March 6, 2019 – Paris

Sigh, last day in Paris.

First, our Spanish repair fellow got back from the store with salt for the dishwasher. We figure the water must be very hard if the salt dispenser is empty it won’t start. Of course there were no instructions about having to put salt in the machine and where to put it. Once he put the salt in the the machine worked. The interesting thing about this maintenance/repair job is that the fellow in our flat was FaceTiming with a guy somewhere in the UK who was also Spanish but spoke English. He was the go between telling us what was being done. The fellow in our flat was using his phone as a camera to show him inside the washing machine so he could tell the guy in the flat what he needed to do. Ain’t technology grand.

Today was art culture day. We had very successfully explored the food and wine culture, it was time for something inedible. Caroline noticed lots of posters for a retrospective of art by Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921) It was at the Petit Palais, a beautiful building built for the 1900 Exposition Universale. It’s now houses the City of Paris Museum of Fine Arts. Neither Bob or I had ever heard of him and on a personal level he was, as Carolyn said a pretty strange dude. He was from Bruges and a lot of his landscapes were from that area. He used his sister as the model for many of his paintings of women and was in fact a misogynist. I did like many of his works and we were all glad we went to the exhibit.

Entrance to Petite Palais
Statue of Winston Churchill outside Petite Palais

After lunch back at the flat we chilled for a while but didn’t want to sit around until dinner, we had reservations at Juveniles for 7:30. It was about a 10-12 minutes walk to Bon Marche, a very high end department store so that’s where we headed in search of a French made carrot peeler – we have one and friends have brought them at the Ex in Toronto. We didn’t find exactly what we wanted but both Caroline and I picked up beautiful tea towels. However, the real find of the trip was the rough made-in- Germany shower mitts, I’m addicted to them. I had bought them in France on previous trips at a chain called Parashop but they no longer carry them. Caroline suggested we check out a drugstore we passed which had lots of mirrors and shaving type items in the window and lo and behold, they carried the mitts. Not the same label that I bought before but these were also made in Germany and were exactly the same material. Yea! So a very successful shopping expedition.

Dinner at Juveniles was terrific, a wonderful way to end our stay in Paris. Tim, the now mostly retired owner, his daughter and her husband now run it, popped in so Caroline was able to have a good chat with him. The journey home had a minor hiccup. We had to take two different lines to get to Juveniles so when we headed back to our flat, the line we wanted to transfer to was no longer open, it closes at 10pm. Bob and Caroline to the maps and they found an alternate line which in fact took us the to metro stop closest to our flat.

Caroline and Bob to the maps

Bob has been our map man both in Malta and Paris, Google maps has links to most major transit systems, very handy for finding routes and checking timetables. It was totally worth having data turned on – at least prices from Canadian carriers have come down a bit although not nearly as cheap as having a local SIM card. Caroline and I didn’t have data on as we relied on wifi and Bob’s phone when we weren’t in a wifi environment ?

I think we are all ready to go home, it’s been a terrific holiday in Malta and Paris. We can hardly wait to experience the -17C temperatures that await us.

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