Trying to Keep Up with Paris

Yesterday we did nothing.  No, that's not entirely true.  We did manage to drag ourselves out to have a drink at the home of someone whom we had never met.  A very nice friend of a friend (how we depend on the kindness of strangers...I feel just like Blanche Dubois!) invited us to come and meet her and fed us champagne and ceviche in her big apartment near les Invalides.  We enjoyed meeting her and hope to see her again, but getting over there and back and having an interesting conversation was all we could manage for the entire day.  It's clear we've been doing too much.

We're overwhelmed with all there is to do here, and I'm embarrassed to say we've not even scratched the surface.  There are operas, exhibits, movies, and even theater although we wouldn't be able to understand it, and we are exhausted before doing even a miniscule part of it.  (Did you know that the French word for lower case is miniscule? I love that.  And capital is majescule. It sounds so fancy!)

Do I seem to be wandering?  Lack of sleep maybe.  On Saturday longtime French friends invited us to dinner in the suburbs, picked us up, drove over an hour to their home through Saturday night traffic, made a great dinner, and drove us home home again.  But this is Paris and dinner wasn't served until about 9:15. We drank a lot of wine, we ate a lot of food, we spoke nearly entirely in French the whole evening because the other guests didn't speak English, and we got home at 1:20 a.m.  So we're a bit tired, and that's why we (see how I'm finally coming back to the point here?) didn't do anything yesterday.

And why we swore we would take it easy this week.  But that's already out the window because our brilliantly talented friend Alisa called this morning to say her first cookbook was published this week (it's in French, but buy it anyway; it's on cupcakes, how can you go wrong?) and so we have to celebrate tomorrow and our niece-in-law's parents are going to be here for dinner on Wednesday and our locked out neighbor emailed to ask us to dinner on Thursday, and O. asked us to go to the bi-annual enormous plant sale at the Chateau de Courson on Saturday and...

As someone once said, "you'll sleep when you're dead."  We're feeling much too alive at the moment.