Day 8 in Paris Come to the Marais District

Today Thursday 19th June we found ourselves alone, for the first time in 14 days, arghh!!!! Ha ha  I am only laughing so I don't cry.  It is a strange feeling when once again the house is crowded, the ipod is playing all the time, the jokes are flowing, the wine is flowing and there are young people around again.  It is even stranger when they leave.  After all my tears yesterday, and there were lots, I woke this morning hoping that I would be better able to cope today.  Crazy really when the girls have already been gone for a year and I knew this would be the case, that they would leave again, but none the less it is difficult.  But today my feet didn't hurt, for the first time in 3 weeks, I wasn't limping by the time I had walked maybe 20 minutes.  Seriously, this has been an extraordinary experience with my feet.  I bought shoes months ago to wear in and wear here and I wore them one day and could barely walk.  So finally I was able to walk today for about 5 hours. 

 We took a stroll to the Marais District today, the Jewish quarter of Paris, did you know about 76,000 French Jews were deported during the Nazi occupation of France in WW2?  What an atrocity!  There have been terrorist attacks on the Jewish Quarter in the past since the end of WW2 actually as recently as 1982 Palestinian gunmen threw grenades into a dining room in a restaurant and killed 6 people.  But today it seems like life goes on, and in the fountain of one of the market places we found this thong oops who left that behind?

A splash of summer colour,

 African artifacts in the middle of Paris,  there are so many Africans here, I met a man today from Sengali (I think) he really wanted Adrian and I to buy some African outfits for in the house he said, ha ha, they were great caftans, in those brilliant bright prints I see our friends at TRAMS wearing all the time.  What a salesman!

 The season for Fraise and berries is now and everywhere we see these beautiful berries.

 Nuts, salted fish and other unknown foods for us tempt me.

Fresh seafood, Langoustines, and some sort of cockles, whatever you wanted was there even horse!!!

 We took a stroll to Place des Vosages, where Victor Hugo (Les Miserables, Hunch back of Notre Dame fame) lived before his exile and took a tour of his apartments and saw an exhibition of his work "The Man who Laughed", we both want to watch this when we get home.  The Place Des Vosages is beautiful.The doors around the Place imposing and old, I love the mystery behind each one.

 Place Des Vosages, filled with school children and families enjoying the sun and summer.  I have never seen such public displays of sleeping and sunbathing as I have here in Europe.  Business men with their shoes and socks off at lunch time.  Couples snuggled together on the grass, families with children in the parks! 

And street art as I prefer to call it, is alive and well in Paris.

Till tomorrow,