Season’s Greetings!

Métro Jourdain (L11), sortie rue de Belleville (20th arr), 20 December 2010

A very Métro — I mean, Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year to all you readers out there!

I hope that everyone is having a spectacular Solstice, I hope that that Hanukkah was happenin’, that your Festivus will be fantastic, and that Kwanzaa is completely creative, cooperative, and community-driven (q.v. Kwanzaa principles).

Okay, that right there is the “short version” of this blog. The long version is coming right up. Get your coffee, or should I say café, or vin chaud, a tisane or heck, a Diet Coke, eh? Come back, and sit down, and read. I have a lot on my mind, and was stalling on writing a post because I just could not choose what I was going to focus on, so you are going to get the smörgåsbord of blog posts. You know, the kind of one where I break all the blogging “rules” and am all over the place for around (over???) 3,000 words. One of those. (A warning: I am committing a HUGE blog no-no, and pretty much blogging the entire month here. Just giving you fair warning. I’ve tried to divide it up so you can take it in chunks, haha.)

If you are not much of a reader, please press on to at least peruse the pretty pictures. There are some good ones of holiday scenes at the end. 🙂

Juillet is Full of Glee

Paris Plages, La Villette (19th arr.) – July 24, 2010

Summertime.

It’s still here in Paris, but in weird ways. Today (it was Tuesday when I started this…), for example, is cloudy with a high of  21°C/70°F. Not really summer-like temps and atmosphere. I’d love to feel a sunshiny 28°C/82°F with humidity below 70%. Maybe a slight breeze. Warm enough to wear a sleeveless top, but pleasant enough that going outside does not feel like going into a sauna and/or steam bath.

Yeah — for those kinds of summertime conditions, Europe is not a good place, I guess, unless it is maybe on Corsica or the Côte d’Azur. Maybe I need to think about moving to somewhere more equatorial someday.

Still, there is a lot of fun going on now that the kiddies have been out of school for a couple of weeks and people are in chillaxin’ vacances mode.

Paris Plages is one of those Paris events that is a sure sign summer is here.

The End of May, Part One

A little nod to «Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulin» — in the Butte Bergeyre Community Garden, 75019 Paris

So, the last we all gathered here together was the post before my guest post for Misadventures with Andi in which I chronicled the story of how I got to Paris. It was May 19 and it was my 42nd birthday.  About three weeks has passed since then and I have been itching to write about some of the things I have been doing. I decided the best way to go about this would be to create some photo collages and write about how it is that friendship in Paris is one of the things I love the best about Paris. Each person who has reached out in friendship to me has helped me fall a little more in love with the city. Helping myself “bloom where I am planted,” to use the very accurate if worn out expression, is exactly the purpose of this blog, and my friends have been helping me to do that. I want to share with you what has been going on to those ends here in P-Town the past three weeks.