Ireland

After picking up the rental car (and a moment of near panic when we thought our TomTom app only covered the UK - whatever did we do before GPS?) we drove around Dublin for a while. It's not my favourite city by any means. But we managed to get to Chris's cousin Clayton's address. There was a sold sign on the house and nobody there (does that say something if your hosts move without telling you??) But we tracked them down by asking the next door neighbour, who said they had moved around the corner. So they didn't escape so lightly, haha. It was lovely to see Clayton and Dee and their two gorgeous girls, Jorgia and Casey. They took us out to a local restaurant and the next day we walked in the park donated by the Guinness family (the site of their large mansion, which had burnt down).

Onwards to Cork via the Rock of Cashel. It's amazing to see the castle, monastery and fortress ruins everywhere in Ireland, crumbling picturesquely in green paddocks, and mostly ignored and unrestored. This was in stark contrast with Scotland, where every castle and historic place is documented and cared for. I guess this is the legacy of poverty and occupation in Ireland, and also of the Viking invasions, but it seems sad that there is so much deterioration. The Rock of Cashel is the largest of these and it once must have been an awe-inspiring (though bone-chillingly cold) abbey with wall frescoes and carved tombs, it's fallen to pieces over the centuries.

We took a horse and buggy ride through the village with a quintessentially Irish character called Mick and his horse Jessie.

Onwards to Ballymacoda on the south coast near Cork - a lovely warm and homely B and B to stay in, and a cold walk on the beach. It was hard to believe that if you crossed the sea here, you'd land in Portugal or West Africa.

The next morning we found our way to church in Cork. We felt very much at home - met the nicest people and enjoyed feeling spiritually uplifted again. After church we drove in the rain up through Kerry and out to the coast on what they call the Ring of Kerry - with spectacular views on a nice day, but just a very long and wet road on a day like that. I was intrigued to discover that at one point we were driving through rainforest. A lot of Ireland was once like this. They felled a lot of the forests to meet the needs of agriculture and an expanding population between the 1600s and 1800s, and bears and wolves became extinct in Ireland. It would be a very different country today if the forest had persisted.

There's a tune name or two for every town, so I played (quietly) the tunes as we passed through - the Lads of Laois, the Maids of Mitchelstown, Trip to Durrow, Glens of Aherlow, Road to Lisdoonvarna and so on. Interesting to see the places that inspired the tunes. And I played every polka I could think of and even a couple of slides as we drove through the Cork-Kerry border - this region is the home of polkas and slides. Luckily Chris has developed a fine tuned ability to switch off from my playing and just drive! He is very tolerant.

Kinvara was our next stop. A little town on the border of Clare and Galway, it's close to the Burren and the Cliffs of Moher, the Aran Islands and the cities of Galway and Ennis. It has a wonderful coastal setting and was a fantastic place to spend a few days. We walked on the Burren and scrambled high up the rocks, like a rocky coastline except you're up a mountain. We visited the Cliffs of Moher (there's a tune for that, too), their sheer 214 metre drop looming over the waves. The winds were gale force and we were being blown off our feet, which was both hilarious and terrifying. It was funny to watch adults and children alike playing in the wind, leaning into it, letting it roll them over on the grass, shrieking and laughing. Luckily there is now a stone barrier and safe paths, as we saw (soberingly) a monument to all the people who have fallen off the cliffs.

The next day Hannah and I went horse trekking in the lovely countryside of Connemara, on real Connemara ponies. It was lovely and Hannah did very well, as we rode for 2 1/2 hours on roads and bridle paths, and even splashed in a lake.

In the afternoon we caught the ferry to the Aran Islands, so remote and rocky it's hard to believe people can live on them. We hired bikes and rode all over Inis Mor, the Big Island. The weather was sunny and the beaches white and sandy with crystal clear water. It was a lovely afternoon out.

I was brave enough to get myself along to one of the local pubs, Connolly's, where there was a great session. The most incredible music happens in these tiny out-of-the-way places, and you meet the most amazing people. I introduced myself to the accordion player, who said his name was Dermot - it was Dermot Byrne, one of my accordion heroes. At the end of the night he gave me a copy of his new CD. It was great to be able to play even a few tunes with that calibre of musician. The next night I got to listen to Buttons and Bows practising. These guys are all musical legends and they were practising in a back room of the bar. The next night I got to play in a session with Charlie Harris and Seamus McGuire. It puts a whole different spin on the music. They are all so kind and welcoming and have good things to say about my playing (or maybe it's just my enthusiasm!) And met a very kind flute player, Mark Priestley, who has been more than welcoming and is a great source of philosophy about the music and particularly the musical style of East Clare. Hannah and I visited him in his pretty little renovated thatched cottage just outside Kinvara - what stories those walls could tell about generations of families and the potato famine that had such enormous impact on Ireland.

And here I am in Ennis. Chris and Hannah left to go home a few days ago. I've been finding my way around the town and even ventured to a session at Brogan's, which is nice but very noisy. I met Murty Ryan, another amazing box player, whose album I happen to have on my phone. It was fantastic to play tunes with him and the others, a bouzouki and mandolin player, and they asked me to start a couple of sets. Once musicians realise you can play, they are so friendly.

My friends Ruth and Andrew have arrived and it's been great to see them and have people to talk to.

Yesterday I got myself all the way to Limerick on the bus, and went to church. I met lovely people including a couple of New Zealanders who are living in Ireland. It was worth the effort to get there.

Off to the festival tomorrow in a little town near here. Should be fun. Some other friends from Raglan, Lynne and Michael, are arriving on Wednesday so it'll be good to catch up with them. All's well at home, which makes it possible for me to be here and not to worry. It's been such an amazing trip - this may be my last entry, so if you've read this far, congratulations for wading through my wordy prose. It's been fun writing about it. I appreciate you all as my much loved family and friends. Take care. XO Kara

Scotland

We were sad to leave our idyllic spot in France, and especially our new friends James and Sam - the best hosts ever. Sam kindly dropped us off at Brive Airport. We will definitely be back to Correze - we felt so at home in their lovely place. It was a culture shock getting on Ryanair and flying to Stansted and staying in the large and faceless airport hotel enroute to Edinburgh. 

And Scotland - really just feels like New Zealand, except older. And perhaps colder (it's supposed to be summer here). The temperature was freezing after the 35-40 degrees we had come from in France. Twelve degrees on the ground at Edinburgh Airport, and threatening to rain - at least it won't be such a shock going back to the NZ winter from this. Everywhere we've gone so far, we've thought, "This feels like Christchurch... Wellington... Wanganui... Mt Eden."

We walked up the hill to the entrance to Edinburgh Castle, high up on a rocky cliff, where they are setting up for the military tattoo next month. The venue is smaller than it looks on the screen. in the streets around the castle, in "Old Edinburgh" there were all sorts of things going on, seemingly unaffected by the intermittent drizzle, and people everywhere. A jazz and blues festival, street performers, a parade of stiltwalkers and some men from a falconry organisation with a live falcon and a huge owl with enormous yellow eyes (Hannah thought she looked like Hedwig). We gave a donation to the falconers and Hannah got to hold the owl with a leather glove. The owl was only thirteen months old and fully grown, weighing eight pounds. She had hairy feet and huge talons an inch long. I think Hannah would like one as a pet, but I doubt she would enjoy feeding it live rats.

Further down the street we stopped to take photos at the statue of "Greyfriars Bobby" and to touch his brass nose - made shiny by all of the tourists - for luck. 

The buildings here are not as grand or ornate as in Paris, but the Scots are more about practicality and hard work than about aesthetics. We drove through some nice leafy suburbs with high stone walls and then onto the motorway north to Perth, a nice city, much smaller than Edinburgh. We're staying here on our way north to the lochs. Perth has a very pretty setting amongst low hills with a large river, the Tay, winding through it. It doesn't get dark till 10.30pm, so we had plenty of time to go for a walk over the stone bridge built in the 1700s, explore the green parks along the river and the stopbank and flood gates that were built after a massive flood in 1993 that inundated 750 houses, and back over another bridge. There are marks on the bridge showing the heights of various floods over the centuries. We learnt an interesting bit of history about clan warfare in the 1300s. There had been a longstanding battle between two clans and they decided to settle it once and for all (in this location). They each gathered their best 30 warriors and faced each other for a battle to decide the winner. The king rang a starting bell and after a ferocious fight, eventually only 12 of the men were left - one from one clan and 11 from the other - the second clan clearly the winner. Luckily these days men can play rugby to settle their scores with fewer fatalities! 

Tomorrow we will be having a Scottish breakfast (though I'll skip the black pudding!) and get on the road to do some exploring of this area.

Scotland day 2

We left Perth and drove along quiet country lanes to the lovely Loch Tay, where the Tay River originates. It was drizzling and freezing cold, but that seemed to add to the atmosphere. At Loch Tay the Scottish Underwater Archaeological Trust have set up the Crannog Centre. A crannog was a round house built over water by hunter-farmer families 2500 years ago. You can still see the remains of 18 of them in Loch Tay - some of them have become islands with trees. They took about a year to build and families sometimes lived in them for generations. The idea with a house over water was to save flat land for farming, to protect themselves from wild animals (a section of walkway could be removed at night to keep the crannog safe) and symbolically to have the protection of the water gods.

The archaeological trust has excavated these sites, worked out how the people lived and how the crannogs were built, and have created a replica at their visitors' centre. It was amazing to see how the Iron Age people could sharpen a tree trunk and drive it into the lake bed - lash a sturdy floor to concentric circles of these, build well insulated walls out of two layers of woven willow panels with bracken fern stuffed between them, and then a waterproof and breathable thatched roof and comfortable floor of bracken and wool. Up to 20 people and their animals lived in these. They also showed us the types of technology these people had, mostly involving bows to do things like turn wood on a primitive lathe, grind holes in stones to make loom weights and produce an ember to start a fire with a hard wood dowel on soft wood. We tried our hand at grinding grain with two stones (the arthritic wrists of the skeletons of the women from that era showed the effects of doing that for a lifetime!)

Afterwards, we had trouble opening the sealed packet of the new SD card we bought, without a pair of scissors, and I felt a little embarrassed that we have trouble solving even the most basic of problems these days - put us out in the conditions where our distant ancestors used to live, and I wonder how many of  us would survive without supermarkets and department stores.

We went through Pitlochry, where we stopped to see the place where they make jewellery out of dyed and compressed heather stems. Our next stop was Loch Ness - the largest body of water in the UK (apparently big enough to submerge every person on earth three times over!) I had no idea it was that big. We stayed in a little town called Drumnadrochit and the next day explored the lake (OK, I admit it, I looked for Nessie - but she was nowhere to be seen), Urquhart Castle, a beautifully situated mediaeval stronghold that passed backwards and forwards between the English and Scottish, and the Loch Ness exhibition centre. We were intrigued by the history of the loch and the search for the Loch Ness monster - poor thing, she didn't have many places to hide with all the depth sounding, sonar, underwater cameras, and she has been talked out of existence by all the theorising about food sources, mirages and other visual illusions and Ice Age paleontology. Still, there were some very believable audio recordings of people who claimed they had seen Nessie, but there haven't been any sightings for a long time.  Afterwards, Hannah and I went horse riding up above the loch on some nice ponies at a very English riding centre.

We decided to take the long route, through the Cairngorm National Park. It was well worth it - a narrow and mostly deserted road winding through a glacial valley between ancient weathered mountains with their patchwork of heather and bracken, little rivers and waterfalls and the ruins of stone buildings.

And here we are in Kyle of Lochalsh - near the bridge to the Isle of Skye. This morning we went for a coastal nature walk run by the Scottish Highlands Conservation Trust. The guide talked a lot about crofting, a system of rented allotments put in place in the 1800s by legislation designed to protect the old way of farming from the impossibly high rents placed on land during the Highland Clearances. These days, it costs around 20 pounds per year rental to run a croft, which also gives you the right to build a house and to use communal grazing lands up on the hills. People have to have other sources of income, but it's a lovely place to live and preserves the communities and ensures the land is looked after, so apparently these places are sought after and passed down the generations. Along the coast we saw a pair of sea otters, swimming quite close to the shore - a real thrill. We saw a Highland cow and her very young calf - like a cute little teddy bear.

This afternoon and tomorrow we'll do some driving and walking on the Isle of Skye.

It's been a while since I wrote anything, mainly because I've been enjoying myself so much and it almost seems a shame to take time to write about it.

Skye was huge and extremely cold and windy, but we found a lovely cafe with welcome shelter from the weather. I had the local specialty,  "cullen skink", a smoked fish chowder with potatoes, and homemade brown bread - delicious. After the exorbitant prices of eating out in Scotland, we found the prices so reasonable.

We drove up over a spectacular connecting road and the windswept scenery was breathtaking. Sheep graze without fences and are often on the road, their self-shedding wool hanging off in messy clumps. Far below the road we could see peaty areas where turf had been dug. They still use it as fuel here - there are no trees to speak of.

The next day after leaving the (ahem) opulent luxury of the "Bespoke Hotel" in Kyle, we visited the Bright Water visitors' centre. This is very close to the island once owned by Gavin Maxwell, who wrote Ring of Bright Water. His cottages are still there, though dwarfed by the huge Skye Bridge (and no longer filled with clouds of cigarette smoke - he died young of lung cancer). We bought the three-in-one set of his books there, and happened to ask the lady behind the counter where Gavin Maxwell had lived with his otters when he wrote his famous book. She gave us directions and after a spectacular drive, a ferry ride and a stop for lunch in pouring rain, we parked on a backwoods road and made our way down the forestry roads with their recently felled trees, and then suddenly, just as the book describes, Camusfearna came into view. I found it interesting that there was no sign, no marked tracks, only a path through the grass which led over a stream (which could be crossed by two ropes) and on the site where Maxwell's house had been before it burnt down, a large rock with a plaque, covering the ashes of the author. It's such a pretty place with its white sand and rocky islands and Skye in the distance. I'm glad we made the effort to go there, and now the book will be more meaningful.

We drove down the west side of Scotland and through the Grampian mountains. It was a shame we didn't have longer, as I would have loved to go walking in the national park. It really is amazing with its glacial valleys and huge mountains rising each side of the road, still with snow in places. There are little lochs and waterfalls all along the way. We drove past Glencoe, the site where the Campbell clan infamously murdered their hosts, the McDonald clan, who had sheltered and fed them one snowy night in history. Still, at least one must have survived, as otherwise we wouldn't have the Golden Arches today (is that a good thing?)

We stayed near Loch Lomond, a pretty lake where Glaswegians go for their holidays. Then on to Glasgow airport where we caught our flight to Dublin. And here we are on the Emerald Isle, but more on that later.

Espagnac

We took the metro to the Paris Austerlitz railway station to catch the SNCF train to Brive-la-Gaillarde, our next stop. We nearly missed the train, as we'd been waiting at the wrong platform, and had to run past 16 carriages to get to ours - got on the train with about 3 minutes to spare. The train is smooth, quiet and fast and we enjoyed looking out the window at wheat fields, forests and little villages as we passed through. 

It took four hours to get to Brive, and we managed to get ourselves and all our bags off the train and walk the 200m to our hotel. The hotel owner was a friendly and chatty little lady called Andrea. She didn't speak a word of English, so it really challenged my language skills to understand what she was saying to us (I can speak and read French much better than I can understand it!) The hotel was cute and homely with a little outside garden. We walked into town to find some dinner and came across a Subway (I know, I know, we go all the way to the French countryside and eat Subway!) I wanted something familiar, and I didn't have to think too hard about how to order it. We did at least sit outside to eat it on cafe chairs under a sun umbrella, French style.

On Sunday morning we had a relaxed breakfast outside in the garden with a friendly cat, Romero. Then we walked through town to find the church. We had a warm welcome from the friendly branch members and felt very at home, despite the language barrier.

In the afternoon we were picked up by the lovely Sam, who moved to France seven years ago with her husband James and their two boys. They bought an old stone house and barn and spent the next three years, including all their weekends, turning it into beautiful accommodation. Sam is an interior designer and chef, and James is a cyclist, who takes guests on cycling expeditions around the beautiful countryside around here. Sam cooks an amazing four-course gourmet meal every night for the guests. They have up to 10 people staying at any one time. There are three other couples staying - Richard and Genevieve from Paris, Michael and Lynette from the UK and Brian and Rebecca also from the UK. Rebecca is a vet, so we have had lots to talk about. Hannah is doing well, chatting away to the other guests and trying new foods like fennel bulb and aubergine. She's made friends with the two dogs, Henri and Dotti.

There's a lake with waterlilies and hammocks at the bottom of the garden, a lovely swimming pool, beautiful decor, completely restful.  I'm getting lots of ideas for the house and garden from seeing the way they do things over here.

Yesterday James took us for our first bike ride, 40 km along country roads, very well sealed with hardly any cars. We went past villages with stone cottages and farm buildings, forests, old churches, a waterfall and some beautiful lakes. We stopped for lunch at one of the lakes where people were swimming, kayaking and ziplining. The French certainly know how to do relaxation!

Tomorrow we're going to Argentat, one of the towns near here, to have dinner at a pizzeria and watch the fireworks for Bastille Day. We're having a wonderful time and will remember this trip for a long time to come.

More...

In the morning, Sam took us to a local market, where they had lots of local produce (including live trout!) for sale. It was interesting to see the huge variety of cheeses and salami, preserves, olives and of course, wine. An old man with a moustache offered us a sample of his salami, doing a hard sell on us in French (of which I couldn't understand a word, except "C'est bon, non? - luckily I had the presence of mind to say "Oui, tres bon", and he looked satisfied at that). It was actually horrible salami, obviously made out of wild boar, as it had that really game-y, boary flavour that you only get from wild boar. We bought some lovely blueberries and apricots and a hat for Hannah. The market is obviously the gathering place for all of the surrounding villages, as there were people milling around everywhere in the sunshine. The villages here are tiny, some with only 4 or 5 houses, and each has a name and its own little "mairie", i.e. mayor's office/council building, and the mairie is responsible for looking after the gardens, schools, road maintenance, sewage and water. The villages seem to try to outdo each other. This must be why each village is so pretty - so many window boxes, pots and gardens and such clean roads and buildings. Sam is on the local council, Chateauret, which has nine councillors for only 300 ratepayers.

Apparently businesses here are very limited in their trading. For example, if you are a "boucherie" your license does not allow you to sell eggs or vegetables etc, and if you are a "boulangerie" all you are allowed to sell is things made of flour (bread, pasta, cake…). Sam told us that she is licensed as a hotelier, but once a year she would do face painting for one of the local fairs, and they stopped her from doing that because she was not licensed (it would cost 2000 euro a year for a licence to be a face painter, to earn 120 euro a year!) The taxes are very high here, 60-75%, and it drives a lot of people out of business. Apparently a lot of Parisians commute to London to run their businesses because the taxes are much lower, making London the third largest French city. But they do have excellent roads, an amazing school system (almost totally free, including secondary boarding school and tertiary education) and a fantastic and totally free health care system.

In the afternoon we took ourselves off on a 20km ride with the help of a map from James. We rode to a larger lake, obviously very popular with the locals, and had a swim and an icecream. Interestingly the water in the lake was sparkly from mica in the sand.

July 14th is of course Bastille Day. In the evening, James and Sam took all of the guests to a local village, Argentat, a very pretty historic town built on the Dordogne river. It was so picturesque, slate roofed stone cottages with bright window boxes and shutters, rising above the river. We had dinner outside a pizzeria on the river bank and watched the fireworks when it got dark, after 11pm. People were lined up all along both river banks and across the bridge, and it was very much a festival atmosphere. I was a little surprised that they didn't sing La Marseillaise. I remember learning it at school. 

Today the temperature reached 40 degrees - Chris went for a 60 km bike ride with James and Hannah and I stayed behind and swam in the pool. We had dinner outside under the big umbrella - local sausages, Limousin steak and chicken and Sam's fantastic salads, with tarte tatin and creme fraiche for dessert. After dark there was a spectacular thunderstorm. Sam turned on Handel's Water Music - ideal music to watch a thunderstorm by!

We really feel at home here. James and Sam are so generous with their time and hospitality. 

Paris

The apartment is tiny but big enough for us, and quiet. It's hot though. 29 degrees here when we landed and no air conditioning in the apartment - should have thought of that. 
The apartment is in the Quartier Latin, which is very central. We had a walk to the Seine. There were lots of people sitting on the river bank, even after 9pm. Still fairly light here at 10.30pm. Lots of people sitting outside cafes and restaurants and the shops are still open. Hannah and Chris went back to the apartment because Hannah wasn't feeling well, and I had the job of getting us some food for tonight and tomorrow so we wouldn't have to spend money on Sunday. I went to a little superette (very expensive) and Turkish kebab place, and managed to ask for everything in French.

We are having a great time. Jet lag is still a problem - we're waking up about 3am and getting very sleepy mid afternoon. Sleepy doesn't describe it really - it's a brain fog that you can't fight! The apartment is good, within easy walking distance from the river and Notre Dame. It's only about 25 square metres with a tiny kitchen and bathroom, but big enough and very quiet. You can't hear traffic or street front noise here at all,  even though it's a busy area, because to get to the apartment you have to go through big doors with a security code, through an alleyway with post boxes, through a courtyard with pots and flowers and into a little dark entryway and then a little dark wooden door. The apartment has no windows, only two skylights which fortunately open so we can get some air, but it still does get very hot in here.

Hannah is still coughing quite a lot but she is feeling better and her cough has improved.
This morning we got ready for church and walked over the river, past Notre Dame and Sainte-Chapelle, to the Centre Georges Pompidou. On the Ile de Saint Louis (one of the islands in the Seine) we saw a man walking a little dog. The dog made a beeline for us so we stopped and made friends with the dog. She was really lovely, and I was able to talk a bit to the owner in French and ask her name - La Foi (Faith). Seemed appropriate, as we were on our way to church!

I showed Chris and Hannah the weird fountain sculptures of the Centre Pompidou, and then we had a bit of trouble finding the church, so I asked directions (in French!) from a man setting up an icecream stand on the street. I was even able to understand the directions he gave me! My French classes at high school from 30 years ago have stood me in good stead. Amazing how much I have remembered after all these years, but I've never forgotten because I love the sound of French and often think in daily life about how you would say something in French. I'd love to do more with it back in NZ, but the opportunities for conversation in another language are so limited where we live. If I made it a priority I could go to the cafe sessions at Alliance Francaise, but I have so many other ways to spend my time that are more important to me, like gardening and music.

The chapel is through some gates and accessed through a courtyard. We discovered that they have combined the French and English speaking wards, and the main language is French. If you want to listen in English you can either sit in a smaller room off to the side, where they have closed circuit TV and a translator, or sit in the main meeting with a pair of earphones and listen to the translation. Hannah wanted to go to the English language room, but Chris and I wanted to make the most of the experience, so we all sat in the main meeting. We happened to sit next to the translator. It was really nice to sing the hymns in French. The testimonies were wonderful to hear and it reaffirmed to me that the Spirit is the same everywhere. I was particularly touched by the testimony of Tom, the Elders Quorum president. He talked about how the Saviour will never let us down or forget us, because he has engraven us upon the palms of his hands through the Atonement. It was really good to reconnect and feel uplifted, after our long travels.
After church a young Tahitian man studying education in Paris started playing hymns on the piano, and it was some of the most beautiful playing I've ever heard.

We left after church and walked back to the apartment to have lunch. A big contrast going from the quiet friendliness and cleanliness of the chapel back out to the noisy and often dirty street, past a bar which is right next door.
Walked back over the lock bridge, with its railings absolutely encrusted with padlocks, each representing a couple who have pledged their love and thrown the key into the Seine.
The council are worried about this, as the tons of extra weight added by the locks is putting a strain on the railings and apparently they are threatening to collapse. So the council's decidedly un-romantic solution is to remove the railings, replace them with glass barriers, and have couples take selfies on the bridge and post them to a website set up for the purpose. I couldn't believe it. You would think they at least would put the railings nearby on permanent display, get newer and stronger railings made, and start from scratch. Still, I wondered how many of those couples who pledged eternal love are still together.... or is their lock on the bridge railing all that remains?

After lunch we joined the queue for Notre Dame and Sainte-Chapelle. The stained glass windows are definitely the highlight of the cathedral (haha, that was an inadvertent pun!)
We read the information boards about the 900 year history of the building in all its iterations. Amazing what they achieved with such basic technology. They didn't get it totally right though. One thing I learned is that there is a wall where the top and bottom differ by 30 cm (not much in the scale of things, but apparently a terrible error) but it has been covered up by a facade to hide the defect.

We saw two pretty Asian brides posing for photos outside the cathedral - one whose (undoubtedly very expensive) dress hem was muddied from the sudden rain that must have fallen while we were inside.... an English boys' barbershop choir and band perform on a band rotunda at the back of Notre Dame... And guards in camouflage carrying sub machine guns walking past in threes. The contrast was a bit surreal.

We walked to the Luxembourg Gardens - really beautiful. I'm struck by how Parisians live in these tiny apartments but most of their real living actually takes place on the street fronts, in cafes and restaurants and in parks and gardens. All very social or so it seems, though I'm sure there must be plenty of lonely people in Paris too. Still, it seems a good model for living in a city, if you had to.
We slept for about four hours this afternoon. So hard to wake up. Then reheated our dinner and went for a walk at sunset, around 9.30 pm. Still a lot of people out and about at that time of the evening.

Paris day 2

We woke up early and it was already hot. Hannah and I did some maths and French vocabulary. Then we went to explore the supermarket (Franprix) around the corner - supermarket shopping in another country is much more fun than at home, because almost everything is new and unfamiliar. We got some lovely strawberries, nectarines and bananas, tomatoes and baby cos lettuce, some packaged pasta salads for lunch, Brie, yoghurt and cereal, but bypassed the large frozen escargots with herb butter!

We walked down the street to the Jussieu metro station and managed to catch the metro to the other side of the river, almost without a glitch (we had to be told to push the green button to open the door at the stop - I'd forgotten that! So nearly didn't make it off the train...)

Took the hop-on,  hop-off bus tour, which is a great way of seeing a lot of the sights of Paris in a couple of hours. The commentary is very good. We passed through the square where 2600 people were executed by guillotine over two years - including the infamous Marie Antoinette. Apparently there is doubt as to whether she ever uttered the words "Let them eat cake", but it certainly makes for a good story, and does illustrate the enormous disconnect between the rich and the poor, which eventuated in the French Revolution. At the Place de la Concorde and all the way up the Champs-Elysees they were setting up for Bastille Day. Thousands of grandstand seats, big red white and blue canopies, and of course the army trucks and personnel (if you were ISIS then Bastille Day would be the ideal time to make a terrorist statement).

In Trocadero Square we passed a startlingly grand statue of George Washington on a horse - not someone you expect to see in Paris. The American Revolution was apparently very popular in Paris because to the people it represented their own struggle for self-governance and in the words of the commentator, "anyone fighting the English was a friend to the French". There were parties in the streets of Paris when the Americans won independence.

We got off the bus at the Arc de Triomphe, made it through the stuffy, crowded and claustrophobia inducing tunnel under the road (thank goodness for prepaid passes that enabled us to bypass the ticket line) and made the big climb up the narrow spiral staircase. The view from the top is amazing. By then it was getting very hot and we needed to have some lunch, so we took the bus to the Eiffel Tower. Crowds, crowds and more crowds, but it was very exciting for Hannah to see this very familiar landmark up close. We had decided we would avoid the queues and not go up... so found a quiet and shady place to eat our lunch and admire the tower, got an icecream and crossed the road to get on the boat tour. It was nice to see Paris from a different angle. I couldn't believe it the number of people sunbathing on the river bank in 30 plus degree heat - seems like an extraordinary form of self punishment to me! Hardly anyone wears sunhats here (only the Asian and American tourists, and they stand out like the proverbial sore thumb). But I gave up trying to look like a local and we all wore our hats regardless.

Got back on the bus and took it to the Palais Garnier (the Paris opera house). Unfortunately it was closed for tours but we happened upon a wonderful oasis, the Lindt chocolate shop, just across the street. Stepping in to the air conditioned comfort, we were handed a free chocolate. Enormous piles of beautifully wrapped chocolates everywhere. I thought I'd died and gone to heaven.

Bought two expensive bottles of Evian water (I hate paying for water),  and battled the heat again to find the metro station. By then we were experts on taking the metro so got back to our apartment with no problems.

Trying to stay awake, we thought we'd walk to a nearby park, the Jardins des Plantes, to find a shady place to lie on the grass. Big mistake - most of the park is a dryish woodland, and when we did manage to find a bit of flat grass, we were told by a security guard to get off it, as the grass was too dry. Well, what else do you do in 32 degree heat? Staggered back to the apartment and went to bed, too tired even for any dinner. We were woken up by our neighbour having a very loud, angry and insistent phone conversation in rapid fire French at 10.30pm, coming through our skylight as loudly as if he was in the apartment. If I'd had more energy I would have yelled "Pardon, nous dormons. Fermez la fenêtre!" but just didn't have the courage, so we had to listen to that for 20 mins. Still, other than that the neighbours have been very quiet so I can't really complain!

Paris is such an exciting place to be... Going to the Musee d'Orsay and opera house today. Chris is loving all the photo opportunities and has been walking in the morning by the river. Hannah's learning lots and taking everything in her stride. I'm managing to challenge myself by speaking French as much as possible, and everything is much easier and more familiar than the first time I was here, so we can do things more efficiently. Thinking of our family and friends back home, but we know all will be well, and we'll be back home before we know it with lots of new memories and photos to look back on.

Paris day 3

We planned to go to the Musee d'Orsay in the morning, because the Louvre is closed on Tuesdays. Seems, so did every other tourist in Paris! The line for tickets stretched for miles and we took one look and said "let's come back tomorrow". Despite the fact that our Paris Passes (highly recommended, by the way!) allow us to bypass ticket lines, it would have been human vegetable soup in there, so we think it'll be better to get there early to beat the crowds. 

We did find a lovely sweet shop and a classy souvenir shop (most aren't) however, just along an alleyway so bought some gifts for folks back home. 

We have become very confident in using the metro, so decided to go out to Montmartre, a good distance out from the city. Walked up... and up... and up... the hill and lots of steps to the little village of Montmartre where artists of the day used to hang out - Renoir, Manet, Gaugin. Some of their paintings are set in Montmartre. There are lots of artists there still, in the marketplace, selling their paintings of varying quality. Some were really beautiful and I would have liked to have bought them, but maybe not for 90-120 euro... sigh. 

The council seem to have cleaned up scammers a lot from the city, as we have encountered very few compared with my first visit to Paris three years ago. There also seem to be many fewer beggars. We did see one on the steps to the dome of Sacre-Coeur - I saw her before she saw us, and she was clearly acting, as she looked quite relaxed and ordinary before she saw us coming. Then I saw her surreptitiously adjust her headscarf, posture and facial expression so that by the time we reached her on the steps, she was hunched over, haggard with a pleading expression. Huh. 

Lots of representatives from the "deaf and dumb association of Paris" at the entrance to the Montmartre markets, with their clipboards in hand, asking tourists to sign up. I had a run in with one of them on my first trip to Paris and she managed to get one euro out of me before I figured out what she was doing... so I knew to avoid them - they are definitely scammers. They want 20 euro from you when you sign their clipboard and will argue (in sign language) and get very angry if you don't give them money. 

Sacre-Coeur is a beautiful basilisk with mosque-like spires on a hill overlooking Paris. It's definitely worth the 6 euro to climb up the tower - 300 or so narrow marble spiral steps to a panoramic view of Paris! While we were up there the bells tolled 12:00 and it was amazing to see the huge bell so close. There are a lot of gargoyles on the parapets. These were apparently designed to conduct water away from the walls of the cathedral so as to prevent water damage. Instead of plain pipes, they were given grotesque animal forms with the mouths being the water pipes. Not sure whether there was any symbolism in the animal forms? We made gargoyle jokes on the way down the spiral staircase (are the male ones called "gar-boys"? What is the purpose of a gargoyle anyway? We must google gargoyles!)

On the way back from Sacre-Coeur on the metro, the station we wanted to get off at was closed, so we had to continue on the line all the way to the end and then catch another train back. This took us through some quite slummy areas of Paris, covered in graffiti - it was interesting to see a different side of Paris (though three years ago, I got lost in a suburb just like that, but that's another story). You can always see the worst parts of a city from a train.

Decided to spend the afternoon at the Grevin wax museum. I hadn't been there before, so it was an interesting surprise to discover that the figures were so incredibly lifelike, down to wrinkles, eyelashes and individual hairs - and that you were allowed to walk in amongst the wax figures and take photos with them. Touching them did not seem to be discouraged. There were a lot that we didn't recognise (obviously French celebrities) but many that we did - Nicholas Cage, Madonna, Elton John, Gandhi, Mother Theresa, Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, Phil Collins, Celine Dion and so many others. There are over 300 figures in the museum. There were figures of Leonardo da Vinci, Nostradamus, Monet and Picasso (who I was surprised to discover did not have one eye near his chin!). The most interesting part for me (and the part that Hannah really hated) was the depictions of events in the Middle Ages - the Black Death, the assassination of king Louis in his bath, the Inquisition - portrayed in all their gory detail, but very interesting to learn about. We really have very little grasp of history in NZ and I certainly plan to read more books when I get home.

Came back to the apartment after the wax museum and were so tired that we all promptly fell asleep about 4.30 pm, intending to have a short nap, but I woke up at midnight and then couldn't go back to sleep. So I've set my body clock all wrong again, just when I was beginning to get over jet lag. Chris and Hannah were OK, as they slept through till about 4 am. 

Paris day 4

Chris and Hannah both slept for around 13 hours last night, so they are well rested today - can't say the same for me, as I had woken up at midnight and couldn't get back to sleep. So I was a little bit grumpy in the morning. Hannah and Chris went for a walk to the patisserie, armed with some instructions from me on how to order bread and pastries, and they came back very proud of themselves, with a baguette and three croissants. Chris is enjoying going for a walk on his own in the mornings, along the Seine with his camera. There are so many photo opportunities everywhere you look.

We went back to the Musee d'Orsay - thought we could bypass the line with our prepaid pass, but there was still a line for people with passes, which seemed even longer than the line for people with no prepaid passes! 

There are rigorous security checks on the way through - you have to walk through a metal detector, and open your bag for checking - hence the queue to get in.

Unfortunately I was feeling so tired that I was not really able to focus on the art. Chris, on the other hand, got a commentary headset for 5 euros and spent the next two hours going around the paintings, riveted. He especially liked the Impressionists and post-Impressionists, and his favourite painting was the Monet oil of the British Parliament building in the fog at sunset. I was really happy that he discovered the fascination of standing in front of a painting, being absorbed in it. The Impressionists certainly discovered how to achieve the feeling of light and reflections on water. So interesting to see the progression of how that was achieved. It's fascinating to go up close - all you can see are the brush strokes and paint  - and then to stand back at a distance - and the brush strokes all blend together into a beautiful scene. You can almost smell the apple trees or feel the cold of the snow. Again, I had the feeling that I would love to learn more about art history. Definitely need to read more books when I get home.

Paris day 5

Chris is becoming quite the local, getting up and going for an early morning walk and returning with baguettes and croissants from the boulangerie around the corner. This morning we planned to go out to the Chateau de Versailles, an enormous and opulent palace in 250 acres of grounds on the outskirts of Paris. We had to catch the RER (suburban surface train) to get there. Found our way to the RER station, but the signs were confusing, so we ended up on the wrong platform. Asked a nice lady who didn't speak English and she showed us the right one. Then the departures screen was faulty, so we couldn't find the right train. We had to ask around five people for help, and they all gave us useful bits of information, and eventually we were able to get on the right train. People have such a kind and helpful attitude, and as Hannah said, "even when they can't help, it's helpful because it makes you feel better".

The RER is a double decker train and much smoother than the metro trains. At one point an accordionist and saxophonist got on the train and played French jazz for a couple of stops, then went around collecting tips. It was a nice musical interlude and they seemed to be onto a good thing, with a captive audience of lots of happy tourists!

Arriving at the Palace, you're immediately struck by the immense size and grandeur of it, the gold leaf covered gates and roof trimmings... and the size of the queues. There must have been 3 or 4000 people lining up to get through security. Hannah was wondering why I was running to get past the rest of our trainload, but when we got there she could see the reason - a five minute run past 300 slow walking people saves you a lot of time in line! It took us only about 40 minutes to get through, so security is pretty efficient. 

The palace was originally built as a hunting lodge by King Louis XIII and massively extended by his son Louis XIV, who seemed to have quite an ego problem, self styling himself as "the sun king" and commissioning massive artworks depicting his conquests both literally and mythologically (the ceiling frescoes portray Greek and Roman mythology, but all have symbolism representing the various achievements of Louis XIV - I guess if he didn't like what you painted, he would have you beheaded! At its height, there were 10,000 staff working in and around the palace. There were paintings showing the royal family dressed in their regal finery. We saw their living quarters, including the bedchambers of the king and the queen. Marie Antoinette was one of the later queens and though she lived in abject luxury, I felt a little sorry for her. No part of her life was private. Each morning she would choose a dress from a silk sample presented by one of her servants. They would go upstairs and get the dress from her massive collection, and hand it from servant to servant until it reached the bedchamber. Then she would be dressed surrounded by her entourage. The birth of her first child was a very public event, by the king's decree - with courtiers and noblemen looking on. She was so mortified by this (understandably) that the king relented and decreed that future children shall be born in private. I felt sad for her too, remembering the tableau of her trial at the Grevin wax museum, dressed in humble clothes, facing her accusers with the image of the guillotine in the distance. 

In the queen's bedchamber, we saw the door through which the queen escaped when the commoners stormed the palace in the lead up to the French Revolution - it must have been terrifying.

In the palace there is a long hallway flanked by marble statues of the previous kings on each side. I came across King Dagobert of 687 AD - who apparently is my ancestor - I've seen his name on the massive 63 generation family tree produced by our cousin Logan. If things had been different, maybe it would have been me living in this palace! Took a photo of Great-great-etc... grandad Dagobert. Guess that makes me one of the aristocracy :-) 

We walked down through the manicured palace gardens, the symmetrical plantings of trees with their fountains and statues, with paths wide enough for a carriage, to the ornamental cross-shaped lake. Hannah and I fed the remainder of our lunch (very expensive sandwiches) to the large and ugly grey fish in the lake. They will take a piece of bread from your hand with their immense and rubbery lips. They are probably descendants of the fish with which the lake was originally stocked in the 1700s.

It was nice to be out of the palace with its throngs of people and to enjoy the sun. We rented bikes with lovely wide comfortable seats and went off exploring. Happily, we discovered that hardly anyone was prepared to be so intrepid and the further we got from the lake, the quieter it was until we had the beautiful shady perfumed avenues of trees completely to ourselves. It was so idyllic. We found a field of ripe wheat with a path cut through it - wild red poppies growing in amongst the wheat - horses and donkeys grazing over the fence - the eight foot stone wall that surrounds the whole estate - all in amongst sun-dappled avenues of trees, and felt almost guilty thinking of our friends in the NZ winter.

We had the bikes for nearly two hours, bliss. After taking them back we got an icecream and walked to Marie-Antoinette's private summer residences. She had expressed a wish to see what it was like to be a farmer, so her husband the king ordered a bucolic little hamlet built for her in the corner of the estate - seriously gorgeous with its thatched roof stone cottages with dovecotes in the walls, window boxes, chickens, rabbits, goats and sheep and a little lake with a mill and water wheel. Can't have been all bad being a queen! Then the opulent summer house with a large kitchen called the "rechauffoir" specifically for the purpose of reheating food. 

An amazing day, being able to picture how the royal family would have lived, but happy to have the privilege of being able to live private and anonymous lives of our own, unlike the royals.

Paris day 6

Today we took the metro to the Louvre, and were pleased to discover that by arriving underground, we could bypass the queues completely with only minimal security to get in. The size of the Louvre is bewildering - four floors over 700 m long with an inner courtyard the size of (Chris thinks) sixteen rugby fields. The courtyard is dominated by the famous glass pyramid that is a central feature of Dan Brown's "Da Vinci Code".

We rented audio guides which are equipped with GPS and can take you on a tour of the most famous icons of the Louvre - fantastic. I saw so much more than when I visited in 2012 trying to find my way around on my own. We began through the excavated moat of the immense mediaeval castle with towers and battlements that used to stand on the site of the Louvre, a scale model of which you can see near the entrance. The castle was demolished to build something on top (I think a bridge or a train station?) and the moat filled in.

I finally met with the Venus de Milo,  who I hadn't been able to find on my first trip here. It was interesting to see the nude statues and think about our modern concept of beauty. In those days when food was more scarce, a beautiful body was a well-fed one. If you were thin it showed you were the victim of famine or poverty. Quite the reverse today when we have an excess of food available and are all trying to be thinner! Part of the intrigue of the Venus de Milo is that nobody knows what position her arms were in, as they have never been found, or whether she was a solo figure or part of a group. I hadn't realised that she is one of the few truly Greek statues that have been found; the majority of what we consider Greek statues are actually Roman copies of the originals.

I was captivated by the Winged Victory of Samothrace, a headless statue found in fragments and painstakingly put back together over decades. It must have been the world's largest 3D jigsaw puzzle! They were even finding and adding bits to her as late as 2013. She stands on the prow of a ship made of blocks of marble, her transparent clothes billowing around her body and her soft feathery wings raised behind her. She has been depicted at the very moment that her feet touch the ship as she descends from heaven. The commentary didn't say so, but I suspect the reason her head and arms are missing and she was found smashed to pieces is that she was sculpted to represent a Greek victory, and later some other nation celebrating a victory over Greece destroyed her as a symbol of their domination, perhaps triumphantly parading her head through the streets.

The Mona Lisa too, of course, smiling mysteriously behind her bullet proof glass. It's easy to feel claustrophobic getting pushed backwards and forwards by crowds all wanting to see her. She seems amused by all the attention. I wonder what Leonardo would think of it all.

It would be entirely possible to spend a week in the Louvre and still not see everything, and after a few hours our feet were sore and we were hungry, so we went out into the courtyard, found a tiny patch of shade on some steps and ate our lunch. Walked across the bridge and bought some indulgent and calorie laden but very French treats - une tarte amande, une tropezienne et trois macarons. And some fruit salad to make ourselves feel better about it!

In the afternoon we caught the metro to the Paris Opera house, also named the Palais Garnier after Charles Garnier, the young and enormously talented but egocentric architect who won the competition to design it. Napoleon the second commissioned it as a replacement for the old opera house that stood on the site, so that he and his wife could have a private entrance. This came about because of an assassination attempt by some revolutionaries at the entrance to the old opera.

We had an extremely knowledgeable tour guide called Luz, who not only told us about all the opulent grandeur and magnificent design of the opera house, but also some very interesting things about the renovation of Paris and how it came to look as it is today, with its iconic stone façades, slate roofs and wrought iron balconies. The opera house is an incredible building, beyond description, and this was the most enjoyable and informative visit we've had.

This building was the inspiration for the Phantom of the Opera story. Even as far as the chandelier (it weighs 7 tons and didn't quite fall, but did suffer a serious electrical explosion which damaged its copper dome and killed an opera patron) and the lake underneath (installed by engineers to control the flooding ground water). You can see the entrance to the Phantom's private box. I found it interesting that the boxes which were originally built for the rich and beautiful have such a poor view of the stage that nowadays these seats only cost 10 euro. It was more a case of "who will see me?" than "can I see the show?" Even the king and queen's boxes could only see half of the stage each.

We were lucky enough to have several American opera singers in our tour group, so they each sang a few bars and we got to experience the acoustics of the auditorium.

Right across the street from the opera house are the famous Galéries Lafayette, an extremely swanky mall, worth seeing for its glittery excess and enormous stained glass dome and gold leafed balconies. You could have your pick of handbags by Gucci or Louis Vuitton, perfume by Christian Dior or Givenchy, or any number of diamond encrusted gold watches behind thick safety glass.  The highest price watch we found was 89,000 euro (around $150,000) but there were others even more expensive looking without price tags (perhaps to avert customers from fainting in shock). Hannah and I sprayed some expensive perfume on ourselves, but we weren't tempted to buy anything!