Skip to main content

Dinner in Paris

Our very sweet young concierge at the Hotel offered to book us a reservation at a restaurant nearby, Le Petit Cadet. However, when we got there at 6:00, the restaurant was closed. So we retraced our steps to the hotel and gently asked about it. He said, “Oh, it’s the First of May, a holiday. They’re closed.” Which made us wonder how he could have made a reservation but oh well. Then he phoned another place “Regalade de Conservatoire” but when we got there and read the menu, whoa, the food was way too fancy for us as was the price, E41-00 pp. So we trailed around near the Folies Bergere—how my parents would have laughed about us being outside this very famous nude theatre—and found Cafe Folies. The waiter there was utterly charming, spoke English for Richard’s sake, and of course nothing was too much bother. 





Steak for me with frites and an enormous hamburger for R. Truly, we could have shared the burger and I can’t help wondering, given how friendly the staff was, whether they made it American sized for us. We waddled back to our hotel. We will be back in Paris in a week and will explore more then. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

January 2024 and blogging

  I haven't posted on my blog for a long time. Partly that was due to not knowing what to write about and partly it was wondering if I wanted to put myself "out there" anymore. And in what way. I subscribe to a few blogs on Substack, which is a subscription-based blog. You can pay to have your own blog, you can pay for someone else's blog, and that means you get to write and post and get comments back from a whole lot of people. You can comment on other people's blogs--if you pay--or else you can just read the blog and not pay. Of course you might miss some of the "pay only" content--much like modern news media has teaser stuff but to read the whole article, you have to pay for a subscription. The Substack blogs cover all kinds of topics and there are a few "professional" writers--meaning they're journalists and writers who have published and been paid larger bucks than the $5 a month they get per subscription on Substack--but I think most ...

There's got to be a morning after

And today is the fourth "morning after", with each "night before" a little easier, a little more "make the best of it but take care of yourself." Before I move back to writing this memoir style blog--going to continue with the South Africa trip of 1977--I feel I would be shrinking if I didn't say something about how I feel about this week's US election. As of this writing, Saturday, Arizona still hasn’t finished its count—the GOP did a great job of preventing the mail-in vote for being counted early and messing up the ability to use the machines—so I still don’t know if we are going to be saddled with the odious Kari Lake or whether the House is going to be Republican too. Still, it’s becoming more “academic” than visceral for me, if you know what I mean. Necesitamos avanzar. Sera dificil, sabiendo que muchos, especialmente aqui donde vivo, creen en los planes de Trump y Vance. (I have been practicing Spanish in preparation for a 10-day December cr...

December in South Arica 1977, Part One

 December in South Africa 1977, Part One I had never understood candlelight in quite this way before. Oh there had been candles on the table Christmases past back home in Canada. For atmosphere, for festivity. While the electric crystal chandelier above cast the “real” light on a table laden with turkey, potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce.… But this, this was different. Here in the corrugated iron shack that my friends had referred to as “the cottage”—not any cottage that I had ever seen in my growing up in Quebec—with no other light either inside the cottage nor outside in the black night of the Transkei, I understood how candlelight could draw a world down into the narrowness of those around the light, as if nothing else in the world existed.  I looked at the six faces around the table, illuminated in the candlelight, my own pulsing with sunburn. "Oh you’ll be grand," they’d told me down at the beach that day. "We’ll tell you when to get out of the sun." And toni...