Our last day in Paris was a rainy one. Not many people were out.
It was a good day to go see some of the historic and beautiful passages, the old covered shopping areas that are probably precursors to the modern malls, though it was not a great day to shop there, as most of the shops were closed.
We could never really figure out when things were to be opened for business. Few shops or restaurants posted their hours of business. We finally decided that they were open when they wanted to be, and closed when they didn't want to be opened.
This was a typical door sign.
We did find some fantastic kitchen supply shops open. They were shops that catered to foodies, professional chefs, and restaurants. Julia Child surely shopped here. Several had photos from their long-ago, historic pasts. What amazed me was that they looked exactly the same now, except for the addition of a few plastic bags and some fire extinguishers.
Without spending much money we ran out of shopping time, as well as museum time, sight-seeing time, Paris time.
We headed to the airport, and made it safely back to Boston, with so many beautiful memories of our time in the glorious City of Light.
-Posted from my iPad
3 comments:
You have made me think that travelling should be on the agenda again soon. Will have to start saving again. What a wonderful time you seem to have had.
I DID have a wonderful time, Mary! I think I'll start saving to go again. I feel like the trip 'expanded' my view, somehow, which is a great thing to have happen.
I was just browsing your very interesting blog and flicked past the FERME sign. It reminded me of a trip I did to Europe in the late 70s (sigh, that was a long time ago). We have our summer break over December and January and so many of us go to Europe in winter. We did a bus trip across Europe (for 6 weeks!) and the person organising the trip had never done one at that time of the year before. So we kept arriving at places that were shut! We learnt the word for shut in many languages. We also found that we would get to some places hours before we were scheduled to because there wasn't the tourist traffic. The upside was that we had very few queues in the popular spots as not many tourists were going in the depths of winter.
Winter in Europe was my first exposure to bare tree branches and white snow - I couldn't believe the black and whiteness of it - we NEVER have that here, we have no native deciduous trees (except there may be one in our snowfields, I'm not exactly sure). So that is one reason I really love your tapestry of the winter scene out your window.
Thanks for your posts, not only am I enjoying your travels but I am able to reminisce about my own.
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