The Case of the Missing Carte Orange!

18 April 2007

today was going to be a day in which I went to the two Memorials. First the Memorial de la Shoah and second the memorial to those who perished in concentration camps. I got all ready to leave and looked for my Carte Orange, only to find it was missing. Shock, horror. I didn't tell you, but last week I had washed a carnet of ten tickets rendering them totally useless. Surely I hadn't done something equally daft!

Then I remembered I had said to Virginia, "don't forget your Carte Orange." Ah, that was it, she had picked up mine. How annoying. So instead of going to the memorials, I went to the Internet Cafe and caught up on my e-mail. Then, when Virginia was due to get out of school, I wandered over there, having sent her an e-mail telling her what she had done.

I met Virginia and she didn't have the Carte Orange! So, we went back to the flat only to find that it was hidden under her bear, Windsor. Arghhh!! How did it get there?

After a bite of lunch we decided we needed to get some reading material. As my French is virtually non-existant, we headed off to a wonderful second-hand bookstore called "Tea and Tattered Pages." The shop has been around for almost two decades and its present owner is an elderly woman born in South America but living in Los Angeles until five years ago when she bought the shop. Thousands of second-hand books; all in English. She was also full of information for English speakers in Paris. We learned there is an English library, for instance.

Leaving there we went to one of my favourite galleries. It is housed in the Le Petit Palais and has an interesting and eclectic collection. We looked at the section on nineteenth century France which contains one of my favourite statues, that of a bread girl. After tea in the very elegant cafe associated with the museum we made our way home. While Virginia took clothes to the laundromat I went out to buy a rotisseried chicken from one of the butcher's shops. That was quite a test of my very limited French. I practiced all the way there. "Je voudrais un poulet pour six Euros s'il vous plait." I either got it right, or the butcher figured it out because I headed home with a 6 Euro rotisseried chook. Very nice, with salad and baked potato an easy dinner.