Musee Carnavalet and Singapore Airlines

17 April 2007

A very busy day. After Virginia headed off to school, I decided to go to the Memorial de la Shoah. The memorial is located in the section of the city known as the Marais. This is a section populated with many Jewish men and women. It is difficult to walk for any distance without seeing black-clad men dressed in their distinctive style.
Anyway, with typical insouciance I blithely proceeeded to get lost. But in the process of getting lost, I found a fascinating museum dealing with the history of Paris. Housed in a beautiful old building, the Musee Carnavalet had an exhibition of old signs, mostly from the eighteenth and nineteenth century. I found it fascinating! But the museum is far more than that. There are a number of rooms each dealing with a particular period in the history of the city. If nothing else, it made me aware of two things. First, the wonderful and complex history of Paris and second, my own apalling ignorance of that history.
I emerged several hours later and as I walked back to the Metro station I asked in a cafe where the Memorial de la Shoah was located. It was not far from where I had been. Oh well, tomorrow I shall go back and see it.

Meanwhile, back at the school, Virginia was learning, in French, about the terrible atrocity in which thirty-two students at the university were killed and even more were injured. It certainly gave a range of unusual words for the students' vocabularies.
Virginia and I had lunch together and after we had finished we decided to find the Singapore Airlines office in order to try to get the seats we wanted on the return flights, now less than two weeks away.

We caught a bus down to the Arc de Triomphe and walked from there along one of the beautiful boulevards that radiate from the Etoile (star), Charles de Gaulle. That done, we stopped for afternoon tea in a nearby cafe and shortly afterward headed for Monmartre where we had some shopping to do.

Dinner consisted of a lovely cheese and mushroom omelette again, a tossed salad and some Roquefort Cheese and crackers. Even in a small kitchen, it is amazing what you can produce. Virginia spent the evening doing her homework and I spent it reading a novel about the Spanish Influenza Epidemic of 1918-19 in London.

The weather appears to have changed and is now somewhat cooler. It is very nice since we can now wear some of the clothes we brought for cold weather and are not limited to one shirt that had to be washed in the hand basin every night since the washing machine in the flat ne marche pas.