Dreaming of France -- Rue Mouffetarde

This time while we are in Paris, Earl and I are trying a new hotel, one on Rue Mouffetarde, which is a street with a famous market. We generally stay in the same hotel in Paris, but this time we booked a hotel with our airfare, which made it much less expensive.
The side streets along Rue Mouffetarde have some inspiring restaurants.

The host at this restaurant was lurking in the doorway trying to lure people to have a seat. Apparently, the more people who sit down, the more people who will join them. We were happy to sit down, and we received a cocktail on the house in return. It must have been lunch time as you can see from the sun shining on Earl's face. 

Here's another picture at the same restaurant where you can see Earl's face.

And here's a shot down the lane of the row of restaurants. I think we returned to the same one a few times. We aren't nearly as picky as our French friends who stop and examine the menu and debate whether the menu is for the right season. 

Still, it's always fun to let A French person choose the restaurant, and we can sit back to enjoy the ambiance. 

Thanks for playing along with Dreaming of France. Please visit each other's blogs and leave comments. I look forward to seeing what you are posting so I can dream about France with you.

Dreaming of France -- People Watching

Please join this weekly meme. Grab a copy of the photo above and link back to An Accidental Blog. Share with the rest of us your passion for France. Did you read a good book set in France? See a movie? Take a photo in France? Have an adventure? Eat a fabulous meal or even just a pastry? Or if you're in France now, go ahead and lord it over the rest of us. We can take it.
Maybe we can all satisfy our yearnings for France, until we get there again.
People in France look so different from people in the United States.
While sitting in a cafe along Rue Mouffetarde, I took a few shots.

I was focusing on people wearing scarves, but as you can see, I also captured a man carrying a baguette along the street, a paper wrapped around it.

This woman does not look like she is getting what she wants out of the day as she and her man do some shopping, but her scarf is a complicated affair guaranteed to keep her neck warm.

 

Men frequently wear scarves in France, but not so much in the U.S., although it's becoming more common. I think some men still consider it too effeminate.

Saturday Snapshot

To participate in the Saturday Snapshot meme post a photo that you (or a friend or family member) have taken then leave a direct link to your post on Alyce's blog At Home With Books. Photos can be old or new, and be of any subject as long as they are clean and appropriate for all eyes to see. How much detail you give in the caption is entirely up to you. Please don’t post random photos that you find online.

In honor of the Tour de France and all the great French scenery I'm watching on television, here's a market scene from Aix en Provence.

And this was a seafood market in Paris along the Rue Mouffetard.

And, of course, who can visit even a market in France without thinking about wine.

Another Day in Paris Flown Away

We made the most of another day in Paris and I have stayed up late (for me) grading papers. That was how I convinced my boss to give me all online classes, by telling her what satisfaction she would get out of imagining me grading papers in Paris.
Earl and I headed over to the market on Rue Mouffetarde this morning.
Pretty much any food that could be imagined could be purchased. Here's a seafood stall where the creatures looked as if they would crawl off their ice beds. As we walked past the fromagier, the smell of the cheeses was so strong. It made me want to stop and buy cheese. I guess that's the point.
Another thing that made me salivate was the sight of this white asparagus. I had hoped to find asparagus for dinner, but maybe tomorrow.
The stalls were selling huge bunches of lilac, which must be in bloom. Strange because the lilac is in bloom at home too and I thought Paris was ahead of us as far as flowers and trees blooming in the spring. I do hope I get to see, and smell, some wisteria in bloom. I'm hoping someday for a trellis across our front steps at home with some wisteria draped across the trellis.
The strawberries for sale in the market were the reddest I had ever seen. People were walking and munching on the fresh strawberries. A teenager walked past eating a strawberry. She had the bluest eyes and the reddest berry. She was already past me when she stopped. I asked Earl to take her picture. He said he felt like a stalker, but he took it. I think nearly any picture of this girl would wind up looking enticing. Isn't she gorgeous?
After the market, we headed for the Seine, where all things touristique are happening.
When I first visited Paris, I stuck to the Metro, the subway system. It's easy to use and feels safe. What I didn't know, was that the bus system, equally easy to use and safe, is closer to most things and allows me to see many Paris sights that I might have missed underground.
Earl and I bought a Paris Visite pass that lets us travel all we want on buses and the metro. We frequently catch a bus and figure out where we want to get off once we are on it. Tonight we were going to get on a bus and just ride the entire route so we could see the sights at night, but I had a few more papers to grade so we came home.
Our first stop was l'Orangerie, which is a small museum that houses Monet's water lily paintings.

The paintings look deceptively easy. Couldn't any one paint blobs of color and say they're water lilies?
Apparently not, because no one has pulled it off besides Monet. Even as his eyes were failing and his paintings got darker and darker in color, his blobs look like water lilies.
We had planned to visit the Musee d'Orsay on another day, (Hey! I rhymed) but the tickets to l'Organerie were cheaper with a companion ticket to the Musee d'Orsay. This museum focuses on impressionism and it's hard to believe the number of paintings done by Monet, Cezanne, Manet, Renoir, Degas, Gauguin, etc... The sheer number makes your eyes go numb.
Here's what I learned while roaming through the Musee d'Orsay today (I rhymed again!), I want to be the kind of woman that Renoir painted, not the kind of woman painted by Degas, Cezanne or Toulouse Latrec. All of the women painted by Renoir seemed happy. They were enjoying life. They were nicely rounded and living life.
The Musee d'Orsay allows no pictures inside any more. What a shame because even the museum, a former train station, is phenomenal.
So I'll leave you with a photo of me and Earl on a footbridge across the Seine, and I promise a food blog tomorrow with lots of "food porn" as requested by Suburban Kamikaze, who needs to get her skinny butt across the ocean to visit France or Greece or Italy, or someplace and start living life before it passes her by!