Paris, the end

This will be the last of this series of photos from my weekend in Paris in late April. I was able to stretch three days worth of photos into two months' worth of blog posts. So... when I left the restaurant where I had eaten lunch, I walked over to the Orsay museum to meet my friends. It was spitting rain, so I didn't take the camera out of my backpack, so, no photos.

Having a glass of wine with my friends L, J, and P, at a café near the Père Lachaise cemetery. Those potato chips really hit the spot!

I got to the museum early, and the rain was becoming more steady, so I decided to duck into a café for drink. I saw a place on the corner of the rue de Lille and the rue de Bellechasse, just across from the museum's main entrance. The line to get into the museum snaked back and forth, filling up the plaza in front and stretched around the corner and down the rue de Lille. And it was getting longer, and it was raining. I'm glad I wasn't waiting in line.

My friend L wanted a copy of this photo, and asked if I could remove the woman between J and P, so I gave it a shot.
It's not perfect, but it's not bad, either.

The café/brasserie was called Les Deux Musées and it was stuffed full of people finishing lunch. They weren't letting anyone sit down who wasn't going to order lunch, the outside tables were wet with rain, and there was a line out the door. Still, there was room at the bar for drinkers and I went in. French bars are not like American bars. There are no stools, so bar patrons stand. I ordered a glass of white wine and watched all the activity. The bartender was busy making drinks and coffee for the diners and loading and unloading glasses into and out of the little dishwasher under the bar.

I had a second glass of wine (I was that early) and was really enjoying watching all the hustle and bustle around me. People came and went, and the rain continued. When I finished, I went out and found my friends, or they found me, and off we went on another adventure. We took the subway over to the Père Lachaise cemetery to see the graves of famous people like Colette, Jim Morrison, Edith Piaf, and Honoré de Balzac, to name a few. After our walk, we ducked into a nearby café for a drink.

Toward the end of the day we took a short walk through the Parc Monceau before heading back to our respective hotels to get ready for dinner. We had reservations at eight at a Left Bank restaurant I've known for many years, Le Petit Prince de Paris. Dinner was great fun and I said good-bye to my friends who would be leaving early Monday morning for their tour of Normandy.

Monday turned out to be cold, wet, and windy, and I tried to go for a walk but it was no fun at all in that weather. I took refuge inside a department store for a while, then got the idea to have lunch in a Thai restaurant I knew of. I think it's the same place that a bunch of us (including Ken) ate in back in 1982. It had been updated since then. Lunch was delicious and a real treat for me since we don't have many Thai restaurants out here in the countryside. When I was through, I went back to the hotel to check out, then went back across town to get my late afternoon train home.