Ever More Seemingly Random...

Tuesday morning Vicki had her pastry class at La Cuisine Paris, on Rivoli near the Pont Louis-Philippe, and, to pass the time, I did the flaneur thing, more genuinely, walking in the 3rd and 4th, both fairly familiar from previous Paris visits. Wednesday morning, we did a longer walk in the Luxembourg Garden while the apartment was being cleaned (it's a "serviced" appartement, serviced weekly). More of the flaneur/flaneuse thing. Sort of.

The school; next week she does tartes

Star baker; the class focused initially on croissants, but
quickly got into several types of pastries, and even
included that most decadent/delectable kouign aman;
imagine having real kouign aman in Orlando in July

Celebrating the 475th anniversary of the Bouquinistes...

Passing by a bead store favored by Penelope,
on Rue de Temple

Holy kilt, Batman!

Marais art

One of the good things about Bowelist architecture is that when it
finally gets renovated you hardly notice the scaffolding...(the
Pompidou museum)

Also undergoing serious renovation...one of our favorite department 
stores in Paris...where department stores are still a thing

Hotel Rivoli, where we and the girls stayed in 1989; we
wonder whether they've put in an elevator since then...
it was 88 steps up to our room...

Attempted artsy-fartsy shot...then I noticed I was standing
at the entrance to the Maison Europeene de la Photographie

Hauling a load of gravel down river...probably headed for the paths
of the Tuileries or Bois de Boulogne

Rare port-side view of the Hotel de Ville

Lunch at Le Louis Philippe; my salad Nicoise not pictured...

Click to enlarge and be amazed...Le Bel Canto...
a dinner theater where (apparently) the serveurs and
serveuses sing operatic stuff at your table..."can you
do the Ride of the Valkyries?" "Maybe the Love-Death?"

Unicycle bass

Interesting pose...Marguerite d'Angouleme, Queen of
Navarre, 1492-1549, in the sculpture-studded Luxembourg,
most of whose sculptures are women...

But we were there mostly for the flowers

Medici Fountain

Monument to students in the Resistance

All-weather bullet-proof guard station outside the Senat

As far as the eye can see...French order imposed on Nature...

Delacroix monument now somewhat obscured in 
the renovation area

Among several walking groups that morning

Peering into the palace's orangerie, where they're now moving the
more tender trees back outside

Major Announcement

Students of this blog will have suspected my fooling around with AI in the past several months. It started innocently enough, asking for travel itineraries, recipes, the kinds of things one used to ask of Google. Actually, Vicki got me into it. Later I asked it (any of Claude, Co-Pilot, ChatGPT, Gemini) to write a poem, a business plan, a short article on how not to get trampled at Disney...which led to short stories, longer poetical pieces, a novella, a lengthy treatise on boiling water (with recipes), and, most recently, my long dreamed-of biography of the artist and philosopher Renè Ssance. With so much now going on, and with more in the pipeline--all of it, yes, of dubious provenance--I decided to start a second blog: Artifices, https://artificialartifices.blogspot.com. It is the repository of my AI-"assisted" projects, and it is more fully explained in its first post.

I invite you to have a look at Artifices. File it all under the heading of someone's self-amusement. Perhaps you too will be amused. 

More Seemingly Random Paris Scenes

Although the post titles might suggest otherwise, we are not really a flaneur and flaneuse. As Baudelaire defined the term, the flaneur wanders the streets of Paris aimlessly. We're just tourists, wandering, yes, but almost always with some destination, some goal. And, I think it might be argued, even the flaneur has goals, those of observation and understanding. But whatever. I digress. In Paris, wandering, whether aimlessly or not, always reveals interesting sights and elicits interesting thoughts...

The eclairage, aka the Twinkling, of the Tour Eiffel

Vicki and sister Marie, there, then

Another day, I am wandering the 6th, to find Messie Nessie's
Cabinet of Curiosities, a place much to my taste, but not
everyone's

Nothing can top Paris ghost signs

In 2014, I searched all over for lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves,
galangol root...now SE Asian markets are everywhere...

August Comte monument at...

The Sorbonne

And, of course, where else but Paris and the Latin Quarter would
you find a bookstore that just does philosophy?

Another day, at a Vide Grenier at nearby Notre Dame
des Champs...a  neighborhood street sale 

Can be wonderful if it's just the neighborhood residents; not so
wonderful if it's mostly the pros

Now at Marche Edgar Quinet, the big market at
Montparasse...largest offering of oysters I've seen
inland

Enough to outfit a small regiment of pelerins...pilgrims on the Way of St. James...

At one of the famous Montparnasse restaurants...all of them claim Hemingway
was a regular

Witnessing the Paris Marathon from the Passerelle Leopold-Sedar-Senghor,
across the river from the Orsay

Allez! Allez! Allez!

Be afraid, be very afraid of what can be done with AI

Had to go back to Galeries Lafayette for the end of the 30% off 'sale';
by law, there are only the winter and summer "sale" periods in France,
although merchants can do sales anytime just as long as they don't use 
the world "sales" ("soldes"); just FYI 

Nothing beats Parisian ghost signs

At a boulangerie in the 15th