This is my first email to all of you who asked to be included in "Paul & Viv's 2011 Happy Snaps from Europe". This is a very self indulgent activity for me, so if you find that my emails are blocking up your Inbox, or that there are too many photos, or that the emails come too often, please let me know and I will reduce the frequency. We have some people who enjoy an email everyday (and we are over here for 152 days so beware!) and others for whom once per week is quite enough. So please tell me if you are getting too many; I'd hate to think I'm being a nuisance.
At the end of our first full day in Paris I have only a sad collection of snaps to share with you. I don't quite know what I expected to achieve - maybe instant photographic virtuosity; maybe the energy and stamina I had on our first visit 13 years ago (1998). The sad reality is that I am 13 years older and it takes a hell of a lot of energy and physicality to walk the streets hour after hour, avoiding being run over, looking at the incredibly beautiful buildings and acclimatising to the pace of a city. In addition, it helps if you remember to take your camera when you head off for the market. So there are no snaps of us buying fruit and veg and deli and meat at the outdoor marche.
What I have managed is seven poor quality snaps of our tiny, but quite flash apartment, including two photos looking out of the window onto Rue de l' Arbre Sec (the street of the dry tree) and showing the cafes, wine bars and fruit shops below us.
The most interesting thing we saw today, other than a dog sitting on a dashbord (because the car was so small there was nowhere else for him to sit) and a beautiful girl dressed all in pink and green and smoking a pink Soubrani, was two cops on roller blades booking a car for traveling the wrong way up a one-way street. We saw this as we sat at a cafe just outside our apartment, in the late afternoon sun, drinking a lovely house wine and watching the world go by. It was so interesting that we are going back again for dinner now, at 8.20pm.
The whole apartment is only 35m2. It would originally have been a living room with two windows to the street. Now the bed is closest to the windows - and the street - with a glass wall/glass sliding door separating it from the living area and kitchen. A small bathroom and toilet are at the rear.
The window with the view.
Directly below the window - fruit shop, restaurant, wine shop, shoe repairer .....
Looking left is our own square - the intersection with the famous rue St Honore, and what will probably become "our local" - the cafe on the corner.
Paul's office is already spread across the kitchen bench.
The floors are very old timbers. And very creaky.
The kitchen is minute but it has a ¾ size fridge and large storage cupboard which make the size manageable.
Here are our cops on roller blades.
Conferring outside the Mr Spectacles shop.
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