December Days

What a strange week it's been.  We had some blindingly bright sunshine, some grayish skies and last night those huge fat snowflakes began to fall while we were tasting champagne and waiting to hear Alec Lobrano read from the new edition of his book "Hungry for Paris" at Spring boutique.  This is the book I refer people to when they ask "where should we eat in Paris?"  It's personal, reliable and fun to read.

By the time we left to go to dinner there was already slush on the ground and we decided to take the metro rather than walk to Anahuacalli, the best and possibly only good Mexican restaurant in Paris.  A huge Margarita after a couple of glasses of champagne was a bit much and I couldn't wait to get home and go to bed.

This morning it's still snowing and our friends in the country who had planned to come into the city this evening just phoned to say they're not budging.  This after emailing a photo showing their garden buried under snow.

Going back to the better weather earlier this week, we took the opportunity to walk a bit and came across this lady sitting rather disconsolately on a bench in front of the Hungarian Cultural Center.  On closer inspection, she's been there a long time, being bronze and permanent.  Maybe she really wants to go back to Budapest.

Our neighborhood now has just what it needed, yet another chocolate shop.  This one opened just a couple of days ago on Boulevard Saint Germain at Odeon, replacing a Tatl discount jewelery store.  The windows are full of elaborately executed objects in chocolate and the prices seem a bit lower than other shops, perhaps carrying on the Tati tradition.

What the neighborhood needs instead are some useful things like shoe repair shops.  While we finally came across a cordonnier working out of a tiny stall in the Marché St-Germain, I prefer this shop in the Marais, with its lovely old blue front and the red boot overhead.  Who needs neon signs?

We came across this, I must admit, while on our way from our semi-annual visit to Merci (this year's Christmas car above) to tea at the patisserie/chocolaterie of Jacques Genin, the legendary supplier of most of the best restaurants in Paris before he opened his own shop on rue de Turenne about a year ago.

I chose the chocolate eclair, but Gene was the winner with the world's most incredible caramel millefeuille.  It made me so excited I couldn't get a good picture of it.

You may not be aware that moving house in Paris is different from other places, certainly from California.  Here you move in through the windows.

Given the small elevators (when they exist at all) and the tight stairwells, furniture and goods are often lifted from the street on a crane platform and brought in through the window, as was the case with this building we passed on Friday.  Luckily they didn't wait until today's snowstorm.