Festival of Music

First, an explanation of why there was no blog yesterday. We spent the evening with our friend Jean Marcel, beginning with aperitifs at his apartment and ending with dinner at a nice restaurant in Montmartre. Since France was playing Switzerland in the World Cup (5-2 France, thank-you-very-much), we had the place to ourselves. The service was great, including regular score updates. By the time we got back to our apartment, it was just about midnight, so I didn't attempt the blog. As a side note, getting to this apartment isn't trivial; the one-way-ness of the streets has recently been revised, and the cabbies' GPS systems not yet updated. Getting a cab pickup Monday may be interesting!

Today we went to a couple of places we somehow missed last year. Musèe Carnavale is a great museum of the history of Paris. We started our visit with a little rest stop in the lovely courtyard. The hedges you see here are tiny, about a foot high.

 

One room included scale models of Paris neighborhoods as they existed around 1900.  I recognized this one as being in the area we stayed in on the first part of our trip.

My favorite traveling companion amazes me. On her list of places to see were two "galleries", old enclosed pedestrian shopping arcades with a variety of shops.  And guess what? We just happened to come across them. She tells me it was quite random, but I think it's about as random as things just happening to fall in the same general direction when you let them go! These two are only a couple hundred years old.

Galerie Vivienne:

Grand Cerf:

One of our new targets today was the Palais Royal. It encloses a very popular garden area, with roses and trees offering a respite from the sun. That is, if you want to get out of the sun, as we did. Most of the locals were soaking up the rays, except for this guy:

We'll be up late tonight. Today is the World Music Day, celebrated on June 21 worldwide, and the French really get into it. Below our apartment is a street party with an unpredictable closing time:

All the events are free. We lucked out. About three blocks from our apartment is the St. Eustache Church, which really gets into this event. For nine years, they've had "36 Hours at St. Eustache". Starting at 10:00 yesterday morning and running continuously until 10:00 tonight they host a wide range of musical performances, culminating in about an hour and half of grand organ from this instrument:

And that's it for another of our shared trips. We hope you enjoyed following along. We've had a great trip and are now thinking about a Christmastime trip to Paris and Strasbourg in 2015. We'll let you know about that when it happens.