (only a few steps from sauerkraut), lentils, raw shredded white celery, raw cubed beets, raw tomato wedges, and shredded carrot. It was right healthy. Afterward I went into the Marché Dauphine and ordered piping hot frites (pomme frites/French Fries) that kicked my healthy lunch right in the beets.
There was
a guuud dooog in an oriental carpet stall near the frite stand. 
She
and her carpet salesman human both had chairs to sit on. He left for another
stall and this well-behaved pointer continued to sit in her chair. Until
a poodle came along. She got so excited her skin was quivering. She knew
she shouldn’t, but she couldn’t help herself, and after all the poodle WAS
on the edge of her carpet stall. So she jumped down and sniffed the grumpy
poodle, and licked the grumpier poodle, and implored the even grumpier poodle
to play, but then the small-old-poodle’s human lead him away before he mauled
the big-young-pointer. The pointer’s human returned to find her away from
her post. Oh, what a tongue-lashing. I don’t speak whatever it was he was
speaking but I know what he was saying. I don’t speak pointer either but
it was soooo obvious what she was saying: “But..but...there was a pooooodle!”
We came home for a nap. Then walked to “The Fountain of Asia” for chicken soup.
Monday, April 30, 2001
It seems CJD (Mad Cow Disease) may be an imbalance of too much manganese and too little copper according to a BBC documentary.
Woke up at 5 a.m.ish with a very sore throat. By 11:20 we were on a #13 train
toward La Samaritaine for another duckie umbrella – my coat hood isn’t big
enough once all my hair is in. [At home the girls are wild about their duckie
umbrellas, thinking they are just like Mary Poppins’s parrot umbrella.] We
had an accordionist playing in our car until Place de Clichy.
We spent 12-2 p.m. in the rain at Marché de Puces de Montreuil. I LOATHE that flea market. All of Canton’s worst and none of the charm. None of the charm of ANY flea market. But Alan hoped for more of the white dress shirts from last time. He found one, plus an Oxford, and then we found two sets of adorable dresses (red/white gingham, and white embroidered, 50F/$7 each) for the girls. So that was a small ray of sunshine. But mostly it was cold and raining. And I’d drunk a lot of water to combat my sore throat. Need I say more? At about 1:30 p.m. we had frites. As we stood eating them, the barkers behind us (there were loud barkers everywhere) kept trumpeting a word or phrase that sounded very much like the English word “bathroom”. It wasn’t helping me.
Part of the charm of the other Paris flea markets and shops are the owners’ dogs in attendance. There were no dogs at Montreuil. Reasonable theory number one: they wouldn’t subject their dogs to these nasty conditions. Reasonable theory number two: the dog is at home in the crock pot.
Revisited the Super Carrefour (across the street) where we got the girls’ Madeline raincoats last time. Bought sinus-blasting mustard, a bag of gourmet salad, and a round of 7.9F mystery cheese. We sat at a McDonald’s table at the mall and ate our cheese. Noticed a place selling DVDs. [At home we purchased a DVD player that will play either Zone 1 (The Americas) or Zone 2 (Europe) discs.] Not only did this DVD place have French “Mulan” [with language selections in Czechoslovakian, Polish, English, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Dutch, etc], they had “Labyrinth” and “The Muppets Take Manhattan” in four language selections including German, and Spanish! The girls and I aren’t Muppeteers, but it’ll be a fun language tool.
A very well-dressed,
professional Mr. Bean entered our métro car on the way to Miromesnil. He
was well-dressed and smelled well-marinated. Dropped off our loot and took
the bus to the Opéra, then métroed to rue Cler. Rick Steves
says rue Cler is dead on Mondays and he’s right. Of course we were there
after hours. Alan told me to choose a 100F+- (total) place to eat. [You can
find a sit-down dinner for two for 100F in some quarters, but not the Eiffel
Tower quarter.] 
So
I chose the Café du Marché at rue Cler and rue du Champs du Mars. This supplied
Alan with salad, duck and sauteed potatoes, and me with salad, rotisserie
chicken, and piped potatoes for 120F total. It was filled with Americans.
Later we found out it’s Rick Steves’s place of choice to “check out the rue
Cler action”. We sat and listened to the rain fall on the canopy overhead
and flow between the cobblestones under our feet. I watched the goings ons
at the Boulangerie/Patisserie on the corner over Alan’s shoulder.
We walked in the rain over to the Champs du Mars to see the Eiffel Tower lit up in the cloudy twilight. The search light caught low clouds once. It would have been a great photo.
April in Paris was wet.
Friday, April 27 | Sabbath, April 28 | Sunday, April 29 | Monday, April 30 | Tuesday, May 1 | Wednesday, May 2 | Thursday, May 3 | Friday, May 4 | Saturday, May 5 | Sunday, May 6 | Monday, May 7 | Tuesday, May 8 | Wednesday, May 9 | Thursday, May 10 | Friday, May 11| Saturday, May 12 | Sunday, May 13 | Monday, May 14 | Epilogue