Easter Sunday

Sunday, 16 April

Easter Sunday. It is bleak and the coldest day since we arrived. Bravely rugged up, we headed toward the Luxemburg Gardens. Had a delightful time wandering through these magnificent public gardens with their joggers, tai chi exercisers and small children on their pony rides.

From the Gardens we went to St Sulpice, a magnificent neo-classical church built between 1773 and 1776. Quite aside from the Easter celebrations the Church crowd was probably attracted by the fact that it features so prominently in Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code. Gloriously spacious inside, the organ was playing and it was a sort of continuous feast to celebrate Easter.

It was too cold to spend much more time out of doors so we got a couple of baguettes, ate them, wandered down to the Place de la Concorde. This is sometimes the greatest traffic jam in Europe, covering as it does 20 acres in the middle of the city. Fortunately for us, it was relatively quiet and we found a metro station with a direct line back to our section of the city.
Even though it is Easter Sunday, the Rubbish is still collected twice daily and the streets are washed down at least once a day. Not surprising when you consider that people here live in flats and that most of the buildings are six to seven stories high. That would create a lot of rubbish. But the flats are in beautiful buildings and we are only ten minutes from the centre of Paris on the Metro.

Hope you all had a good and happy Easter or Passover - take your choice.