We got here a week ago but that seems like a long time; time has definitely slowed down. What is interesting as well is that we can do whatever it is we are doing here and still keep in touch via email and the internet. As the gym doesn’t open until 9 today, I decided to skip it, Sandy’s running in le Jardin, so I can check out the New York Times (IHT only has a weekend edition but which, fortunately for me, has the Sunday crossword) as well as yesterday’s Globe.

I thought I should include what our view is from our dining room window, into the courtyard. (See below.) And since it’s raining, we aren’t doing much except going to the Marché Raspail for organic produce. At least at the bistros, one doesn’t get much in the way of vegetables unless pommes frites count?

Otherwise, I am reading Simon Schama’s book, Citizens, on the French Revolution, written in 1989, 200 years after the fact, made more fascinating by being able to walk around the places he discusses.

After booting around for the last week, tomorrow we are getting at our sabbatical life, going to the Alliance Francais, happily around the corner, and I am meeting my art instructor on Tuesday at the Musee d’Orsay.

We decided to go to the Robert Frank exhibit at the Jeu de Paume www.jeudepaume.org (an old form of tennis court, now contemporary art gallery. Frank is a Swiss-American photographer who did a famour series of portraits of ordinary Americans in the 50s and, later, a series of photos of Parisians and Paris, also of ordinary life here. Frank now lives part-time in New York and Nova Scotia and has made a number of quirky videos, a few of which were running. While taken with the Frank, the other two exhibits, by Sophie Ristelhueber and Mario Garcia Torres, didn’t speak to us as much (although no doubt, our friend, Gord Sato, who has an encyclopaedic knowledge of current art and artists, along with much else, would know the artitsts, if not these works). The Ristelhueber did have a very amusing bit, though. She had lived in the US for a time and was fascinated with how every store seemed to advertise or sell something at 99 cents or $99, so she hired a county-fair auctioneer and recorded him auctioning off the Year 1999 as part of the millenium madness.

Have to finish the crossword now.