The Abbey Bookshop

There is a Canadian bookstore in Paris.  Are there even still any Canadian bookstores in Canada?

Sunday mid-day queue at the bakery

Sunday in France is a day to eat with your family, or your friends.  But not all bakeries are open on Sundays.  So the ones that are, are busy.  This is a queue outside at our favourite bakery, Boulanger Erik Kayser.  It's not the closest one to us, but it is a short walk.  I myself am rarely inside it, since that responsibility is delegated to others in the family.  Either Silke or Jerome, or frequently both of them, go there every morning at 7am, and buy four croissants and two baguettes.  On Saturdays and Sundays, instead of croissants they get pains au chocolate.

And since I started on the topic of food - and what would be a blog without food shots? - here is a cream of parsley soup I made yesterday, served of course with a baguette from Erik Kayser.

And wild mushrooms, cèpes, from the market.  Because it is mushroom season.

Galleries of paleontology and comparative anatomy

Last weekend we went to the galleries of paleontology and comparative anatomy in the jardins des plantes.  The galleries are only one of many buildings in the jardins des plantes which are devoted to natural history and evolution.  There is even a small zoo in the gardens.  It would take a long time to see everything there.  I think the galleries, which along with the superb building they are in date to 1898, are one of my favourite places that we have seen so far.  There is a floor devoted to dinosaur skeletons, which is cool.  But what turned out surprisingly to be the most interesting were the modern skeletons.  Thousands and thousands of them.  You really can see the patterns of life.  For example, all mammals have more or less the same bones, different shapes for sure, but connected in the same order, and you can generally name the bones, whether it is a mouse or a giraffe or a gorilla or a porpoise.  This isn't news of course to anyone who has studied biology, but it's one thing to know a fact and see illustrations in a book, and another thing altogether to be looking at hundreds of real skeletons, of wildly different shapes, and yet all still a variation on a theme.

So, I have more photos for this post than usual.

Elephant

Whales

Performing on the Paris Metro

Here's a video from the New York Times about musicians playing on the metro.  http://nyti.ms/1fjwYSA  After three months, I still love taking the metro.  Everyone complains about it: it's crowded, dirty and bewildering.  But it beats the heck out of finding a parking spot.  And in a city crowded with cafés with outdoor tables where all the chairs are facing out for the purpose of people-watching, you can watch a heck of a lot more people in a short time on the metro.  They don't serve drinks, but, as the video shows, there is live music.

Vincennes

Today is the last day of school holidays.  It also happened to be a lovely crisp fall day - and the forecast for next week is rain.  So we went to the park de Vincennes on the edge of Paris.  It's the largest park in  Paris.  There is also a castle there, le château de Vincennes.  It's a 14th century castle, which served as a royal residence for a number of kings in the 14th and 15th centuries.  Medieval castles seem really rather small and uncomfortable compared with renaissance palaces.

What we were really there for was not the castle, but the park, so after a quick tour of the keep, we found a vélib station to get some bikes for a spin around the park.

Opening hour at le café Campana

Le café Campana is inside musée d'Orsay.

Eiffel Tower