France

Paris 4

This time it is Caro writing for a short time until Alan gets sick of waiting for me to finish anyway.

What a glorious couple of days the weather is still really hot and we have walked miles, no one wears hats very strange. all in all the women are dressed much the same as Sydney, they are  mainly thinner than in Orange,( but  they are thinner everywhere than Orange) The women famous in literary circles in Paris were older and fatter than most which is also good news for me. I finished the book by Lucinda Holdsworth  about women in Paris and its been great seeing the places she talks about.

Last night was exquisite, we went to a comcert in the most beautiful church I've ever been in Sainte Chappelle on the Isle de Cite. The music was Mozart and Borodin and played by a string quartet with a clarinet for one of the peices. You normally have to queue for ages to get in and it was very special with only a few people and as dusk fell and the light through the windows slowly went.

Today I went back to look at it during daylight and it was just as lovely even with the many tourists, I then went to the Musee de Moyen Age and then on to shop at Gallerie Layfayette. This was a great opportunity to spend money while Alan worked.

He is back from getting his coffee and is a presence at my elbow so I will let him get you up to date with his stuff.

Hello all, this is Alfonso, and I am hugely annoyed  by the news that Orange has censored one of the paintings from my show Flaming Youth. They are lucky I was not there, because the last time this happened, when I was in Hamilton, I made sure that every newspaper in the country made Hamilton out to be the backwater that it had proved itself to be. I would certainly have refused to cover the work, and made it a cause celebre...oh well, so be it.

Today I was working all day at Halle St Pierre condition reporting the works and talking to an ancient artist who is showing downstairs, a Polish woman Kalinsky, who survived Concentration camp but lost 200 members of her family. Oddly enough, her work still bears many traces of this experience!

Tonight, we go our for dinner somewhere...we allow ourselves only one meal out a day, and so tonight it is it...for a cheap meal somewhere that is, probably to the same one we went to in Montmartre on our first night here, which was very good and not too dear.

We are about to ring Fred Lachise and his freinds in paris, and will make a rendez-vous when we can. I have put them both on the invitation list for the Opening next Monday also...

I should tell you that yesterday we firstly went to the Bastille market...well worth it for food, although not everything we bought was as good as it looked. Just the same, we had the best Lebanese food I had ever had..great hummous and kiibe, which made tasty additions to our Baguettes and rochqefort pastries  eaten in the nearby jardins des Plantes, which for early Autumn had a lot of blooms happening. Parisians tell us that it is not in fact unusual for the hot weather to continue to mid Setember, but to me it seems postively hot...too hot surely!

we then continued our Literary walk around the left bank, of course getting side tracked here and there by places like the Cafe de Flore (where Satre and De Beauvoir spent the huge professorial slaries they must have had to have been able to drink there) and cheked out Ginsbergs and Kerouac's fav places. We also saw the St Germaine de Pres and the bust of Apollinaire, which must surely have been made by Picasso, although no label is on it...perhaps for good reason!

We saw millions of lovely small galleries and quality shops, but not a great amount of good art, as they say in the song...we don't know how lucky we are! (Except in Orange, where the good burghers are complete morons it seems, OR AT LEAST THEY ARE WHEN I AM NOT THERE).

Bonjour!

12:51 PM, 12/9/2006 .. Posted by Nicolette

Bonjour mes amis

It's great to read that you're managing to enjoy yourselves and finding a leetle somezing to eat every now and again in the cultural and culinary wasteland of Paris.

We also went to a concert at St Chapelle in 2004 (it's probably the same quartet still performing!). The music was so melancholy and the chapel so beautiful that we were all weeping by the end of it.

Alain, I was thinking of you when I read about the covered painting - has it been in the gallery for a while or is it a recent acquisition?

What a shame we're missing each other in Paris - we'll have to try and coordinate better next time!

Enjoy yourselves and I look forward to reading more of your travellers' tales. Love N xxx