A Lazy Sunday in the 'Hood - Sunday, 14 October

What a difference the day of the week makes!  I don't think I've ever arrived in Paris on a Sunday morning before.  The trip into the city from the airport was a dream...no traffic jams at all...it took half the time it normally takes.  Of course, the drivers were still crazy, changing lanes suddenly, zipping through too-narrow-for-my-taste gaps, etc.  But my trusty driver/apartment-manager Xavier deposited me in this really gorgeous apartment without incident.  It looks just like the photos and is very comfortable, with all the conveniences of home and then some!  www.vrbo.com/214859

I had every intention of heading over to my favorite Sunday morning haunt, The American Church in Paris, but after unpacking a bit and making some coffee I just needed to put my feet up for a few (ha ha) minutes.  Oh, well, naps are good things...they're what vacations are for, right?

After waking up to the lovely tap-tap-tap of raindrops on the windows and the narrow balconies outside the windows, it was time for a few hours of fighting with technology.  Once everything is working it's a dream, but I hadn't used my netbook computer in a while and so of course it needed to download about 2000 Windows updates (just a slight exaggeration!).  And Internet Explorer wasn't cooperating at all, so finally I downloaded Chrome (I should have done so a long time ago).  And although my iPad is a dream machine for many things, it just doesn't play nicely on a few tasks such as inserting photos in this blog.  OK, all of this is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, and technology can be wonderful (I'm sitting here listening to a recording of Glenn Gould play the Bach Goldberg Variations via the Amazon Cloud Player), and my vacation objective isn't to accomplish a ton of stuff, but still.....

Late in the afternoon I finally got out to stroll the neighborhood and to stop at the cash machine and patisserie and to grab a bite to eat.  The afternoon was grey and drizzly, and there weren't a ton of obvious tourists around, and I'm familiar enough with this quartier that I could just stroll without having to constantly consult a map (after all, I had nowhere in particular to go).  It almost makes me feel like I belong here!