Over the hills, under the moon - and off the beaten path

  The last two weeks have been pretty sprinkled with even more pretty. We took off from Paris to visit Normandy and we have now seen untold numbers of romantic villages and towns filled with pastel-colored half-timbered houses garnered with hollyhocks. After having lived in Paris close to Porte de Stalingrad with its graffiti-tagged concrete facades, its elevated metro tracks, and its many drug addicts and heavily armored policemen, it has been almost a culture shock to be surrounded by all this niceness. Our base has been in Rouen, which we before we came to visit, knew almost nothing about - except it being the town, where Jeanne d'Arc was burned at the stake almost six hundred years ago. We did pass the last remaining, forbidden tower from the castle, where Jeanne was held prisoned, and interrogated - and we walked across the Place du Vieux-Marché, where she was burned - only 19 years old.  But, in contrast to its dark past, Rouen turned out to be an absolutely lovely ...

After many months of staying put, it is SO wonderful to be allowed back into the world, but as you never know if and when everything is once more bunkered down, we decided this summer to stay pretty close to our home base and live some months in Paris.  The last year we have all seen how severe Covid lockdowns made the Parisian streets and boulevards almost empty, but this July, even though the throngs of tourists may not have arrived, the city seems to have completely refound its joie de vivre. The night we arrived, the Place de la République was filled with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of dancing Parisians celebrating the lifting of the last Covid restrictions on the size of assemblies.  There was dancing around the Marianne monument and it felt like we were celebrating the revolution or the liberation from a restrictive regime.  But even though everyone was happy, Rita and I also felt a slightly bitter taste in our mouths.   Many French people do not want to ...