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Parisian life

Sunday, August 31st, 2008

Tour St. JacquesAfter the chaos of Beijing, the excitement of the Olympic Games and the exhaustion of working every day for two months without a day off, we needed a holiday. And so we find ourselves in Paris, visiting Wendy’s friend Jessica, soaking up European life after being in Asia for eight of the last 10 months, and blogging again – something that was somewhat difficult to do under the circumstances we were in while in China.

Since we lived in Paris for three months last year everything is quite familiar and at times it feels like we hardly ever left. Yesterday was a glorious day in the city (the kind of ‘blue-sky day’ that is so rare in Beijing), and we walked around the city for most of the day from the Latin Quarter to the two islands to Bastille and back to the Marais. The Tour St. Jacques (right) has had the scaffolding removed since we were here last year and that was a pleasant surprise, since it’s one of my favourite examples of Gothic architecture in the city. We were pretty exhausted at the end of the day – having not exercised much in China and especially not during the Olympic period – and finished the day with a much-enjoyed baguette-and-wine picnic in a park in the evening.

Produce MarketToday was a bit cooler and quieter but this gave me time to reflect on the relaxed pace of life here and why I would like to live in Europe – if we can manage it logistically and work-wise – when we finally settle down. We went to the Sunday produce market in Jessica’s suburb in the morning (the mushrooms to the right were particularly unusual, I thought), had a lazy French breakfast at 11am and picked blackberries in the Bois de Vincennes in the afternoon.

The rest of our European itinerary for the next two weeks looks something like this:

Tomorrow we’re heading to Chartres (the first time for either of us) to see perhaps the most celebrated of all the Gothic cathedrals in France. We’ll then have one more full day in Paris on Tuesday before going to Rome on Wednesday evening for Mike and Sylvia’s wedding on Saturday in l’Aquilla. We’re in Rome for a week overall before laying over in Istanbul for four days en route to Kathmandu.