Snow, Crepes and Parking

6 April 2008

If anything, the weather was colder than predicted with flurries of snow in the late afternoon. Your intrepid travellers, knowing no fear, bundled up and went about their daily rounds. One of the places near Paris that we want to visit is Aubers sur Oise where Van Gogh spent the last months of his life of his life and where he is buried. Aubers sur Oise is just over an hour out of Paris but is outside the range of the RER even though it is still in the Isle de France. It is usually necessary to change trains to get there, but we noticed an advertisement saying that during April there would be direct trains because of a special exhibition of Impressionists. Anyway we went down to Gare du Norde to find out about tickets and train schedules forgetting it was a Sunday and that the station would be extremely busy in the morning so we had to abandon that for another day.

Virginia and I had been lusting after one of the crepes that are made in street stalls as well as in restaurants. In the afternoon, braving the rain which had begun to fall, we went to the top of Montmartre. Needless to say it was as packed with tourists as usual and despite the weather the entertainers and "artists" were doing their best to earn a quid (oops, euro). Virginia had a crepe citron and I had one with creme de marron. Eating a crepe while standing in the rain holding an umbrella is no mean feat, but we did our best and other than spilling some of the fillings on our clothes made "a mouthful" of it.
In the evening we made our way across to the sixteenth for dinner with Winky and Sandy and two of their other friends. It was a delightful evening; good conversation, good food and the evening passed all too quickly. The temperature was dropping and by the time we headed home it was bitterly cold. We changed from our bus to the Metro at the Place de la Concorde and it was already beginning to snow.

I know we've talked about the parking in Paris before and undoubtedly it is a very creative exercise. The notion that the middle of an intersection is not a good place to park has not yet crossed the minds of most Parisian drivers. And, of course, there is always the corner where you can pull "nose-in" when you can't find anyplace else!

In the middle of the night we woke and out of the window we could see 7-10 inches of snow on the car tops in our street. And thus ends another day in Paris.